Budget Forum
It's hard to know what to say. Attendance was down from the earlier budget forum. I will say though that even the numbers who were at the earlier forum would have looked smaller in ARTS 240 since it holds over 200 people. Also, this forum was only formally, officially announced on the Monday of Thanksgiving Week and the materials only came up a day or two later. I personally didn't expect many people would spend their holidays poring over the website.
Still, the people who came were interested in finding out more. And, I'm glad we are finally getting out more information (even at a late date) so that people can focus more closely on what's going on.
Questions ranged from wanting to know more about how targets are set, to concern about the 20:1 allocation to AA to hire faculty (and do everything else); to continuing desire to know more about establishing a fund for staff in-range progressions and classifications. All good questions.
As a member of UBC, I'm not sure what my role is. I think the handouts honestly depicted where the money goes. And the handouts clearly show how much money we don't have and likely need to do the things we want to do. It was especially helpful to get the handout that showed the staffing patterns in the university. If you want to see what was handed out at the forum, the documents are still available here.
I'm glad we're having these forums because I think it's important for the University Executive Council (and UBC, although we only make recommendations) to be able to explain themselves in clear language to the rest of the community. I also think it's important because when I hear the questions people ask, it reassures me that the questions that I and the other faculty on UBC ask are reasonable and not completely off the wall. I do sometimes feel that being on UBC is one of those through the lookinglass experiences where the normal rules of language and logic just don't hold.
Anyway, UBC actually has a fairly limited brief, especially when it seems to me that the major observation from looking at all the budget documents is that we don't have enough money to do the things we'd like to do (if we knew what those were).
There are lots of responses to the observation that there just isn't enough money and isn't going to be enough money to grow the programs and services we want to grow if we rely solely on Chancellor's Office targets that are in the 2.5% - 3% range. If there isn't enough money coming from that source (and I know some of you are convinced there is and I'd like to talk more to you about that --- call or email me) then there are some things we have to look at:
1) Enrollments targets. Everyone, including the Administration would like to see our official targets increased so that we get full funding for all extra students in the year they arrive on campus (providing we meet target). As the President indicated, the process by which official targets are set is a very politicized one both in Long Beach and in Sacramento. The take-away message from the forum was that we have to look at increasing targets unofficially to bring in extra money. This means we only get the student fees (not state general fund money) for the students above the official target.
If we are going to do this and it's something faculty need to be involved with the administration in deciding on, then there are going to have to be some understanding about how the extra fee money is used. In some respects this is the deal that faculty at the University of Maryland recently struck -- not so much the target part as the agreement to increase SFR (for that is the bottom line about what taking extra students over target without full funding means) because it promised increased funding for academics and student learning while providing for cost containment in the rest of the university.
It's something we need to start talking about because believe me, it is not just 'coming' as a partial 'solution' to our money problems, it's already here (in case you hadn't noticed) and without the commitments that UM faculty got. There is also LOTS of risk here. On the one hand, I guess you could argue that if CSUSM shows Charlie that we can consistently set and meet targets above the official one, he'll see reason and adjust our official targets (and therefore our funding) to reflect that. But someone else (me for instance) might say, well yea, but if we continue to show that we are willing to overwork and underpay ourselves by setting unofficial, higher targets, why wouldn't the system just continue to let us do that since it then doesn't cost them extra money. We play that dangerous game with the Chancellor's Office (and risk being chumps) and as many of you know the CSU plays that dangerous game with the Legislature and Governor since the system now has about 8,000 overtarget, unfunded undergraduates in it. I wish Charlie and the CSU all the best in trying to get fully funded for a further 1% enrollment increase (up from 2.5% to 3.5%), but I keep thinking that we are going to get played for chumps at the state level.
2) External Money. Ok, it's not going to solve everything but honestly, we need some of this sooner and at a pace closer to the CSU 'recommendation' of augmentating state appropriations by 10% a year. In our case that's about 9.8 million/year. Maybe that's asking too much right now, but we ought to be moving more swiftly towards that goal.
3) Internal Reallocation to address strategic priorities. I don't want to say too much about this because it's the part I know the least about since UBC doesn't deal with examining how people spent previous year's allocations. The Senate Executive Committee has been told that at the Executive Council these discussions have occured. I hope so. Sometimes I think though that we even need to look at the expenditures at what is often called the 'chump change' 'dust-bunny money' or what my friends at DoD call 'decimal dust' level. This is what I'm talking about: [full disclosure -- what follows makes me feel like Andy Rooney and like I ought to preface it with 'don't you just hate it when . . . . ] -- color copies --- am I the only one who wonders why every division except AA seems to freely hand out color copies at meetings ; Blackberries -- who is paying for all the blackberries and service contracts for all the blackberries that every level 4 and above administrator seems to carry and check incessantly when you are in meetings with them ------------- do we all really need to be that connected? really? honestly? I'm sure you can think of other examples of what looks like cavalier use of precious resources, ie., money --- like the rate at which administrators traipse off to meetings in Long Beach. Is it really necessary? Would it really harm the campus is you stayed home for one out of every 3 meetings? etc.
Chargebacks -- the handouts at the Budget forum just show academic year allocations. They don't show how, for what purposes and at what rate money changes hands inside the university. I have no reason to think anything funny is going on here, but shouldn't we be talking about it. BTW a good explaination of chargebacks appears here [subscription required]
4) Staffing Levels -- Ok, one thing that the charts on staffing show is that there are fewer than 10 employees at CSUSM for every MPP. 11% of our full time employees (not including students) are MPPs. There are 85 of them. Again, I don't know how legitimate or not they all are and I'm used to the 'economies of scale argument' ---- it's the one time when people in the administration still say we are a 'small' university, when they are trying to explain why we need so many administrators relative to the rest of the staff. But if we have a 9+:1 MPP/staff&faculty ratio and a 24:1 Student/Faculty Ratio, might not we want to ask why and ask whether or not that's a good thing. I know we have lost some directors and other MPPs since last year, but in January 2007 there were about the same number of MPPs 80+ and about half of them made over $100,000/year not including benefits. I'm no math whiz but right there and if you do count benefits that probably 5-6 million dollars in salary (not to mention support, travel ,etc) -- which is about 5-6% of the entire university budget. And of course this doesn't even count the amount of faculty time that is also spent in administrative and quasi-administrative activities (dept. chairs, directors, etc.) ------ maybe some of it needs talking about.
Anyway, you get my drift. We ought to be looking not only at increasing the money we have by increasing the number of students but also at all the other aspects of how we spend money here.
After all, it's not just how much we have, it's also what we do with it.