The University System of New Hampshire (USNH), which oversees all three N.H. public four-year higher education institutions including KSC, is facing a cut of 15 percent or roughly $26 million compared to the previous biennial state budget cycle.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed the budget for fiscal years 2026-27 into law on Friday, June 27, after much deliberation and disagreement between the senate and the house, according to an all-campus address delivered by KSC President Melinda Treadwell on Monday, July 7.
The state will appropriate $87 million for FY26 and $77 million for FY27, according to a June 30 email from Treadwell to all KSC faculty and staff. The USNH Board of Trustees approved FY26 budgets built around Ayotte’s original recommendations and tasked each campus with adjusting to the funding cut.
USNH Chancellor Cathy Provencher said the board had initially aimed to reach an operating margin of one percent, or about nine million dollars. The budget the board approved instead had an operating margin of roughly half a percent, or about five million dollars.
Keene State’s response
“[I] don’t think our future is bleak,” Treadwell said. “I believe that we are in an industry right now that is under attack, and we are needed now more than ever as a public institution and specifically a public institution committed to access and to broadly educating our students to adapt through the liberal arts core that we deliver.”
Treadwell presented measures the college administration is preparing to take to reduce costs, increase market access and overall adapt to the decreased state appropriations over the course of the next two fiscal years.
One such measure is to make reductions to departmental budgets in areas including professional services, discretionary supplies, student labor, professional enhancement, travel savings, postage, non-capital equipment, maintenance and repairs. Treadwell emphasized none of these items will be reduced below their actual amounts from FY25.
“These are places that don’t affect directly the student experience or their student engagement places, and these again are not austere cuts,” Treadwell said. “We’re trying to make very strategic measured cuts to constrain spending.”
Another cost reduction measure Treadwell outlined was a pay reduction for all members of the KSC cabinet, which includes herself and all of the college’s vice presidents.
“We are ahead of projection on continuing students and our grad student enrollment is strong, actually outpacing our early projection,” Treadwell said. “If our revenue comes in higher, that’s going to help us cushion as we go through next year, but we don’t know that … Every vice president and I are going to experience a 10 to 25 percent compensation cut in this budget year. Full stop. It’s necessary, and you lead by example and so we’re leading.”
Treadwell also explained continuing efforts to reduce compensation costs by introducing a faculty retirement incentive program similar to the one rolled out in spring of 2024. In the previous program, the college looked to have ten tenure-track and clinical faculty members over the age of 55 volunteer for retirement and hired seven new faculty back, according to previous Equinox reporting. Treadwell also said the college may look to roll out a similar program for staff members, pending approval from the USNH board of trustees.
USNH going forward
Treadwell also presented several system-level organizational proposals she discussed with administration from all three USNH institutions, USNH administrators and the system’s board of trustees. The goal of each proposal would be to eliminate administrative costs. These distinct proposals included:
- Integrating USNH with the Community College System of New Hampshire (CCSNH)
- Integrating all three USNH schools into one institution under the banner of the University of New Hampshire (UNH)
- Integrating only KSC and Plymouth State University (PSU) to accompany UNH in a two-institution system
- Dissolving the university system altogether and having each institution operate independently
Treadwell announced none of these proposals will be implemented; instead, KSC will persist with its existing brand identity as a part of the three-institution system.
“The fact that our enrollment and our retention is climbing at Keene, [students are] telling all of us that they are having the experience they expected … they’re feeling a sense of community, a sense of opportunity and breadth of pursuits and supports,” Treadwell said in an interview with The Equinox. “Those are really important to not lose if we suddenly make a pivot where an identity which we’ve worked hard to forge gets lost because we don’t carefully figure out how to communicate what it is that we’re doing and how that structure may or may not impact the students’ experience.”
Provencher said the considered proposals were part of the presidents’ collective task of envisioning the next five or so years for USNH, and ultimately the least disruptive path was chosen as the right one.
“There are no plans to integrate the university system with the community college system or integrate [PSU] and [KSC] with the community college system. Nothing like that,” Provencher said. “It was put on the table because it’s an option, but that is not the plan forward with all the difficult decisions that we need to make going forward and to ensure that we can continue to deliver on our mission to our students and to our state. … All other options, I won’t say they’re completely off the table for well into the future, but that’s not where we need to start out of the gate.”
Treadwell added that USNH will continue to lean in on a web of shared services, naming the enterprise resource system Workday, which was rolled out during the 2024/25 winter break, as a major example. She said the cut from the state is a message from the legislature that USNH needs to prove its worth as a system, and she believes KSC is in a good position to prove its worth as the liberal arts institution within USNH.
CCSNH check-in
However, Treadwell specified that integration with CCSNH would be Plan A right now if the community college system and the legislature had both been interested in going forth with it.
