The University of Montana continues the effort to align its budget with the current and future enrollment as officials plan for the next three years.

Provost Jon Harbor said the university has been going through a planning process for the past three years.

“The goal is to match resources with the needs that we have, and those needs have been changes over time, said Harbor. “Any good organization will be doing planning around that. The university has been going through an engaged process of planning on the academic side of things. As part of the APASP process, we’re making planning decisions around the future staffing of our academic departments.”

Harbor said all departments have been given a timeline of between now and 2021 with targets involving their faculty.

“We have been working through shared governance is arriving at instructional targets that academic units have to achieve by 2021,” he said. “This is what you had in your budget last year and this is what you’ll have in your budget in 2021, so you now have to come up with an instructional staffing plan to fit that budget.”

Harbor met with media on Thursday morning and shared the same table that you can see (attached to this story),” he said. “We want this to be very transparent because we want people to know what it is, and what it isn’t. When little bits of information are dribbled out, people jump to all sorts of interesting conclusions that are not supported by the data.”

Harbor identified one program that will be phased out altogether from the University of Montana.

“There is a program called Global Humanities and Religion that has very few majors, so the APASP program had that in its lowest group of programs, so after a great deal of discussion that is one program that is being phased out over the next several years.”

Harbor said he has opened his door for individual meetings with faculty to discuss their views on the budget plan.

Now, it will be up to the various departments to begin planning for that 2021 goal.

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