photo by: Shawn Valverde/Special to the Journal-World

The University of Kansas campus is pictured in this September 2023 aerial photo.

Updated at 1:50 p.m. Tuesday, March 25

The University of Kansas is clamping down on its hiring process as it faces possible reductions in federal funding, Chancellor Douglas Girod said Tuesday.

KU will require all new hiring decisions to go through an additional review process by KU’s “University Cabinet,” which includes the chancellor, the provost, the chief financial officer and other top executives from across the Lawrence campus and the Medical Center campus, Girod said.

“This includes requests to create new positions, backfill vacant positions, and pursue promotions and pay increases,” Girod said in a message to university employees and stakeholders.

The review, he said, “is designed to ensure that any hiring or role changes during this period of uncertainty are mission-critical and aligned with university strategy.”

KU also is directing all of its departments to implement new budgeting procedures that will require departments to first look for dollars other than from KU’s general operating fund to pay for department expenses. Girod said KU wants to conserve those general operating funds — which are the dollars with the fewest restrictions placed upon them — in order to use them for universitywide commitments.

Departments also are being instructed to look for ways to cut back on expenses in the current budget, which runs through June. Girod said all budget managers “should be very judicious in the expenditure of currently budgeted funds.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod is pictured on Nov. 7, 2023.

Girod said he knows the new hiring and spending policies are likely to have impacts on university operations.

“The reality is, we should all prepare for disruptions to the programs, services and activities we manage,” Girod said.

Research universities across the country are facing the prospect of significant new restrictions on how they can spend research dollars, as the National Institutes of Health is working to impose a new cap on using federal dollars to fund administrative and overhead costs related to research.

KU officials have estimated that new spending restriction, which is the subject of lawsuits elsewhere in the U.S., would create a $30 million to $40 million budget problem for KU, if the restriction is placed just on NIH grants that KU receives. Girod, however, has told the Journal-World that he is worried that if the NIH caps are allowed to be implemented, they will spread to all forms of federal research funding, which could significantly increase KU’s budget problems.

KU also is one of 45 universities that recently was named by the U.S. Department of Education as institutions that are being investigated for improperly using race considerations in their operations. KU and most of the other schools landed on the list for using a little-known, third-party program — The PhD Project — that helps Black and Latino students pursue advanced business degrees. That investigation, if it finds KU violated civil rights laws, could result in the university losing significant amounts of federal funding.

Girod did not address the U.S. Department of Education investigation in his Tuesday message to the campus. Instead, he focused on what he characterized as a “new reality” that “federal funding for higher education could be substantially reduced or eliminated in many areas.”

“Federal policy changes have created unprecedented uncertainty for higher education and indicate a fundamental transformation of the relationship between universities and the federal government,” Girod said.

The Kansas Legislature is currently completing its work on new budget for the state, but Girod said it “is unlikely there will be additional state funding for higher education to address rising costs and reductions in federal support.”

KU’s new spending and hiring policies come as other universities across the country implement similar or stricter measures. Several universities, including Stanford, Harvard, North Carolina State, MIT and others have implemented hiring freezes.

In his message on Tuesday, Girod said KU’s new policies “will invariably require that we make difficult decisions.” But Girod also expressed optimism that KU will use ingenuity to adjust to this “highly uncertain environment.”

“The KU community is resilient,” Girod said. “As a community, we will meet this challenge and strengthen our university so that we can continue our mission of education, service and research.”