K-School Runs $1M Deficit Due To Extra Faculty

Due mainly to unexpected success in faculty recruiting, the Kennedy School of Government is expected to run a deficit of roughly $1 million this year, Dean Joseph Nye said in an interview yesterday.

Last year, the school ran a deficit of roughly $900,000, he said.

Since last fall, the Kennedy School has offered positions to 11 professors at other schools, 10 of whom accepted posts as tenured faculty.

Nye said he only expected about half those professors to accept the offers, which has caused a short-term increase in capital expenditures.

The deficit amounts to roughly 2 percent of the school's operating budget, and Nye said he is confident that the budget shortfall will not continue in the future.

"We will grow out of it, partially from the additional research these professors will generate and partially from the success of the Capital Campaign," Nye said. "I'm not worried about the deficit."

Nye said the deficit for this year was also increased due to a $500,000 series of expenditures to improve the school's information technology systems.

Provost Albert Carnesale, who is the former dean of the Kennedy School, said in an interview last month that many of the appointments that have been announced in the last year came from recruitment efforts begun under his tenure two to three years ago.

The plans for most appointments were not finalized, however, until Nye took over as dean last December, Carnesale said.

Carnesale said that when plans for the new appointments were made, he did not anticipate that all of the new faculty members would come at the same time and that the school had not planned financially for this contingency.

"It may be a bit of a worry for Dean Nye right now, but it's a price far more than worth paying," Carnesale said.

Fundraising efforts at the school will soon cover the costs of the increase in professors, Nye said. The school has now raised approximately $100 million of its $125 million goal in the University-wide, $2.1 billion capital campaign.

When the campaign is over, newly raised funds will be used to endow new faculty chairs at the school, Nye said, resulting in a real increase in the size of the school's faculty.

Previously, the school had not planned to enlarge the size of its faculty but to increase the ratio of tenured faculty members to associate faculty members, Carnesale said.

The Kennedy School has already seen the effects of the new faculty members. Admissions yields this year are higher than ever, and the average test scores of newly-admitted students have also broken previous records, Nye said.