Even as the University of California struggles to make necessary reductions resulting from present and future funding cuts from the state, not all parts of the system predict a gloomy future.
For the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which expects to end the year in a better financial state than it had anticipated, director Charles Kennel said, that future is a more promising one.
Since 2000, Scripps has suffered three consecutive 10-percent cuts in the state’s research budget, according to Kennel. The funding cuts came after the institution had already lost 10 percent of its state funds during the 1990s.
At the time, Scripps’ chief financial officer, Deputy Director of Administrative Affairs Tom Collins, said the fiscal outlook put him in “despair.”
“We had that money for 50 years and we had used it to make long-term personnel commitments to researchers and faculty,” Kennel said. “It was really fundamental to our operation. [The cuts have] hit our budget especially hard because half of our overall [state] budget comes from the research line and the other half basically from the teaching line.”
Though Scripps gets slightly more than 10 percent of its nearly $150 million budget from the state and the majority of the institution’s total funding comes from federal and other grants, the grant money is awarded to individual researchers and cannot be used for general expenditures.
Since 2000, instead of distributing the cuts equally throughout all programs, Kennel said Scripps chose to protect its academic personnel and concentrate the reductions heavily in a few specific programs.
The decision put the institution’s collection of rare specimens, exceeding two million samples, its ship fleet and a joint 50-year-old Pacific coast monitoring program in line for cuts, in addition to other projects.
“We basically cut everything in the budget that was not tied up in an academic personnel commitment — everything,” Kennel said. “Then, when we did that … we were still looking at a five- or six-year period in which we would be unable to undertake new hiring. And for any institution, not to be able to hire young faculty, to start new teaching programs, is really the death of things.”
However, since its funding nadir in 2001, the institution has staged a financial turnaround, fueled by “miracles of financial analysis” and a sweeping reorganization plan, said Kennel, who also serves as the UCSD’s vice chancellor for marine sciences, dean of marine sciences graduate school and chair of NASA’s advisory council.
“Compared to where we had been, we are in wonderful shape, but for us there has been an irreversible change,” Kennel said. “There are many things that make us happy about our new direction, but there has been a fundamental change, and we will never come back. I think we’ll get through this, but the bottom line is that we cannot count on the state of California to meet our fundamental commitments to teaching and research.”
Scripps has stepped up its effort to raise private money, doubling its fundraising in a single year. The money, in addition to increased grants, has been enough to avert or reduce some of the proposed cuts to programs.
Since 2000, funding from the National Science Foundation, the institution’s largest financier, has grown by nearly 60 percent, from $26 million to more than $41.5 million in 2003, according to NSF data. In the previous four-year period, Scripps raised its NSF grant amount by less than 10 percent.
Overall, Scripps has increased its total grant funding by 41 percent in the last two years, according to Kennel.
In addition, though Scripps originally began as an independent laboratory, the institution has entered into a new partnership with UCSD, increasing its role in undergraduate teaching to gain access to more academic funding.
The institution has created 14 new course offerings, according to Kennel, and is currently working with the university to create a formal marine biology major in addition to several other interdisciplinary programs to be run jointly with the university.
Scripps has also increased its graduate population by 27 percent to 206 since fall 2000, according to university records. Though the students receive a five-year financial aid guarantee, Kennel said the growth has improved the institution’s ability to secure research funding.
In exchange, UCSD has picked up some of Scripps’ tab in recent years when the institution’s cash flow has remained in the red. The debt to the university is “in the millions,” Collins said, though he would not disclose the actual amount of the debt.
“That’s the arrangement that the university has made with us: We’ll work hard on the university by increasing their undergraduate teaching, and we’ll give them new opportunities for research that they wouldn’t have otherwise,” Kennel said. “But in return for that, they’ll continue to invest in us and even help us grow if we do our job right.”
After celebrating its 100-year anniversary last fall, the institution believes it has made a turnaround, with its debt to the university increasing for the current year by a smaller amount than it had expected.
“The good news is that it appears that [the deficit] will be less this year than we had predicted, significantly,” Collins said.
As one of the world’s oldest and most renowned marine science research centers, Kennel believes Scripps’ partnership with UCSD puts it in a good position to benefit from the potential increases in federal spending.
In 2002, a report by the independent Pew Oceans Commission, on which Kennel served, formally recommended that Congress provide “substantial federal funding” for future investment into the nation’s oceans. Another recent preliminary report from the federally chartered U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy has urged the federal government to more than double its current $1.3 billion in ocean research and pay for the development of a national ocean observing system.
Collins, who also serves as UCSD’s associate vice chancellor for marine sciences, said he believes Scripps’ budget challenges are a microcosm of the entire UC system, coming two years ahead of the university’s.
“Because of the process that we’ve gone through in the past year, especially with the type of support we’ve gotten from UCSD, I very much believe … that the institution is going to come out the other end healthy and maybe healthier than it was before,” he said.