How to Lead through Budget Cuts

As the pandemic rips through university plans and budgets, many of us in positions of leadership are called upon to make significant budget cuts. Not the slow, incremental kind, but significant cutbacks that will affect everyone. Often these are not efforts to cut excess with surgical precision but cuts made across the board, hitting the healthy and the weak in equal measure. The trend is to push responsibility for making these cutbacks down to lower levels—from the provost to the deans, program directors, and department chairs. The message: “Work with your numbers, and come back to us with a budget that is xx percent less.”