This text has been translated from Norwegian with the assistance of GPT UiO.
For many years, the faculty enjoyed a considerable degree of financial flexibility. The overall level of academic activity was lower than our total financial resources would have supported, and over a few years the faculty generated a large accumulated underspend—or “surplus”. At the end of 2021, the total accumulated underspend stood at 143 million kroner, rising to 155 million kroner by the end of 2022. Having a lot of money on the books may sound positive, but for a public institution it is a challenge: funds not used for academic activity can lead to reduced allocations or demands for repayment.
Our faculty—along with other faculties at UiO in a similar position—therefore received a clear message from UiO’s leadership: we had to reduce our accumulated underspend. Naturally, this instruction was passed on from the faculty leadership to the units responsible for academic activity, namely our departments and centres.
The only way to reduce an accumulated underspend is to spend somewhat more each year than annual income would indicate. In other words, the instruction to reduce the accumulated underspend meant moving from a situation where our academic activity was slightly below what annual income would support, to a situation where it was slightly above it. The departments and centres increased academic activity to a level that exceeded income, and the accumulated underspend was reduced.
The greatest challenge in winding down a large accumulated underspend is finding a pace of reduction that is sustainable and does not result in a crash landing followed by overspending after a few years. The obvious goal is to maintain a long-term, healthy balance between our financial framework and the volume of academic activity. Over the past year, it has become clear that the pace of reduction could advantageously be slowed considerably, and we are now on track for a total accumulated underspend of around 80 million kroner by the end of 2025.
All departments and centres are now working on the long-term forecast. UiO’s request is no longer for the faculty to deliver a balanced long-term forecast, but one that shows an accumulated underspend—i.e., a “surplus”. We will achieve this, even though the underspend is not evenly distributed across the departments and centres. The financial situation varies greatly between them, and some units will have to reduce their activity substantially to achieve a healthy balance between resources and activity.
The number of full-time equivalents, especially in basic funded recruitment posts, is falling, and fewer such posts are being advertised than before. Many units reduced part of their accumulated underspend by hiring more people into basic funded recruitment posts than the target required, and by adding an extra year of employment dedicated to teaching to some externally funded recruitment posts.
Recruitment posts stimulate and enrich our academic communities and the faculty, and all our research fellows and postdoctoral researchers have driven high research activity and produced many strong candidates for the PhD programme. A major additional advantage of reducing the underspend by increasing the number of recruitment posts is that these extra posts do not create long-term salary obligations, which could be difficult to manage at a time when the real value of our basic allocation declines slightly each year. Having this flexibility going into the budget process is very welcome.
However, fewer staff inevitably means less research and less teaching. Many of our departments and centres are now actively working to reduce the scope of their teaching provision to a level that can be managed within the financial framework we can expect. Deciding which teaching activities are essential to retain and where cuts will be least painful is primarily an academic matter, and the answers will not necessarily be the same in all units. Considerations of study quality and students’ ability to complete their programmes must carry significant weight in any case. But the choices we make about the teaching portfolio and the use of teachers paid by the hour will also affect staff members’ day-to-day work.
Perhaps seminar teaching on a course that has been offered for many years will be scaled down or even cut altogether. Perhaps the number of elective courses will need to be reduced significantly, both at BA and MA level. Such courses give our students good opportunities for academic specialisation and, moreover, provide particularly strong opportunities for research-led teaching—making them popular with staff for that reason. Perhaps we will need to set a lower limit for the number of students enrolled in a course for it to run. Perhaps there will need to be a longer interval between every time a given course is offered. Many have invested considerable effort in developing interactive teaching formats, which can be more resource-intensive than traditional formats such as lectures. Could greater collaboration help us retain innovative teaching while using fewer resources?
Cutting teaching is never particularly pleasant, but when a unit teaches considerably more than its resources justify, the department/centre head has no choice.
I hope we can all help ensure that the difficult task of cutting activity levels does not become even more difficult than it already is. The faculty aims to facilitate a process around dimensioning the programme portfolio that is as open as possible, with principles for prioritisation that are transparent and useful—so that we preserve an appropriate and sufficiently flexible sizing for the future as well.
I expect the process will be demanding for some, but the faculty encourages units to use this opportunity to think afresh about how teaching is organised. It is heartening, for example, to see that several units are already developing closer collaboration to make better use of resources around individual courses and programmes—something that can, both in the short and long term, contribute to creating a stronger educational provision for the benefit of students.
In any case, we are all best served by ensuring that our academic communities keep their hand on the wheel in the work of finding a good balance between available resources and the level of activity.