Trustees focused their discussions on the budget challenges the University will face over the next years and also received updates on the status of the Curriculum and Academic Restructuring Steering committee's plans at last Thursday's meeting, administrators said. The trustees also confirmed former Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration Jeffrey Apfel as executive vice president and chief operating officer, replacing Peter French who is retiring after 12 years. Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said that the trustees were "mainly focused on the deficits we are facing over the next few years and the need to come up plans to deal with that."

Apfel had announced at the beginning of October that the University's projected deficit for fiscal 2011 had grown to $9 million from $7 million in part due to a slower-than-expected pace in faculty retirements.

Last semester, the Board of Trustees endorsed the University's plan to increase the undergraduate student body by about 12 percent and to reduce the faculty by 10 percent, or about 35 positions, to save $5 million from the Arts and Sciences budget.

The CARS plan stipulates that the reduction will take place through retirements or departures. In keeping with the CARS recommendations, the University proposed an early retirement plan to faculty last semester. Provost Marty Krauss said trustees received an update "on the discussions [Jaffe] and I have been having with a number of faculty related to their plans for the future so that we can have a better sense of what it will take to achieve the 10-percent reduction in faculty."

She explained that the University has communicated with 43 tenured faculty in Arts and Sciences who will be 72 or older by June 30, 2015 to talk to them about their plans for the future. Interested faculty have until the end of December to decide, Krauss said.

Apfel explained that the trustees had not received an official financial update since last May and, therefore, for the first time, discussed the latest projections from early this fall. Apfel said he did not propose any options to close the gap at this meeting.

"Our long-term approach to budget balance rests upon the assumptions in the CARS approach," he said. In the short term, before the balance is reached, "we have to figure out what mixture of onetime and permanent changes are appropriately going to fill that [gap]."

He added that the trustees "didn't give us any hard and fast rules" about how to address the financial gap.

Apfel said the University is considering the option of taking a portion of money out of the University's $70 million in reserves, the portion of the University's nearly $600 million endowment that is not restricted to a specific use. He explained that reserves would only be part of the solution to ensure that the University still has sufficient savings.

"We've seen just 8-percent growth [in the endowment this] year to date, which is pretty good because we're only partly through the year," Apfel said. "At the moment we're feeling pretty positive about the endowment coming back, but it fell so far it's still going to take us several years."

The University is also considering to what extent the University may be able to apply the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act.

UPMIFA, enacted by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick Aug. 5, removes previous restrictions on using endowments funds that have decreased below their original historical value.

Apfel said, however, that UPMIFA's capacity for budget relief was relatively minimal because it still requires institutions to act prudently in making such spending decisions and to consider what the drawbacks there would be on the perpetuity of the endowment. Another factor limiting its effect, he explained, is that it would only apply to the portion of the endowment restricted to specific purposes.

With the CARS implementation under way to determine "how we're going to deal with more students and fewer faculty," Jaffe sent a memo to department chairs Oct. 22 that asks chairs to submit reports on their progress in implementing CARS suggestions by Dec. 1, in addition to their annual three-year curriculum projections. The reports will be part of an effort to assess whether the University is making progress toward maintaining the curriculum of majors and minors with fewer faculty, Jaffe said.

The memo asks chairs to consider how they anticipate coordinating courses that overlap with other departments and to what extent faculty are affiliating with departments outside their own. The memo furthermore asks chairs, "Do you think that the numeric CARS target for faculty for your department is feasible?" If the chairs do not consider it feasible, the memo asks them to describe how they are coping with reduced resources and "why those measures are inadequate or inapplicable, and what would be lost to students and to the university if you were forced to live with the CARS target."

"I anticipate that some departments are probably going to take advantage of the invitation they were given to say that they think the CARS [faculty] targets for their eventual size are too small, and we're going to be . evaluating their arguments in order to consider that," Jaffe said in an interview with the Justice.

He added that the Dean's Curriculum Committee, a group of faculty, students and staff advising him on the CARS implementation, would meet with the School Council Chairs this week to discuss how to respond to departments who consider the targets too small. The CARS faculty targets for departments are not set in stone, he said.

DCC member Prof. Richard Parmentier (ANTH) said he had suggested the meeting so "that [the School Council] chairs [would] be brought back into the loop in terms of planning.