Once Again Facing the Threat of Enormous Budget Cuts

In 2012, "an already brutal budget year has been made far worse by another proposal for deep and disproportionate cuts," Pitt Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg told members of the Pennsylvania Senate and House Appropriations Committees in February.

The proposed cuts would:

• Take Pitt's cumulative two-year cuts in state support to well in excess of $100 million;

• Reduce the University's state support, in absolute dollars, to levels not seen since the mid-1980s, more than a quarter century ago and when the state’s own budget was about one-third its current size; and

• Reduce the University's state support, if adjusted for inflation, to the lowest level since Pitt became a state-related university.

"In terms of proportionality," the chancellor added, "perhaps nothing is more telling than the proposed general fund budget’s bottom line. Overall state funding would be reduced by less than one-tenth of 1 percent, or $22.456 million. The cuts proposed just for Pitt are more than double that amount."