The University of Arizona has cut 320 positions from its payroll, including 44 held by employees who recently were laid off.
The staff reductions, made in response to a $28.4 million cut in state funding, include 91 faculty positions, 161 staff and administrative positions, 63 posts held by graduate assistants and five held by UA students.
The UA was able to keep layoffs to a minimum and achieved the job cuts largely through retirements, resignations and by not filling vacant positions, said Gregg Goldman, the university’s chief financial officer.
“It could have been worse,” said Goldman, who praised decision-makers for finding places to cut that limited negative impacts on students.
The downsizing will save the UA more than $21 million in salaries, wages and benefits.
The university also trimmed about $4 million from spending on travel, operations and capital projects and was able to offset about $3 million of the lost state funding with extra revenue from auxiliary sources such as UA athletics.
UA spokesman Chris Sigurdson said the work-force cuts are expected to be permanent, with lost positions unlikely to be restored.
The university is Southern Arizona’s largest employer with the equivalent of more than 11,000 full-time personnel, so the loss of 320 jobs is a sliver of its overall workforce.
Even so, the impact of the cuts will be noticeable, ranging from less parking lot maintenance to larger class sizes and higher fees in some programs, officials said.
Sigurdson said academic rigor will be maintained despite the loss of 91 faculty positions. The cuts were limited to non-tenure-track instructors, clinical and research faculty and didn’t affect tenure-track professors, he said.
Some of the cuts’ impacts will be felt internally, such as in longer waits to process expense claims due to reduced staffing in that area, officials said.
Others will be felt by students, such as reduced hours for the school’s fine-arts library, bigger class sizes in some areas and higher application fees for graduate programs.
