To the George Washington University Community:
With each new day, we are seeing exciting progress toward the fall semester. I hope that by now you have been able to review our Fall 2020 Back to Campus Plan, which is an important step to making our safe return to campus. As we await approval from the District, we are preparing a more detailed operational plan informed by the thoughtful feedback we are receiving, including from many of you. And our faculty and staff are continuing to develop creative ways to enhance the GW experience by finding new opportunities to reimagine everything from courses and research to residential life and student engagement.
We also have been proactively reimagining how our university will operate more efficiently and strategically in our COVID-19 world. This effort has included a comprehensive review of our finances and ongoing assessments of our administrative organizational structures to ensure we are best positioned both now and into the future to fulfill our core mission of knowledge creation and dissemination.
Today I want to share an update on our approach to this effort, including the steps we have taken to address our financial reality to date and our plans for the coming year.
Securing GW’s Finances
As I wrote to you previously, we have been working to secure the university’s financial position, and in doing so our priorities have been and will continue to be the safety and care of our community.
Like all universities, the pandemic has increasingly strained our resources, including this past spring as we invested more in health and safety efforts, transitioned courses online, packed and stored students’ belongings, provided prorated account credits for room costs, and determined we would not offer summer housing or programs. Starting in March, we took several immediate steps to address these unexpected financial impacts. Although about 70 percent of the budget is dedicated to compensation and personnel, we worked hard to weather the challenges through changes in other areas, including by:
- Suspending nonessential hiring and noncritical capital projects.
- Pausing strategic planning for the foreseeable future.
- Implementing cost savings and avoidance in operations wherever possible.
- Reducing salary for members of senior leadership.
- Freezing all salaries and not awarding merit increases.
- Drawing from reserves in a financially responsible manner.
These early actions were critical, and they have allowed us to continue to fulfill our core mission and limit impact on our staff. But as I shared recently, we have been learning more about the coming fiscal year, which begins Wednesday, and we have estimated significant impact on the budget, with a gap of more than $100 million between expected revenue and expenses.
Many factors are driving this gap, including likely enrollment impacts and the increased investments we need to make in health and safety, including our testing, tracing, and quarantining ability, as well as improvements to technology in our classrooms to support high-quality hybrid teaching and learning. The magnitude of this gap and the continued uncertainty of additional impact present a formidable challenge in our financial planning, and we now need to make more difficult decisions.
Positioning GW for the Future
While administrative units across GW regularly assess how to best support the university, and some were doing so even before March, the pandemic has required that we take a comprehensive look at how all of our units function to create a financially sustainable, stable, and strategic future.
Recently, we requested that administrative leadership, overseen by Provost Blake and EVP and CFO Diaz, comprehensively review their unit’s administrative functions and staffing and consider how they support the goals of the unit and the university’s core academic mission, guided by four main principles:
- Preserving those functions critical to the university’s teaching and research mission.
- Establishing shared services within functional areas and restructuring units to reduce redundancies.
- Right-sizing staffing based on current and expected needs driven by the evolving COVID-19 context.
- Determining those functions that are not mission-critical.
Unfortunately, during this process, we will need to make personnel decisions, including staff layoffs and furloughs. I know this is not easy news to receive, and I understand the increased anxiety many have experienced this past spring as we have considered this possibility. I want you to know that we are taking a thoughtful and principled approach to this process, and we are committed to caring for our friends and colleagues who will be affected. These are very difficult decisions, but we believe that, rather than making indiscriminate, across-the-board reductions, applying this principled approach supports an equitable review of staff positions. This review process will occur on varying timelines specific to each administrative unit, and we expect to notify individuals affected in the coming weeks.
Additionally, as part of an ongoing review of our academic enterprise and its finances, Provost Blake has formed a set of review teams consisting of Faculty Senators and Deans while also sharing the overarching philosophy with the Faculty Senate Fiscal Planning and Budget Committee. We will continue to update the university community as this process continues.
As we take steps to manage our finances based on current projections of the pandemic’s impact, we will also need to continually review our situation as the pandemic evolves and be prepared to respond with additional actions should our circumstances change. I want to assure you that in our actions, we will continue to prioritize the safety and care of our community. We also will continue to be guided by our commitment to preserve and strengthen our core academic mission.
Sincerely,
Thomas J. LeBlanc