Florida Memorial ends 18 degree programs, announces pay cuts for more than 80 employees
Florida Memorial University, a historically Black university in Miami Gardens, announced it will reduce by 10% the salaries of more than 80 employees who make $60,000 or above, discontinue 18 undergraduate degree programs, and eliminate 15 faculty positions.
The only HBCU in South Florida will implement more restrictive policies for borrowing money and more accelerated policies to repay money from its endowment. It will also set new fundraising and contribution goals for its board of trustees, and study new ways in which it can use its land for extra revenue, according to a memo sent to the FMU community Monday by a task force created to address the university’s accreditation issues.
The task force, comprised of fewer than 10 leadership members, recommended the measures, and the 23-member FMU Board of Trustees unanimously approved them Monday.
Additionally, the FMU administration enacted its own measures: a hiring freeze for non-critical positions, a reduction in university-wide travel, and cuts to department budgets of up to 30%, according to the memo.
The news comes as the private university fights to emerge from a sanction imposed by its accrediting body last summer.
In June, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges put the school on “probation for good cause.” Before that, FMU had been under “monitoring” for two years for failing to comply with all of the necessary standards — a problem rooted in financial difficulties due to a steady decline in enrollment.
In June 2022, the SACSCOC Board of Trustees, made up of 77 administrators and academics from other colleges and universities in southern states, will meet again to discuss FMU’s future. In the meantime, the university is trying to improve its performance.
William C. McCormick Jr., chairman of the FMU Board of Trustees, said the university’s leadership team is doing everything possible to keep its accreditation, because “at the end of the day, if we have no accreditation, we have no university.”
“We convened with a mindset that we had to make a transformative decision, and I think the meeting went extremely well,” he said. “Any time a decision will impact someone’s life, it shows a level of severity. But it was necessary, and the board members responded accordingly. I’m very proud of the board.”
The board will meet again next Monday to hash out, among other details, by how much the board’s contributions and fundraising should increase. McCormick said he anticipates it will put each member’s individual contribution at more than $25,000 and the overall board’s fundraising goal at $1 million.
Slashes to FMU’s curriculum, personnel
FMU did not immediately disclose which 18 of the about 40 degree programs it offers will be phased out.
The university wants to reach out individually to affected students first to make sure they can either transfer to other programs or have available all of the courses left to graduate within the next 12 to 18 months in the discarded programs, said Jacqueline Hill, FMU’s provost and executive vice president.
The HBCU has 28 undergraduate degree programs, but some degrees have different concentrations, which amount to about 40 curriculum tracts.
Hill said the cuts impact FMU’s three schools — Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education, and the university will likely disclose the complete list by early January.
The FMU task force chose the 18 programs by studying the historical trends of each program’s enrollment.
The group calculated the 10-year average enrollment for each program, and any program that had fewer than 20 students enrolled got cut. Likewise, they computed the five-year average for each program’s graduation rate, and any program that had graduated fewer than five students got cut.
“Our operating budget relies quite a deal on tuition, so it’s important for those programs to be healthy in their enrollment in order to bring tuition dollars to the institution,” Hill said. “So those were the variables that we looked at in order to determine the program closures.”
To replace some of the old programs, FMU will launch new ones in two to three years, Hill said, in areas like hospitality management, data science and early childhood education.
Because of the program shutdowns, FMU will eliminate 15 teaching jobs — eight currently filled and seven vacant.
The new salary reductions will affect nearly all administrative staff, including FMU President Jaffus Hardrick, said Sharee Gilbert, FMU’s director of communications and marketing. FMU employs 228 full-time people and 48 part time.
It’s unclear how long the cuts will stay in place. Hill said FMU will first focus on stabilizing its financials and growing its enrollment, and will then revisit the measures.
“It’s hard to determine [the timeframe],” Hill said. “We just know these are some actions that we must take in order to address our probationary status.”
This story was originally published November 23, 2021 at 3:44 PM.
