Report of the President, Bowdoin College 1976-1977

Bowdoin College Bowdoin Digital Commons Annual Report of the President Special Collections and Archives 1-1-1977 Report of the President, Bowdoin College 1976-1977 Bowdoin College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/presidents-reports Recommended Citation Bowdoin College, "Report of the President, Bowdoin College 1976-1977" (1977). Annual Report of the President. 86. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/presidents-reports/86 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Special Collections and Archives at Bowdoin Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Annual Report of the President by an authorized administrator of Bowdoin Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Report of the President 1976-1977 BOWDOIN COLLEGE Brunswick, Maine Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013 http://archive.org/details/reportofpresiden19761bowd Report of the President 1976-1977 BOWDOIN COLLEGE Brunswick, Maine Printed by The Anthoensen Press, Portland, Maine Report of the President To the Trustees and Overseers of Bowdoin College: I have the honor to submit the following report for the academic year igy6-igyy. The Financial Situation THERE is a certain inevitability about the fact that the financial situation of the College is discussed first in this annual report. Everyone connected with colleges and universities is con- cerned about the growing costs of education and the increasing im- balance between the level of expenditure necessary to maintain quality and the available resources of those institutions. Some colleges have had to face the bleak reality that survival is no longer possible; most others have begun an intensive process of self-examination with a view to achieving both survival and the maintenance of quality. Bowdoin obviously is subjected to the same general pressures that fall on other colleges. Here, too, the difficult process of program review is under way, accompanied by a multitude of voices urging one policy or another as the route out of the financial pinch. It should be said at the start that Bowdoin's position is more fortunate than most. A sizable endowment, a generous and loyal body of alumni and friends, an effective development program and the continuation of the 175th Anniversary Campaign all contribute significantly. The budget continues to be balanced, although the use of unrestricted funds as income to make that balance possible has occasioned concern in a number of quarters. Despite a severe winter and rising fuel costs, overall budget control has been exemplary. Behind the balance there also lies, it should be remembered, a vigorous program of cost control and responsible retrenchment. Projects initiated by the Physical Plant Department have already resulted in sizable savings and will, in the future, achieve more, as the director pointed out in a recent issue of the Alumnus. Selective reduction of staff and the maintenance of the freeze on the size of the faculty have likewise been significant factors in maintaining budgetary balance. Increases of tuition have been necessary, though 4 Report of the President the scale of those increases remains well in line with the levels of increase at similar institutions. And yet there are worrying signs as one looks to the future. The first phase of the program review did not reveal any areas where reduction of expenditures would be easy or painless. Minor savings can be achieved in a few areas without any noticeable ill effects. But major savings are quite a different matter. Put very simply, the situation is this : there is little, if any, fat in the operation, what fat there was having been cut in the last several years, and further cutting means cutting bone, not fat. The program review, which must be a continuing process, has shown that these deeper cuts can be made, but it has also shown how they will alter the offering of the College. Each area reviewed was asked, as an exercise, to con- template the effect of a 10 percent reduction in its budget and also the effect of an even more sizable reduction. Of each area it was asked whether, if we were to start anew, we would have that area at all. To the latter question, the response was almost invariably yes. To the former, the response was uniformly that reduction in budget had grave implications for quality. The library is a good case in point. It goes without saying that a library lies close to the heart of the academic enterprise. Unless its quality can be maintained, both students and faculty are deprived of a vital resource and they suffer because of that deprivation. The cost of books and periodicals rises at an alarming rate; at least one department has already seen its funds for book purchases drop to nearly zero because its acquisition budget is exhausted by the purchase of essential periodicals. Were the library's acquisition budget frozen, let alone cut by 10 percent in such a context, the results are obvious and they are wholly un- acceptable. No one could maintain that everything the College does and the way in which it does things are, in some fashion, engraved in stone as a perfect model of what a college should do and how it should operate. At the same time, that realization should not blind us to the fact that alteration on a major scale is fraught with perils. The elimination of intercollegiate athletics, for example, could achieve substantial savings, but the impact would be serious. It is clear that such a course would have an adverse effect on admissions recruit- Report of the President 5 ing, hardly a desirable prospect as one looks to a future in which admissions is going to be more and more of a problem area for the private college. It would also doubtless have repercussions on the nature of student life and morale, and it would have implications for alumni support and interest. There are those who argue that the solution is to be found in increasing faculty work load and maintaining strict control on expenditures for the academic program, including salaries. It is my impression that most discussions of faculty work load are unduly simplistic and ignore, from the start, the simple fact that a faculty frozen in size is now teaching some 450 students more than it was in 1970 and hence has already increased its work load substantially. Failure to keep pace with the market in terms of salaries can only, in the long run, have a delete- rious effect. To assume that, because the academic market is, at the moment, oversupplied, one can follow such a policy with impunity is very shortsighted. Even in a tight market, it is the best people who are mobile and who will move if not competitively com- pensated. Future projections leave little doubt that something will have to give. The choice is not between the most attractive and the least attractive options ; it is among options that are all unattractive in one way or another, and what needs to be found is the least unpalatable of the choices. In reviewing those options, it must be remembered that they are not all on the side of budget cutting and control. The income side must be considered as well. The level of giving to the College and the yield from the endowment are as important to balancing the budget as stringent fiscal control is. It would be irre- sponsible to concentrate future budget planning on one aspect of the question only. If budget cutting is called for, serious attention must at the same time be given to the utilized rate of return from the endowment and to the use made of unrestricted money. En- dowment growth is, of course, essential for the future survival of the College, but that growth cannot be achieved by sacrificing the present; if it is, there may be no future to preserve. Times of financial stringency, such as the College has experi- enced in recent years and can expect to continue to experience for the foreseeable future, are not without their utility, if only because 6 Report of the President they do force close scrutiny of the way things are done. That sort of examination, painful as it may be at the time, is, in the long run, constructive. But the examination must be as broadly based as possible and it must keep the institution's primary mission as an under- graduate liberal arts college of quality firmly in mind. The budget problem cannot be solved by riding individual hobbyhorses; the view taken of the College as a financial entity must be institution- wide and comprehensive. Two further points should also be borne in mind. In the first place, it is essential to an institution to have a sense of movement, momentum, even growth. Such a sense is psychologically very important to those who work and study here, and without it, it is all too easy to lose any awareness of purpose and direction. Such a sense of momentum is easy to convey in expansive times. In the immediate post-Sputnik years it came almost automatically as higher education entered a vigorous period of growth and expansion. It is obviously much harder to sustain in times such as we are experiencing now when actual growth is severely retarded. But it remains of central importance, and it is essential that budget control not be- come identical with a retrenchment mentality that would be inimi- cal to the College's efforts. In the second place, one must be honest about the impact of any program cutting that is contemplated.

Load more