MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

in play as well. And, then that other piece, the more strategic piece he talked about earlier in terms of changes in the way we do budgets, they are just planning to try to do that and this will be the first cut in implementing it and then the idea is that this is how we budget on a unit basis and at the university level so that we are able to plug in this kind of process where we are looking for cuts if we need to look for cuts. He stated that we are managing the budget well ahead of time and in a strategic and more transparent way.

Dr. Zingale asked Professor Ray if it is too early to start asking if they are seeing any patterns. Professor Ray replied that it is probably not too early although he is the wrong person to ask that question. He noted, just to clarify what he did, he participated extensively in the Student Affairs pilot and so he got to see how the deep dive works and what it was going to look like. One, it did make a lot of sense for him to try to hit every unit. He stated that he is not involved in that kind of unit by unit analysis except that when Jim Bennett and Bonnie Kalnasy and he meet. They discuss things that come up. He is heavily involved now in the cross-cutting ones and those tend to be discreet, sometimes connected but not tightly connected. He noted that there might be the case that there are patterns emerging from the unit analysis and we can find that out.

Mr. Bennett stated that one that was described to him and is pretty broadly-based is the degree to which we serve our students so well that there are non-consequences for behaviors that are not helpful, etc. For example, financial aid: information on time, changing classes and so we bend over backwards to knock at rules and disciplines. The costs of this are really quite extraordinary in terms of staffing requirements and inefficient work processes where we have hunches that regularly occur at certain times at the school so we have policy decision as to whether we want to move ourselves as an institution to be more disciplined. He noted for example, we have charges for not paying bills and we do not enforce them. He noticed from parking tickets through bills that occur, we have a limit of $1,000. A student can come back if they are $1,000 in debt and the financial aid only covers by federal regulation $200 so there are some of our colleagues saying, “We will be much better off if we went to $200.” The reason is we then have bad debts which go right into the operating budget to the tune of $3 million per year. Mr. Bennett noted that these are the kinds of things that we are handling. So there is a very long list of practices that cause staffing, that cause disrupting the operating system and their choice is whether you want to tackle those and move into the program and tighten it up. He commented that there are lots and lots of little things that were done over time that are not so necessary now or can be stopped or done less frequently. We just need take a hard look at things that we don’t need to do anymore and if you accumulate them they have a cost including everything from little things to some interesting patterns in terms of how they run the institution. Mr. Bennett noted that there will probably be a thousand ideas; in the pilot there were sixty-five and when we do the whole university, there will probably be a thousand little ones – $1,000, $20,000, $25,000, etc. and it will range all the way up to some fairly big ones which are one-time decisions and there are ones in between which are cultural ones that we need to work on.