Higher-education officials said Thursday there would be no increases in tuition or cuts in programs or faculty in the face of Gov. Angus King’s order to reduce the budgets of the University of Maine System, Maine Technical College System and Maine Maritime Academy by 2 percent for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

As part of his plan to ease the $180 million state shortfall, the governor Wednesday cut the UMS budget by $3.58 million, including $1 million from the Economic Improvement Fund, which is devoted to research and development; the MTCS budget by $835,000; and the MMA budget by $157,458.

University of Maine System Chancellor Joseph Westphal said budget tightening would come through deferred maintenance and leaving positions unfilled.

Maine Technical College System President John Fitzsimmons said he couldn’t offer details of how he plans to meet the cutback until next week after he meets with the campus presidents and with his board of trustees.

“We’re working real hard on a creative solution,” he said.

While he was generally stoic about the newly announced cuts, Westphal said the research and development hit was especially tough.

“For us it’s about a loss of $5 million in federal money,” he said, referring to matching funds. “So it’s fairly painful, particularly as both the state and the university system have really made research and development a real priority. So that’s one area we’re backpedaling on.”

Although he hopes to minimize the impact of this latest cut “as much as possible,” Westphal recalled that the UMaine System had the equivalent of a 5 percent budget cut in March when health care costs increased by 50 percent.

And last November, UMS, MTCS and MMA all were required by the governor to cut 2 percent from their budgets to meet declining state tax revenues.

Together all the cuts will leave their mark, said Westphal.

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do that isn’t in some way going to affect the quality of what we do – whether it’s because [we] can’t improve a lab or a class, or because classes are getting bigger, or because we can’t hire the best faculty or because we lose some of the best faculty because we can’t improve their salaries. All these things have an impact that eventually gets at the quality of what we want to do,” he said.

Deferred maintenance is “something we’ve been doing for two decades. That’s a pretty serious thing when you think about it. We’re talking about buildings and grounds, many of which are really outdated,” he said.