Copyright Forbes
Faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are poised to consider a “no confidence” vote against Chancellor Rodney Bennett over his plans to cut $27.5 million from the institution’s budget and eliminate several academic programs in the process. At a meeting on Tuesday, the UNL Faculty Senate passed a motion that schedules a formal no-confidence vote by the senate on November 18. The motion, which passed by an overwhelming 55-4 margin, alleges that Bennet has “failed to uphold the duties of leadership, financial stewardship, and governance integrity as mandated by the Board of Regents Bylaws” and that his administrative decisions “have undermined shared governance processes, violated established consultation norms with faculty and staff, and caused measurable harm to institutional morale and trust.” It accuses him of making “non-transparent budgetary reductions,” resulting in a loss of confidence by the faculty in his leadership. The motion also requests that a review of Bennett’s fitness to serve as chancellor be conducted by the University of Nebraska Board of Regents and system president Jeffrey Gold, that the Board initiate proceedings for the removal or negotiated resignation of Bennett and that the review of academic programs for possible elimination be suspended until “an interim Chancellor is appointed and shared governance processes are demonstrably restored.” The no-confidence motion comes after Bennett informed the campus in August that the university needed to eliminate a structural deficit it had run for several budget cycles, writing that despite its best efforts to live within its means, the institution’s revenue had not kept pace with its expenses. At the time, Bennett attributed the problem to “a combination of downward trends in state appropriations, net tuition and campus allocations combined with historically high inflation of health care costs as well as property and liability premiums and utilities.” Included in Bennett’s recommended cuts are the elimination of six academic programs — Community and Regional Planning; Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; Educational Administration; Landscape Architecture; Statistics; and Textiles, Merchandising, & Fashion Design – that would save $7.7 million and eliminae 77 faculty members, 71 of whom are tenured or on the tenure-track. Bennett also recommended the consolidation of four other departments. MORE FOR YOU But that plan has run into stiff opposition, first from an external consultant who questioned whether the university’s financial problems were severe enough to require the cuts and then from a 21-member internal advisory committee that disagreed with the chancellor’s recommendations and urged that cutting academic programs should be an “absolute last resort.” According to an analysis by Bonnie Fox Garrity, a business professor at D’Youville University, the cuts are not required, given the university’s overall financial condition. “The system and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln both show many signs of good financial health, increasing net positions, total revenue exceeding expenses, increase in state appropriations, budgeted revenue and expenses projected to grow,” Garrity said, according to Nebraska Public Media. Other faculty have challenged the accuracy of the data used in formulating the recommended cuts and questioned the methodology employed to arrive at the key metrics. Disputes over budget cuts and academic program elimination are one of the most common reasons for no-confidence votes against university administrators, as Chuck Ambrose and I document in our forthcoming book, N0 Confidence: When College Faculty Turn Against Their Presidents. Bennett’s three-year contract expires on June 30, 2026. The NU Board of Regents has not yet voted on whether it will be renewed. Chancellor Bennett has not yet commented on the senate’s resolution. ‘
