AKRON, Ohio -- The University of Akron offered a buy-out to about 47 percent of faculty on Monday in an effort to balance its budget.

Taking a “voluntary separation or retirement" offer would pay a faculty member 100 percent of 2019-20 base pay, split into two installments. The employee would leave the university on May 31, 2020. The first payment would come on July 2020, the second in January of 2021.

Choosing to leave the university would not affect retirement plans.

The offer is to full-time permanent (non-visiting) faculty who are not in what the university calls a “Strategic Investment Area.” No law school, polymer science, or engineering faculty can take the offer. UA spokesman Wayne Hill wrote in an email about 47 percent of faculty, or 340 people, are eligible.

See the full “Strategic Investment Area” list at the bottom of this post.

The offer is the latest attempt to slim UA’s budget. The university expects it needs to make about $15 million in cuts.

“We designed this VSRP to ensure that areas of strategic investment at the university will continue to have the needed faculty members to achieve the investment goals,” UA chief financial officer Nathan Mortimer said in a news release. "For those who are eligible for the VSRP, this offering may enable them to take their career in a different direction or to retire, depending on their personal situation.”

Interim President John Green announced last week that the university would put reorganization efforts on hold after delivering a proposal the week before. The proposal listed no involuntary faculty cuts.

Beginning reorganization talks would start again, Green wrote in a letter last week, if faculty and staff did not make significant progress on a list of goals. Those goals included new programs in “areas of strength” like polymers, corrosion, biomimicry and cybersecurity, decreasing the amount of money used to subsidize research from the general fund and making it easier to work across departments and colleges.

Eligible faculty members will be contacted by mail by April 1, 2019, and will have until May 31, 2019, to decide, according to a university release.

There is no target number for the amount of faculty that need to take the offer, Hill wrote, and there are no plans for layoffs if a number of faculty do not take the plan.