September 6, 2024

Dear Faculty and Staff,

As your president, I continue to feel both honored and humbled to serve our institution. Leading the University of Delaware with the utmost dignity and respect for all members of our community is a responsibility I take very seriously every day. That word, community, is a very important one, as it creates a bridge for open conversations for us to have here at UD — communicating ideas and sharing feedback that can inform creative solutions by working together. Many of you have directly expressed your perspectives with me about new approaches we can implement to prioritize our commitment to academic excellence while embracing operational efficiency. I want you to know that I sincerely appreciate this productive collaboration.

During the last academic year, like many higher education institutions, UD faced extraordinary financial pressures as we navigated challenges presented by a perfect storm of factors in the post-pandemic economy.  After consulting with the vice presidents and deans, Provost Carlson and I created measures and guidelines to mitigate a projected $20 million to $40 million budget shortfall for the 2024 fiscal year (FY24). Some of the austerity measures announced last spring caused aggravation and disruption of activities. In hindsight, we should have proactively consulted with faculty earlier in the process of contemplating these measures and guidelines. Thanks to your feedback, we subsequently adjusted several measures to accommodate the needs of our community.  I also want to acknowledge the concerns expressed in faculty surveys around leadership transparency and accountability, financial management, communication and prioritization of our academic mission. I hear you, and I can assure you that I am committed to working with you, the Faculty Senate, department chairs and deans, and the student government associations. As one UD, we are all working to advance our shared aspirations toward actionable progress.

Through our collective efforts, we have managed to correct the fiscal situation the University faced in the spring; we are now projecting that UD is within $3 million of bridging the all-funds FY24 budget gap. This impressive turn-around reflects a combination of savings from payroll (attrition and restructuring resulting in savings of $11 million), reduced spending on travel and materials ($14 million), and increased summer and graduate revenue from the academic sector ($6 million), as well as investment income and operating gifts meeting target ($6 million). 

I want to sincerely thank you all for your sacrifices and herculean efforts to overcome these challenges. Our goal is to minimize the need for those sacrifices in the future and set up campus units for success; we will continue to advance initiatives and resources to do so, including those supporting revenue generation.  

Indeed, in managing our changing environment to position UD for success, our community has collectively begun to realize momentum for progress that will continue into this year and beyond. A key catalyst for this effort has been our commitment to new levels of transparency, sharing budgets down to the unit level across all academic and administrative areas. This massive effort is underway, with the expectation that budgets will be made available in the coming weeks.

Example of initiatives include, among others:

The momentum, transparency, faculty empowerment, and communication that result from these initiatives will be necessary, as the headwinds are still present. As you may recall from my communication in February, for FY25, the budget gap was projected to be in the $20 million to $54 million range, due especially to the $36 million projected increases in benefits costs, of which about $24 million is due to the health insurance premium increase alone and $6.5 million for retirement benefits. While we are not out of the woods yet, early projections indicate that we are making progress on our enrollment targets and meeting our commitment to financial aid. Indeed, this fall we welcomed an academically strong, diverse class, from an all-time high pool of 40,000 applications despite continuing issues with FAFSA impacting university enrollments nationwide. We are also staving off the impact of the Fair Labor Standards Act from $14 million to approximately $1.5 million for FY25. We have also secured additional support from the state in our operating budget. As a result, we are positioned to contain the budget shortfall to no more than $40 million, and hopefully considerably less, depending on continued effectiveness of various cost containment and revenue growth efforts.  

In addition, to further ease pressures on our operating budget while protecting our academic mission, we anticipate that part of this budget gap will be mitigated through the use of unit reserves where applicable, as well as savings from strategic administrative realignments and the reduction of central institutional support towards athletics and recreational services. We will also improve our liquidity by seeking debt financing for certain capital projects that have already been in progress, most notably Building X.

In closing, from the bottom of my heart, I want to express to each and every one of you my thanks for all you did last year, and most importantly what you do every day for our amazing students and the broader UD community. With shared vision and resilience, I know we will continue this great work. Together, we are shaping a better future for UD, and you are making that happen.

With gratitude,

Dennis Assanis President