Deep state budget cuts, forced by falling state revenue and a new focus on performance-based funding, is pushing Southern University of Baton Rouge (SUBR) to the “point of crisis” in its ability to function, says the school’s chancellor, Dr. Kofi Lomotey.
“We don’t see light at the end of the tunnel,” Lomotey said in a recent telephone interview. “It’s not a new situation, but it’s reaching a point of crisis,” says Lomotey, who took the helm of SUBR 18 months ago.
SUBR, a historically Black institution with some 7,000 plus students, is the flagship campus of the Southern University system, one of four state-controlled higher education systems in Louisiana.
Nearly all the state’s public colleges and universities have seen state funding slashed over the past year and a half—including $250 million last year—as the petroleum-tax-revenue-based state has seen gas prices falling from the nearly $4 a gallon price around the nation nearly two years ago.
“The folks in Louisiana have had money when other states have not,” said Dr. Belle Wheelan, president of the Atlanta-based Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, referring to Louisiana’s economically flush days when gas prices were high and revenues flowed in.
“They’ve come in hard to make cuts right away. It’s painful,” says Wheelan, who serves on the Postsecondary Education Review Commission, a special task force in Louisiana assigned to study and recommend improvements in the state’s public higher education system.
The overall cuts are compounded, Lomotey says, due to the stepped-up imposition of new performance-based formulas.
Some state education officials have been toying with such an idea during much of the past decade, hoping to devise a sort of bonus funding mechanism for schools that improved based on a number of measures, including retention and graduation rates. There was a consensus among most officials that, once such a funding formula was adopted, it would be imposed over a number of years to give schools time to adapt to the new funding process.
