Facing a $6.2 million budget shortfall, Saint Martin’s rolls back raises. Faculty aren’t happy

Facing a $6.2 million budget shortfall, Saint Martin’s University in Lacey has resorted to a series of cuts to get its budget back in order.

Cuts have been made to faculty pay, and faculty members are not happy about it, according to emails and a social media link shared with The Olympian. The Facebook post calls on the college to “honor the contracts” of faculty, which has attracted dozens of concerned comments.

“For decades, SMU faculty have been among the lowest paid in Washington state, and the modest raise that CAS and CEC faculty got this fall finally put us on the path towards fair compensation,” the post reads. “Having that little bit of income taken away from us after just three paychecks really hurts.”

The Olympian reached out to Roy Heynderickx, a familiar name for those connected with the college. Heynderickx served as Saint Martin’s president for years until retiring in 2022. He returned in late September to serve as interim co-president with Father Kilian Malvey, another well-known figure and instructor.

Saint Martin’s needed the interim help after Jennifer M. Bonds-Raacke, who became Saint Martin’s University president in July 2022, resigned in August after her father died.

Heynderickx confirmed and acknowledged the budget situation at Saint Martin’s during a recent interview.

“Like every organization, including nonprofits, we have to periodically assess our spending for the year vis a vis the revenue streams that we are provided,” he said. “We over-obligated ourselves for this year in our budget.

Dissecting the budget problem

A contributing factor to the shortfall was a 7% drop in enrollment, he said, a combination of fewer new and continuing students. Current total enrollment stands at 1,507 students, down from 1,614, according to university information.

Other factors were not as clear, with Heynderickx saying that they were the result of changes to the school’s budget last year.

“Expenditures, primarily, without contemplating how the revenue streams would work out to support those increases identified,” he said.

In response to a follow up question, the university added: “At the time the decision was made to move forward with faculty salary increases, the prior administration did not know the full extent of the enrollment decline and other factors impacting the budget.”

There also have been administrative changes other than Bonds-Raacke’s departure. The school has hired a new provost and had three interim chief financial officers, he said.

The result has been a $6.2 million budget shortfall. Heynderickx said the school has made $5 million in non-compensation-related cuts, about half of which was realized through leaving positions unfilled and the remaining by limiting travel, pulling consulting fees out of the budget, and delaying annual improvement projects, he said.

“We are trying to identify expenditures that would not affect the student experience,” Heynderickx said. “That has been our mantra going into this: We really do not want to affect the experience our students receive here at the university.”

But the university still needed to cut more than $1 million. To get there, the university is eliminating the remainder of the school’s contribution to faculty retirement accounts for this year. It also is rolling back a previously approved faculty salary increase, but will honor a 1% pay increase and new faculty contracts that took effect in the fall.

There have been no layoffs, he said.

Heynderickx acknowledged that the impact of the faculty-related cuts has not been felt across the board.

“The salary scale that they came up with is important and at some point we will get back to it,” he said. “The funding is not there to support it.”

Faculty respond

Interim co-president Heynderickx said reaction from faculty was “mixed.”

“There is a concern as there would be at any organization with this type of cut,” he said.

Former Saint Martin’s faculty president Tam Dinh, who now teaches at Seattle University, spent 11 years at Saint Martin’s before leaving the school this year.

Dinh earned her doctorate in social work from the University of Southern California. The Olympian reached out to Dinh because some current faculty were not comfortable speaking to a reporter on the record.

As faculty president, Dinh worked with Bonds-Raacke to come up with a new salary schedule that was approved by the college’s board of directors for the 2023-24 school year. Not only was Dinh disappointed to learn of the cuts and rollbacks, she said the university’s actions were hard to reconcile with the Benedictine focus on community, social justice and dignity of work.

“I was hoping for more support from the board and the abbey, and seeing that they are allowing the cuts to happen, it kind of speaks volumes,” she said.

Dinh said those faculty members who have reached out to her said they were feeling “traumatized” by the decision.

The rollbacks mean that salaries will return to the level prior to the changes approved by the board for this school year.

But what were those cuts? Dinh said the rollbacks varied, with current faculty saying there are differing reduction amounts. Dinh questions why there wasn’t a uniform cut.

Although Heynderickx told The Olympian the cuts were beyond the proposal stage, the college’s board of trustees is set to meet Monday to vote on the amended budget overall, including the cuts, according to information shared with the newspaper.

Dinh earned $49,000 a year when she first joined the university in 2012, even though she had the opportunity to make more than $100,000 with the city of Seattle.

Still, like a lot of faculty at Saint Martin’s, she believed in the school’s mission and its Benedictine values, so was willing to accept less to do work that was important to her.

Eventually, however, she felt she had done all she could within the limits of the Saint Martin’s system and mentally prepared to leave, but the pandemic kept her in place. She also was elected faculty president and then met incoming president Bonds-Raacke.

“She brought hope and a new way of doing things,” Dinh said.

Together, with input from the faculty, she and the president set out to find ways to improve faculty compensation, looking at 24 universities with similar operating costs. They didn’t raise salaries to the median of that group of schools, but did increase it within a certain range, which meant an assistant professor in the liberal arts would now make $59,000, up from $49,000.

Dinh still called the higher figure “scandalous” for an assistant professor, but it was a start.

If Saint Martin’s wants to protect the student experience, faculty matter, too, Dinh said. “If we are truly student-centered and care about the student experience, the biggest contributor is faculty.”

Heynderickx said Saint Martin’s is going to get through this period. The school did well during the pandemic and its largest major, nursing, is looking to grow by 50 percent over the next four years.

“We are still a strong institution,” he said.