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Chico State's independent student newspaper

The Orion

Chico State's independent student newspaper

The Orion

Chico State's independent student newspaper

The Orion

College of Humanities and Fine Arts subject to spending freeze

Arts+and+Humanities+Building+Photo+credit%3A+Daniel+Wright
Arts and Humanities Building Photo credit: Daniel Wright

The Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts released an email to the faculty and staff of the college announcing a spending freeze.

The freeze became effective April 9 and is specifically targeting Professional Development funds.

Professional Development funds are used for professionally related travel, subscriptions, purchases and graduate or student assistants.

The freeze means that all requests from faculty to use PD funds will not be approved for the current fiscal year.

Robert M. Knight, Dean of HFA, cites the current budget deficit the college has as the reason for the freeze.

When the college received funding, in November, for the 2016-17 fiscal year it was 1.3 million dollars less than anticipated.

“November was too late to adjust any expenditure for the fall semester… I am projecting a year-end deficit of over $1.2 million,” said Knight in the email to the faculty of HFA.

This will be the first year the HFA has ended the year with a deficit, with Knight as the college Dean.

“What is evident is that we all must work collectively to increase the major counts in all HFA degree programs as a means to address the situation,” said Knight in the email.

The reason for this as Knight mentions in the email is that the college breaks even on its GE course offerings, but loses money on its upper division courses.

“Together we will be discussing a number of initiatives for the 17-18 year to aggressively market the major programs in the college,” said Knight in the email.

Daniel Wright can be reached at [email protected] or @Danny_W_Chico on Twitter.

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    Garrett Wheeler // May 14, 2017 at 1:29 pm

    Chico State University had the money to build a new multi million dollar Arts and Humanities building over the last 4 years. Yet all of a sudden has a $1.2 million dollar shortfall for staffing and classes? One department that should certainly be cancelled indefinitely is the Glass Department headed by Robert Herhusky. This program wastes more money than any other department in the entire college. The school of art has turned a blind eye to the lack of teaching accountability, safety and excessive waste of resources by Mr. Herhusky’s department. This tenure track professor has been milking his job for 30 years collecting his pay check while wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of the Universities money and has nothing to show for it. Get a clue C.S.U and realize your being swindled by a dead beat professor that does not care about teaching or saving the school money, only collecting another pay check. Best of luck balancing the budget. Maybe you can sell some of those bongs being made to help close the budget gap?

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