The University of Maryland, Baltimore has suspended plans to open a school of public health this fall, noting budget concerns, and will reconsider its options in six months, officials said last night.
In an e-mail to faculty yesterday afternoon, UMB President David J. Ramsay said that anticipated budget cuts to Maryland's higher education funding forced him to temporarily shelve plans for the new school, which was to be spun off from the downtown graduate campus' medical school.
In an interview last night, University System of Maryland Chancellor William E. Kirwan said that Ramsay told him yesterday morning that unsuccessful negotiations with a prospective new dean of public health were part of the reason for halting the school's launch.
"He had been in negotiation with an individual to become the dean, and when those negotiations fell through, he just decided that given that we are expecting a cut in our budget this year ... he would just not resurrect the search at this time and wait to see what the budgets will look like in six months," Kirwan said.
Ramsay, in a separate interview, said he was "determined" to launch the school but was taking a "wait-and-see approach" about when.
"I have not given up my commitment to public health," he wrote in his e-mail to faculty, adding, "At this time, however, the initial investments needed to open a first-rate school may not be available."
When the Board of Regents approved the school in June last year, officials said it would have a different mission from that of the internationally known Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University. The UMB school, they said, would focus on the mounting public health needs of Marylanders.
Last month, the regents approved the formation of another state-funded public health school, this one at the University of Maryland, College Park. Kirwan and Ramsay said yesterday that UMB's decision to suspend its school was unrelated to the planned school in College Park, which Kirwan said was "moving ahead at full speed."
Ramsay pointed to an anticipated structural deficit in the state's budget - with projected expenses outweighing projected revenues - as a crisis that could affect other Maryland colleges as well. The estimated $1.4 billion shortfall in the state budget "is real, and unless addressed, and very quickly, is likely to have unpleasant ramifications for the state's public higher education institutions," Ramsay wrote.
