MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Professor Zingale wondered that as this information starts to roll out, he doesn’t know if there is a format that Mr. Bennett is thinking about as to how it gets shared, but it would be kind of interesting to begin thinking about a way that it can be talked about. For example, there might be these cultural or whole institution concepts that flow from this but then it might be interesting to also see things that are emerging that are horizontal patterns and then also things that might be emerging that are more vertically integrated patterns and that might speak or at least be helpful for us to look at our own colleges to see how what we are learning from other colleges might relate to.

Dr. Sridhar stated that this will be discussed in two parts. One, the college budgeting thing that Professor Zingale is referring to is quite a different process than the one that Professor Ray explained. It is similar but there are fundamental differences in terms of how they are structured. In the administrative institutional support costs project, the idea is to go through and take a deep dive and say how can we do things better to cut operation costs Dr. Sridhar noted that with the college budgeting, it is different in terms of saying, are we investing resources, resources that we are already investing and continuing to invest, are we investing that in the best ways so that they are pointed in the right direction to what the college wants to have in terms of its strategic plan. He added that every college has a strategic plan. Every college has goals for five years, etc. so the question there is, “Are these resources being invested in the right way in order to achieve these goals?” What Professor Zingale already suggested, would automatically happen with that process.” He noted that the second part of that is with the horizontals that Professor Zingale can see across these. There is in fact a synthesis project that will occur with all of these things and that will occur after the individual projects themselves are completed. The idea of the synthesis is exactly what Professor Zingale suggested which is to look at all of these projects, all of these sixteen or eighteen different projects going on, and pull things together so that we, as a university, can operate in a fundamentally different manner than we have been. Dr. Sridhar commented, “Maybe we will be different, maybe we will just be like we have been doing things right all along but we will find out.”

Professor Ray stated that this is something we have talked about a lot at the beginning and we emphasized that it has gotten a little bit lost in the shuffle. It has been a ton of work to just do this but at some point it will make sense probably for the bigger team to talk about how to do a series of presentations about what happened. We will hear about them but the budget impact is really kind of secondary. The budgeting sort of phrases them and makes them salient for one reason or another but then those decision- making processes will take place on their own. Some stuff will just be pure behind the scenes stuff that are not that interesting but the overall process can be important at some point for us to take stock in and it explains what is happening and how we are going to do this on a foregoing basis. He added that we should talk about it.

- VIII. Report of the President of the University

President Ronald Berkman said he wanted to make everyone aware, since we were talking about this data issue and this transparency issue, he doesn’t know how many