UI president optimistic about future

MOSCOW — Programming at the University of Idaho will not be significantly affected by a $500,000 budget cut passed down by the legislature, thanks in part to a surplus expected at the end of the year, UI President Scott Green said.

“It is a half a million dollars, and it’s a half million dollars that we’d like to have, obviously, but at the end of the day, the budget’s going to be pretty close to what we got the previous year,” Green said in a virtual news conference Monday. “We know we can work within that — we do plan to cover that reduction centrally so it’s not going to affect really any of our colleges (or) academic units.”

Last week, the Idaho legislature passed a higher education budget that slashed $2.5 million from university budgets in response to alleged “social justice programming” in state schools. The UI’s share of the cut was $500,000, which Green said would likely be offset by a surplus expected at the end of the year.

He said the final sum of excess funds is still uncertain but he expects it to exceed last year’s $900,000 surplus. However, Green reiterated comments made in recent months that he finds the debate in the capitol swirling around claims that state universities are indoctrinating students with left-leaning ideologies to be disappointing at best.

“It’s just not really the makeup of our student body or the makeup of our faculty ... like any organization, we’ve got faculty who represent a broad spectrum of beliefs,” Green said. “We’re a pretty moderate campus and a campus that works well with each other and are tolerant of each other’s views and the views of our students.”

Green said it’s important for higher education institutions to give students the opportunity to encounter a multitude of world views and provide space for them to think critically about opposing ideologies.

While it’s still early to make projections, Green also said fall enrollment metrics so far have been encouraging. He said overall applications and acceptances at the UI are higher than in years past, although — as with all four-year colleges in the state — applications from Idaho residents are substantially depressed.

That said, Green stressed that university officials say they believe the quality of the applicant pool has improved.

He also touted the UI’s efforts to remain open to in-person instruction during the pandemic, crediting the testing and monitoring of students that allowed them to address any potential outbreaks early.

“We were able to do that because we had a wonderful program in place that just helped us really identify early where we had a problem,” he said. “We were on pins and needles, to be honest, all year long, just waiting to follow the data wherever the data would take us and trying to ensure that we kept our community healthy.”

Jackson can be reached at (208) 883-4636, or by email to sjackson@dnews.com.