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There are four empty seats on the University of Minnesota Board of Regents that will get filled soon by Gov. Tim Walz, who has been interviewing candidates this week for the coveted slots.
It’s not clear how many of the more than two dozen applicants scored interviews with Walz or what kind of leaders he is seeking for the governing board at the state’s land-grant university. The DFL governor could make his picks any day. The slots are usually filled by the Legislature during a joint convention, but one never got off the ground this year.
The reinforcements come at a moment of incredible change and challenge in higher education, and the university itself.
"The budget that my team and I are proposing is not an easy one, and these are not easy times,” University of Minnesota President Rebecca Cunningham said at a June Board of Regents meeting.
In that meeting, the board approved the budget, which cut seven percent of the university system budget and increased tuition in the Twin Cities for out of state students by 7.5 percent.
"Perhaps I'll get to be your president in a year where there's lots of extra money going around from the state and federal government,” she said. “But this was not that year. It will involve a reduction in workforce over time. It will also involve a reduction, as we heard yesterday, from some programs that we know many people cherish and love. And these are the difficult decisions that need to be made in this time."
These are very difficult times for higher education institutions — public and private.
Schools face large cuts in federal research money. Recruitment of international students is tougher. State aid is crunched. Athletics departments, under a recent court decision, must pay some student athletes. And schools are under scrutiny from the federal government over efforts to diversify campuses and over protests of the Israel and Hamas war.
In other words, a mountain of problems await the four new regents — one third of the overall board.
Former Regent David McMillan said it's a much different landscape than when he was there from 2011 to 2022.
"We were having conversations with them as a board about the importance of finding more (National Institutes of Health) money, more (National Science Foundation) money, growing our research stature,” he said.
McMillan said the board will now require a different mindset.
"Today, that conversation isn't about growing. It's probably more about, how do we just preserve what we have and not get beaten up here too much and find ourselves in a world where they're doing even more laying off of researchers and staff than they've probably already had to do,” he said.
As of late May, the University had lost 72 federal research awards, around $22 million dollars, across the grants from the National Institutions of Health, National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The university says it expects to lose 10 to 30 percent of its federal funding. The school took in more than $600 million in federal research funding last fiscal year.
State funding for the university stayed flat in Minnesota's new budget. School officials say that's about a 3.5 percent decrease when adjusted for inflation.
And international student enrollment in Minnesota could fall by about 15 percent, according to NAFSA, a nonprofit also referred to as the Association of International Educators. Losing the higher tuition those students pay will sting. It's similar to a drop in new international student enrollment nationwide.
"Obviously they're going to have to increase enrollment somehow,” said Michael Hsu, a regent from 2015 to 2021. He says the university could gain enrollment by revising admission requirements or reopen its General College, which closed in 2005.
"The university could always go back to that and make it easier for people to get into the university. Yeah. So those are financial trade offs that they could always make,” he said.
But Hsu says there are other pressing issues. That includes the fate of the university's agreements with Fairview Health System due to expire after 2026. It's a key link for the university's medical programs.
"The Fairview runway is getting shorter every day," he said.
Hsu and McMillan both said new regents should quickly dive into homework on all these issues and get acquainted with key university players. Still, they said it’s a tough moment for anyone taking on the role.
"It's very difficult. It's unprecedented,” Hsu said. “I mean, the whole college higher education system is on its head right now because of what's going on nationally."
The new members are expected to take their spots when the Board of Regents holds its next meeting in October.
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