Ben Allen reflects on UNI presidency, budget cuts last year

Despite a vote of no-confidence by the University of Northern Iowa faculty and criticism from a national academic group, retiring UNI President Ben Allen still believes controversial budget cuts and program closures last spring were the right decisions for the future of the university.

Allen on Wednesday said going into those decisions last year, he expected the faculty no-confidence vote and that the American Association of University Professors would get involved.

"We had a $5 million deficit. The other option would be laying off people across campus," Allen said in an interview. "If you worry about your legacy you're going to be making some decisions on a very personal level that won't be right for the institution."

Faculty leaders criticized Allen for not including faculty and staff more in the process last year, when dozens of programs were cut and the Price Lab School closed. An AAUP report said UNI administrators didn't follow proper procedures in the actions.

Allen on Wednesday said these were the kinds of decisions that were never going to be popular. The process of closing Price Lab School, for example, was one where more conversations would only lengthen and enhance the controversy, not lessen it, he said. He also said the academic programs cut affected a very small percentage of UNI students, a message university officials should have better communicated.

The mistake that was made, Allen said, was that those programs were cut in one fell swoop rather than in an incremental way.

"When it's all done at one time, because we weren't making decisions each year, that was the mistake," he said. "We should have been more diligent, and say which programs are ... not much in demand, or not high quality."

Allen, 66, sat down with The Gazette Wednesday as he wraps up seven years as UNI president. He departs the job May 24. His successor is William Ruud, who comes to UNI after six years as president at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.

When he first came to UNI, Allen said, he recognized that due to large state funding cuts and enrollment losses, many academic programs had a "weak resource base." Addressing that, and focusing resources more on quality and priority programs was a top goal, Allen said.

The university also recently wrapped a record $157.8 million fundraising campaign, and much of that money will go to scholarships, faculty support and academic programs, he said.

Allen points to his spearheading of discussion about UNI's funding model as another major accomplishment. A new regents task force will study how state funding is allocated among Iowa's three regent universities. UNI's enrollment is about 93 percent in-state students, which impacts the university's finances differently than the University of Iowa and Iowa State University.

"I hope there's recalibration of the model so there's more alignment between in-state students we serve and the state resources we receive," Allen said. "That could have a substantial impact on the resources."