“[CCSNH] did quite well in the last legislative cycle; they’re not looking to hook their wagon to [USNH] at this moment, not because they don’t believe that this is a part of what we should be doing to support post-secondary education and educational achievement for the citizens of New Hampshire and the region, but because it’s a really difficult moment politically because four-year institutions are in the crosshairs of reduction to Pell [grants],” Treadwell said in her all-campus address.
She added individuals who receive Pell grants will receive up to $2000 less in awards, impacting almost 30 percent of KSC students.
“There are big changes coming with regard to four-year institutions and the level of investment,” Treadwell said.
CCSNH Chancellor Mark Rubinstein described the community college system’s state allocations as roughly flat with the previous biennium at about $137 million, slightly below what the system requested. Rubinstein affirmed a continued collaboration between the two systems.
“We’ve been working collaboratively for a number of years and that work is going to continue to try and figure out how we can be good partners for the students that we both serve and for the state that we both serve,” Rubinstein said.
Keene Democratic N.H. House Representative and KSC Professor of History Nick Germana said he believes the reason Republicans advocated to level fund CCSNH while handing down cuts to USNH is because of a focus on two-year technical education that leads directly to the workforce.
“There is an ideological agenda that drives the Republican party here in New Hampshire and the Republican party nationally that sees higher education as an enemy and as something that needs to be targeted and attacked,” Germana said. “The community college system is an incredibly important system and I certainly think that they deserve the funding they had. But Republican legislators in particular will see the community college system in terms of job training, workforce training and that they understand the value of … It doesn’t carry the same kind of anti-intellectual stigma that four-year colleges do.”
A look inside the legislative process
Germana said at the beginning of the year the state was facing a gap of at least $700 million between Ayotte’s overall proposed budget and the revenues the state brought in. He pointed to the expanded funding of the Education Freedom Account (EFA) voucher program as a leading example of excessive and unnecessary funding that was causing issues, such as a cut to USNH.
EFA vouchers provide taxpayer funding to parents who wish to send their children to private, religious or home schools, according to The Keene Sentinel. Income eligibility requirements for vouchers were eliminated earlier this year.
“The result is huge cuts to programs that working class communities in the state need, and also obviously one of those cuts is a 15 percent or so cut to the university system, which is going to be pushed down onto students in the form, probably of higher tuition, higher fees and more student debt,” Germana said.
KSC tuition is set to increase by 2.5 percent going into the coming school year, according to previous Equinox reporting. This increase came after five years of no changes to tuition.
DEI rollback at USNH schools
Germana also spoke about a provision attached to the new state budget that prohibits public higher education institutions from engaging in practices related to diversity, equity and inclusion, with non-compliance bringing the risk of losing state funding. He said the provision is another example of Republicans fighting an ideological culture war.
“Ultimately, I’m convinced it’s unconstitutional and it’s not going to stand up in court,” Germana said. “But certainly at this time, when we are looking at these cuts to USNH funding right now, we do have to take a look at our curriculum and we have to take a look at our the programs that we have on campus that are meant to create diversity and inclusion and ask ourselves what the consequences of this would be.”
Germana said he is not concerned about how the provision may affect his curriculum as a history professor, but that the larger-scale impact is something to be wary of.
“I stand by the principle of academic freedom. I have the right to teach history as I understand it and I can support the way that I teach history with the scholarship in the field, and so I’m going to continue to do that,” Germana said. “What is more disconcerting for institutions like Keene State is … what kind of programs do we have that are designed to create a diverse and inclusive community for our students? We’re a very white campus and we would very much like to have a campus that is more culturally diverse.”
Treadwell addressed the provision in the all-campus meeting, saying the college will be reviewing diversity-related efforts and programming while maintaining a commitment to access and welcoming for students of multiple identities.
Most recently, the college paused several pages on its website related to diversity, with all former links redirecting to a scrubbed version of the “Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” page, as reported by The Keene Sentinel. In the email to all college faculty and staff, Treadwell stated college administration is working with USNH General Counsel’s Office to ensure the institution is compliant with the law.
“We’re not going to stop supporting our students. We need to be careful about how we communicate about what we’re doing and we need to be honest and of high integrity in the ways that we’re working,” Treadwell said at the all-campus meeting. “But frankly, we work for all of our students now and we know our students have multiple identities and so I need to help the legislature and the state department of education understand we are not doing anything illegal at this institution.”
Rochester Republican N.H. Senate Finance Committee Chair James Gray, Ayotte and Ayotte’s Director of Communications Caroline Hakes all did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Charlotte King can be contacted at
cking@kscequinox.com
This article was updated on July 22, 2025, to include an interview with USNH Chancellor Cathy Provencher.
