February 12, 2004
Faculty Senate
Editor’s note: This is one of a series of articles by the chairs of Faculty Senate councils and committees. G. Ross Heath is chair of the Senate Committee on Planning and Budgeting and vice chair of the senate.
The administration of the University of Washington expends a great deal of effort on fiscal planning and on the allocation of resources through numerous budget decisions. The Senate Committee on Planning and Budgeting (SCPB – see http://www.washington.edu/faculty/facsenate/senate/planning.html for membership) is the faculty’s voice in the shared governance of these resources,
The SCPB meets weekly or biweekly throughout the academic year. Its agenda is partly self-generated (this year, for example, we have been assessing the implications of different funding models for the University), but is predominantly set by the fiscal decisions that must be made throughout the year. Examples of discussions driven by such decisions are:
- Tuition proposals for 2005. The purpose of tuition is to help support the instructional activities of the University. How to apportion these costs across various graduate and professional programs and out-of-state students involves many considerations, such as differential program costs, student demand, student access, value (in terms of future income potential) of a particular degree, societal needs, and management of student debt load, to name but a few. The answers are rarely simple. The fact that the Legislature sets maximum resident undergraduate tuition whereas the Regents set all other tuition categories adds to the complexity.
- Enrollment. How do we balance access pressures and state needs against limited state resources and growing costs? The Regents have ruled that we will not continue to enroll students beyond the state-funded level, yet the actual enrollment numbers depend on student behaviors (such as the number of credits taken per quarter or decisions to leave and return to university) over which the University has little control.
- Funding to fill vacant faculty positions. When a faculty member retires, 40 percent of the released salary is budgeted for five years to re-hire the faculty member on a part-time basis (this policy was adopted to encourage faculty to consider retirement when mandatory retirement was eliminated). Because of salary compression, the remaining 60 percent is not adequate, in many cases, to hire even an entry-level assistant professor, let alone the more senior faculty often sought to meet programmatic needs or take advantage of new opportunities. How should this be addressed (re-budget core funds, merge positions, delay new hires, …)?
- Performance contracts (or compacts). There is interest, in both the Legislature and the University, in developing more formal agreements between the two institutions to clarify the Legislature’s expectations of us and to provide us with a more predictable budget environment (in terms of funding per student, for example). The concept is attractive, but, as always, the devil is in the details. As faculty, we are concerned that any expectations recognize the full spectrum of educational contributions that we provide and that they relate to educational outcomes, rather than to operational metrics that may be easy to measure but have little relation to how well we are doing our jobs. Because one Legislature cannot make financial commitments for its successors, any contracts will have to be carefully crafted if they are to prevail long enough for us to derive any long-term benefits. This is likely to be a hot topic at least through the 2005 legislative session.
None of these issues and the many others discussed by SCPB have simple answers that necessarily work as times change. The continual give-and-take between the administration and the faculty, facilitated by the SCPB, is an essential factor in maintaining the values of the University and developing the best budgetary solutions within the complex financial environment in which we operate.
