MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

people are aware of the state Treasurer’s initiative which has already begun to have a state checkbook. This initiative would require every agency now including every public university and this is being pushed aggressively and many agencies already are on board and have signed up to provide data to the Treasurer’s Office chronicling every single expenditure of the university in every single category, including every faculty members’ paycheck, every faculty members’ extra compensation, every faculty members’ summer expenses, every expenditure on soft water, mana, gold, whatever the university spends dollars on and writes from a state checkbook that would now become public information on the Treasurer’s check. He noted that people can go on line now and check it out. If you want to know how many vehicles were bought from Ganley by state agencies, you can go on line and look at Ganley. It is an amazing amount of data whose utility he does not quite understand. President Berkman stated that the Treasurer has turned his attention to state universities. President Berkman stated that he would have to say that we have not been one of the universities that has stepped forward and said, “Sign us up” although there is significant pressure. He noted that we came to a good resolution if it holds that four universities would act as pilots in this effort and those four universities would go through a process with the Treasurer’s Office of going and discerning what information can be made public, what is covered by FERPA, what is covered by HIPPA, what was covered by Buckley, what information cannot be made publicly available, and to determine what the cost involved in downloading this amazingly large data-set into another amazingly large data-set would cost each respective university. This is real. President Berkman reported that he was in Columbus yesterday. He said that he has been so lucky to make very frequent trips to Columbus now. Indeed, the pressure from the Treasurer’s Office really kind of put the other universities sort of on the witness stand about why we are not willing to make this information available. This is different than the agreement we thought we had with the Treasurer’s Office in which the four universities would be treated as a pilot. President Berkman invited everyone to go to the Treasurer’s website and acquire all of the information about how much DOT spent on fertilizer, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and you will be a bad citizen as a result. But, this is going on and it is real. President Berkman said that he fears the time, the energy, and the complications involved in us having to do this, but it is not impossible and at the end of the day we will have to do this.

President Berkman stated that he is trying to give everyone a thirty thousand foot view. There was a recent IUC meeting in Columbus. Right now there is a political vacuum in Columbus. There is no shortage of vacuum cleaners in Columbus who would like to use this opportunity to, including with the capital budget, play a stronger more determined role. And, there is a growing sentiment that the Governor’s decision to create the Capital Budget Commission with university presidents, and he is a member of the Commission, was not consistent with the duties and responsibilities given to the legislature. Two things are going on simultaneously: we are trying to resolve a pretty significant conflict with the two-year institutions concerning the respective share of the four-year institutions and the two-year institutions would get the plug number which is now $405 million which they decided arbitrarily as a group to raise to $455 million. There is a very significant rift, more than he has ever seen a significant rift in terms of what the respective share should be. He added that there is no formula for respective