The Whiting School of Engineering (WSE) and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (KSAS) have instituted a hiring freeze in their offices and departments, meaning that for the next fiscal year of July 2009 through July 2010, open positions will purposely go unfilled to help Hopkins handle the difficult economy.
"We are hiring very few people now. Most of the units in Hopkins are deciding how to do their business without hiring new people, so as to save money to meet the revenue shortfalls they face," Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration James McGill said.
With few exceptions, the University will not be hiring new staff members or faculty members until at earliest July 2010, according to McGill.
"Hopkins, like our peers, is concerned about a number of its revenue sources given the current economic climate," Vice President for Finance Michael Strine said in an e-mail.
The KSAS Human Resources Manager Joan Spoltore commented that in the next fiscal year there would be a hiring freeze, a reclassification freeze and a salary freeze, as well as a complete halt in faculty searches across the Arts and Sciences departments.
"I would say that the Krieger School is trying to be proactive in implementing some of the cost-cutting measures, that we don't want to wait until we're too far along and find that we have to make more severe cutbacks because we didn't earlier," Spoltore said.
She said that, like the Whiting School of Engineering (WSE), KSAS will make necessary exceptions for large new contracts in certain departments and positions that are "integral to the department" and would cause a "real loss of function" if they were not filled.
Spoltore mentioned where the saved money from the freezes is expected to go.
"The school is continually trying to remain competitive in a number of ways when it comes to healthcare and benefits," she said, and she pointed out that unlike many other major universities, Hopkins does not get much "soft money," meaning research and grant money from other institutions, but rather, pays for most of its programs itself.
WSE Associate Dean for Finance and Administration James Aumiller said that freezes are currently being determined for the engineering school since February is a big planning month for the budget.
He also mentioned that the Board of Trustees is meeting next week.
"[President William Brody is expected to be] putting forward some message to the University community - what we think will be in that is that open positions will be kind of frozen," Aumiller said. "There are exceptions related to sponsored research and potentially essential personnel."
The deans of the schools can grant exceptions for personnel who must be hired, according to Aumiller, and other exceptions exist due to funding.
Sponsored research dollars, he said, have not been cut thus far. However, for the vast majority of cases, WSE has implemented a full hiring freeze.
"We've continued our faculty searches - but we won't be hiring any more until July 2010," Aumiller said.
He said the school is not worried because interviewing faculty and setting up their positions can take up to half a year.
Strine pointed out that the state of Maryland has cut aid for independent higher education this year, which is unlikely to relax next year.
According to Strine, equally pressing is fact that federal research dollars have been tightened, philanthropic support is now uncertain at the end of the Knowledge for the World campaign, and insurer reimbursements for patient care to the School of Medicine are under pressure as well.
The result, Strine said, is that as a University, "We have tightened our belts."
"This belt-tightening is happening school-by-school across the universities; it has not yet involved across-the-board action applying to the entire University. We're budgeting for more than $100 million in reduced revenue University-wide in each of those two years," he said.
"This is a rapidly evolving situation and every day brings new information, some bad news and some good news," WSE Dean Nicholas Jones said.
He reiterated that as well as hiring freezes, WSE will face "zero raises" for faculty and staff during the coming fiscal year.
"If this were a normal year we would be conducting searches for faculty with expectation that we would hire several across the school," he said.
"We would be anticipating giving raises to faculty and staff averaging in the three to four percent range. We would certainly be looking when we lost people - we would plan on replacing that person as quickly as we possibly can. This is way different from normal."
KSAS Dean Adam Falk confirmed that he recently told his departments that the school is not anticipating salary raises for fiscal 2010 and is implementing a hiring freeze, with the aforementioned exception of "truly exceptional situations."
Falk was also concerned about how Hopkins students would be affected.
"It's hard to know at this moment what the impact of the economy will be on our families," he said.
As a result, he said, any saved money will go to financial aid as well as to the areas Spoltore mentioned.
"I anticipate that the only category that gets an increase is financial aid," he said, saying that it was the only part of the school's spending that will go up and continue to increase.
Even in hard economic times, he emphasized, Hopkins will still help students since their need may increase as well.
Despite the string of tough calls, the deans of both the WSE and the KSAS schools are optimistic.
"We haven't changed procedures or aspirations. We're not hiring fewer faculty and more adjuncts, nothing like that," Falk said.
"Hopkins faculty is the core of the enterprise. That's unchanged. What is changing is the pace [of the hiring process, temporarily]."
"I have great confidence in the leadership of my school," Jones said. "The people who are in leadership and management positions as well as my colleagues in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences are managing very well. I can't imagine a better team in place for doing that."
He has confidence, over all, that these issues are merely temporary.
"We're having to replace the red ink cartridges much faster than black ones, that's for sure, but that will change," Jones said.
