ScienceInsider

by Sam Kean

Things are as bad as expected under the Ivy in New Haven. Yale University President Richard Levin has announced in an email to staff, faculty, and alumni that Yale expects to run a deficit of $150 million each fiscal year between 2010–11 and 2013–14, and that “with the exception of financial aid, no area of expenditure will be immune from scrutiny.”

Levin noted that the college of arts and sciences will have to pare back faculty recruitment significantly. This reduction includes recruitment to the university’s new West Campus, situated 7 miles from the New Haven campus. The West Campus will house a number of science laboratories, and while the university will still recruit scientists and staff for those buildings, it will not do so at the pace it had hoped.

Virtually all universities are facing similar cuts and cutbacks, and even the wealthiest Ivies have not been spared, especially their endowments. Yale’s did not take as big a hit as Harvard University's did, but Yale’s projection last summer that the endowment would be approximately $17 billion is now looking $1 billion too optimistic. Any university program dependent on endowment funds will be especially hard hit, Levin warned.