Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1918 [PAGE 456]

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BOARD OF TRUSTEES MATTERS SUBMITTED BY PRESIDENT JAMES

[July 31,

The Board proceeded to the consideration of the following matters submitted by the President of the University.

T H E BUDGET FOR 1917-18 ( i ) The Budget of the University for the year beginning July i, 1917, introduced by the following statement: The most important matter I have to lay before the Board at this meeting is the budget. I have never had so much difficulty in preparing a budget which seemed to me financially feasible and satisfactory to the different departments of the University and fairly considerate of the needs and justifiable demands. Likes many other instiutions and men we have been sailing in fair weather during the past few years and have pushed on with full sails. W e have been making great progress and we are now suddenly overtaken by a storm which some people feel is a mere squall but which has certainly assumed dimensions almost unbelievable and which has involved our financial future very materially, even though it should die away within a short time, of which there seems to be at present no indication whatever. When I first considered the matter I did not see how it was possible to make up a budget which would not involve either the dismissal of many men outright, as some institutions have done, or the lopping off of some important departments, carrying with them the men employed in those departments, or a horizontal reduction of salaries in all departments of the University, or serious reductions in the ordinary appropriations for equipment and running expenses. I have finally prepared a budget which I submit for your consideration and which I think can be repeated for the second year in the biennium, which is financially possible,—that is, which will not involve us in an actual deficit—and which does not involve the reduction of a single salary of any employee of the University, nor does it involve the dismissal of any person on the University staff on account of shrinkage in the budget. I should have been glad if in addition to this the budget could also have provided for the ordinary and legitimate increase in the salary list of the University which we have come to look upon as a regularly recurring event. The cost of living has gone up frightfully. W e are all suffering from it in more than one direction. The people who draw moderate or small incomes from the University suffer, of course, very materially, and intensely. Circumstances ordinarily would make it possible for the University to raise the level of salaries in the lower grades very considerably.