At a time when the UConn administration has repeatedly talked up its budget deficits, UConn’s upper administrators have hired external consultants, Kennedy & Company, for a reported amount of $750,000. And we don’t know if that contract could be extended for even more money. Instead of developing an internal process that built on deep and genuine consultation with the broader UConn community, they have imposed outsiders on us.

We don’t need a cookie cutter budget approach that drains funds from UConn and passes the money instead to consultants who shop their same ideas from one university to the next. Heck, it would have been much cheaper to just buy a copy of the report from their last client!

As proud faculty members with decades of experience at UConn, we do agree that now is a good time to reconsider UConn’s budgetary and planning process. Higher education faces a difficult set of pressures. Yet at its core, a research university like UConn should be about research, teaching, outreach, and learning, and the beneficial ways that these things all complement and enrich each other. 

But for years UConn’s upper administration has sought to weaken academic departments and other units by draining their funds and reallocating the money for their own initiatives. Indeed, the administration has claimed that the goal of this new Kennedy & Company driven “Budget Transformation Initiative” is to “incentivize units to allocate resources in alignment with institutional priorities, rather than viewing funds as exclusively owned by individual departments.” 

But we have brilliant, creative colleagues and sharp, energetic students; the best model would directly empower them rather than let a few upper administrators decide budgets based on their latest initiatives. Such a heavy-handed approach has not worked well in the past, and it harms the scholarly and programmatic life on campus. It has weakened many of our graduate programs and, at least anecdotally, reduced the opportunities for stimulating scholarly and other student events on campus.

Academic departments and units are the beating hearts of the UConn community. They are where we find the writing, the labs, the projects, the presentations, and so much more that both strengthens UConn’s ties to Connecticut’s towns and cities and places our state at the forefront of national and international innovation. To repeatedly cut academic departments and units suggests that our administration neither understands nor values UConn’s distinct mission as a public land grant university. 

Let’s note, too, that when UConn’s leaders recently revised the FY26 deficit downward from $37.9 million to $12.6 million, they did not correspondingly reduce the amount they were pressing academic departments to cut. Not a peep about reducing or rescinding previous calls for departmental cuts.

The broader UConn community – the students, staff, and faculty who know UConn best and who make it work – was not involved in the decision to hire Kennedy & Company and to bring its “Budget Transformation Initiative” to our campus. While the administration imagines a multi-year process in which UConn’s “stakeholders” will serve on subcommittees and offer feedback, this is nothing like the genuine collaboration and shared governance that should guide the decisions of a major university. At best, these subcommittees will be placed in a position in which they are expected to endorse the BTI as a fait accompli while upper administration organizes a few “town halls” that are intended to, in Kennedy & Company’s words, gain the “buy-in” of the broader campus community. This is not shared governance.

This is, instead, a struggle over the best vision for UConn. We believe that the university – its students, staff, and faculty – thrive when the people who do the teaching, the research, and the learning that distinguishes UConn have an equal say in how its funds are spent. Outsourcing our flagship state university’s future to drop-in budget consultants is not the way forward.

Jeffrey Dudas is a professor of political science and president of UConn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Jeremy Pressman is a professor of political science and a member of the AAUP executive committee at UConn.