ITHACA, NY (607NewsNow) — Cornell is making budget cuts. 

In a statement, President Michael Kotlikoff cites significant legal expenses, increases in employment costs, and reduced government funding as some reasons for slicing budgets across multiple campuses, including in Ithaca. “Urgent action is necessary, both to reduce costs immediately and to correct our course over time — achieving an institutional structure that enables us to balance our budgets over the long term,” Kotlikoff stated.

“Our work toward this goal will progress in several phases, beginning with the immediate budget reductions already underway for the current fiscal year across our Ithaca, Cornell AgriTech, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Cornell Tech campuses. Hiring on all campuses remains restricted indefinitely, with rare exceptions from campus-based position control committees,” Kotlikoff added.

The next step involves a reimagining of operations. “The second step in this process requires that we reimagine our university-wide operations and permanently reduce costs across our campuses, colleges, and units. Currently, we are engaged in an institutional analysis of our entire budgetary structure, seeking ways to control expenses by finding new efficiencies and reducing duplication of work. Cornell’s decentralized structure is part of our tradition, but a source of significant administrative inefficiencies; part of our task is identifying opportunities to scale and regularize our academic support systems across units with unique characteristics and needs without compromising our institutional excellence. This means centralizing some functions that are duplicated in colleges and units, while retaining those components that are necessary,” Kotlikoff said.

Kotlikoff says the planning and analysis should be completed this fall, with a ‘phased implementation’ starting later this year and into 2026.