To: All Faculty
From: Katherine Baicker, Provost
Subject: Update on University Actions and Budget
Date: August 28, 2025
In the face of ongoing uncertainty in the federal landscape and the University’s current budget deficit, President Alivisatos, the deans and I have worked closely together this summer to develop a set of actions designed to steward our resources to best advance research and provide transformative education. As President Alivisatos described in his message, these strategic actions are intended to ensure that all of our resources, including our faculty’s time, are most effectively devoted to our core mission, and that we have the resources to continue to invest in both existing and emerging areas of scholarship. I want to provide additional detail here, and you will also be hearing from your dean.
Our structural deficit is not new. Through dedicated stewardship and expense discipline across campus, we were largely able to stay on track with our financial plan in the fiscal year that just ended despite substantial erosion of key external resources. This is an important accomplishment achieved through the care and hard work of many and must be sustained. But the increasing external financial pressures—including potential federal policy changes that could lead to fewer international students, reduced grant support, reduced Medicaid coverage, increased capital costs, and more—combined with the ongoing need to close our structural deficit, require additional measures.
Many of these actions are designed to make sure that our unrestricted resources—those not coming from grants for specific activities or dedicated endowments—are available for and dedicated to our most important enduring goals. While today’s message primarily addresses new efforts to streamline and focus our spending, these efforts must of course continue to be complemented by efforts across the University to develop and seize new opportunities for growth, from expansion of our educational offerings and reach including the College, divisions, professional schools, and executive education, to new sources of research funding, to new endowed chairs, to new activities on campus.
These decisions are shaped by our distinctive intellectual strengths and will help the University emerge from this period of uncertainty and financial headwinds in a position of strength. However, many of the changes will pose real challenges for our faculty, students, and staff. None of these decisions was made lightly, and we will all need to work together during some difficult transitions.
- Faculty Hiring: The University’s tenure-track, non-clinical faculty has grown by more than 20% in the last 10 years. Our intention is to hold steady at this faculty size overall for the near term, which means reducing hiring from the growth rate of recent years by about 30%. To that end, deans will submit hiring plans for the year for their units, and hiring will focus primarily on assistant professors. In addition, we will convene a faculty committee to assess faculty retirement options.
- Doctoral Education: This is a moment to examine carefully our storied and essential doctoral programs to ensure that we continue to prepare the next generation of scholars and researchers for meaningful careers. As a result of work this summer, several academic divisions have paused admissions for academic year (AY) 2026–2027 while they stand up committees to make recommendations to evaluate and strengthen their doctoral programs in the face of rapidly changing job markets and the rising cost of doctoral education. Other academic divisions, including those that receive significant federal grant funding, will be reducing the number of PhD students without external funding by shrinking cohorts, requiring students to move onto grants more quickly, or shortening time to degree. Overall, the University will reduce its internally-funded PhD population by 30% by AY2030–2031. Faculty governance is crucial to our academic programs, so in coordination with work already underway in the academic units, we will work with the Council to enlist a faculty group to provide recommendations about how our varied programs can each best meet the aims of doctoral education in an evolving landscape.
- Master’s Degrees: A rising share of college graduates go on to complete master’s degrees, and we have had great success in reaching new student populations and launching new programs. It is imperative that we ensure that our master’s degree programs are serving students well and are of sufficient size to be financially sustainable. Based on an initial review of our existing programs, some master’s programs have paused admissions for AY2026–2027, and we will be assessing all small programs to establish appropriate enrollment floors. We are also moving towards shared administrative infrastructure for recruitment and career support to leverage UChicago’s range of strengths, ease burdens on smaller units, and improve reach and outcomes for students. Additionally, we will work with the Council to form a faculty committee to establish regular reviews of our master’s degree programs and to make recommendations to help ensure that they meet students’ needs and expectations while supporting the University’s financial sustainability.
- Department Structure: As fields of inquiry evolve, our structures should be examined to ensure that they align with the way that knowledge is produced. Some deans, including in the Divisions of the Arts & Humanities and the Biological Sciences, are working to identify opportunities to strengthen ties between scholars, enhance eminence, increase educational opportunities for students, and reduce administrative burden for faculty. We will continue to examine departments across the University, focusing on smaller departments that may benefit from different organizational structures where such work is not already underway.
- Capital Projects: Capital funding for maintenance and enhancement of core spaces on the Main Quadrangles is a priority. Given limited capital funds and great uncertainty about future infrastructure support, the planned New Engineering and Science Building (NESB) will be significantly reduced in scale. The reduced scale will still allow all of the planned space for quantum laboratories along with new teaching labs and additional space for PME faculty, but with limited space for future expansion and a substantially smaller structure. Going forward, our target will be to launch new capital projects when 75% of their funding has been secured.
- Centers and Institutes: Unrestricted funding is invaluable in allowing the University to seed new ideas and support institutional priorities. At the same time, as fields and faculty evolve, the contributions of some centers may wane over time. Systematic periodic evaluation of centers should be routine, allowing space for new centers to emerge and making seed funding available for them as existing centers become self-sufficient or sunset. Deans are beginning the process of building such regular assessment of the centers and institutes within their units, and we are doing the same for those that are housed centrally. The University expects to reduce its unrestricted funding of existing centers and institutes by at least 20% in the coming years, spanning those focusing on economics, the sciences, and beyond, with the expectation that thriving centers can become more financially self-sufficient. This reduction in University funding will come through multiple mechanisms, including stretching out some existing large commitments over longer time horizons, emphasizing substitutional fundraising, and sunsetting some centers.
- Administrative Efficiency: As part of our efforts to focus resources on our core mission of scholarship and education, both central offices and deans are working to reduce administrative positions and spending while enhancing the support services available for those core activities. We have reduced the number of officers at the University, and we are working with deans to assess the leadership structures in academic units and the Office of the Provost in an effort to return more faculty time to research and teaching and to streamline staff efforts. One mechanism for doing this is to ask leaders to take on multiple responsibilities, offering the benefit both of a smaller administrative footprint and of more integrated activities. Another mechanism is to stop certain programs and activities, understanding that fewer people cannot carry forward the same workload. Other efforts are underway to consolidate support functions to reduce duplicated efforts and improve effectiveness.
These will be ongoing efforts that build on the hard work already done last year. The voluntary early retirement plan and departures from the University without replacement reduced non-clinical staff headcount by almost 300 last year, and actions anticipated this fall will reduce that number by an additional 100–150. The actions described here aim to further reduce our spending by $100 million.
This overall approach is designed to preserve and build on our university’s exceptional culture and strengths, where dedication to free and rigorous inquiry has generated so many breakthroughs and trained future generations of exceptional scholars and thinkers. Faculty engagement has been crucial to the many ongoing workstreams described here and will be vital to their evolution and success. I deeply appreciate the work of the deans and our colleagues over the summer, necessitated by the need to have plans in place for the coming academic year and the value of making those plans in collaboration with faculty while drawing on as much information as possible in a time of unprecedented change.
I know that these are challenging measures for so many people across the institution, affecting faculty, staff, and students alike. Many of you surely have questions, and we will do our best to provide answers during this period of extraordinary uncertainty. We will hold the first of the year’s town halls in September, and will continue to provide regular updates, including via this FAQ page. I am grateful for the collaborative spirit with which so many people across campus came together to help craft a set of policies that will ensure that UChicago remains the exceptional university that it is—now, and for the years to come.