MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

comes up in sort of bits and pieces. He thought that he would give Senate a quick overview of why we are doing this and what we are doing and then he will talk about the piece that he is involved in.

Professor Ray reported that the University is aware that we are period of uncertainty regarding enrollment. The Enrollment Task Force’s results look like enrollment is unlikely to go up substantially or at all over the long term and may actually go down. Then combined with that we have known for a very long time including in several periods where we had to address potential cuts, that the way we budget isn’t ideal. It is not necessarily the most transparent because we tend to budget historically. We tend to, at least for the goal categories and for departments and colleges, have these categories and then the Budget Office does an excellent job every year of trying to make sure that we conservatively estimate what those big categories will be and then ultimately not over spend. We have done a really good job of that even through periods of cuts, but the net result is that there is a lack of transparency because we just fit things in and we basically live on or we figure how to make it all work through a combination of carry-over vacancy savings and again, very conservative budgeting that allows us to have the flexibility to move things around when we need to.

So, 2020 is attempting to address some combination of those two things. Professor Ray noted the most immediate idea is that, given conservative enrollment projections and the fact that the State has imposed a freeze on undergraduate tuition increases, we need to potentially fill some size of a hole and exactly what that is, it is still under development but we have heard the numbers from Tim Long. It is not a small number in the aggregate but it is not accurate. He noted that it is not a crisis and we are trying to plan ahead and plan smart and, on top of that, take advantage of this opportunity to think through how we are budgeting and are there ways that we can do things a lot smarter. He stated that this is being done across the university but the emphasis is not in the colleges – the college piece is a follow-up to program prioritization. The colleges are undergoing something similar in trying to restructure the way they budget and make it more transparent. But, there isn’t the same detail process in part because it doesn’t make sense. So the process he is describing is a process for the administrative and institutional support units. Professor Ray said that essentially two things are being done. We are doing a deep dive bottom-up analysis unit by unit of the budgets. So, taking a scrutinizing look at the budget it and then collaboratively working with everybody involved in the unit to ask, let’s think about what we do in this unit; how do we do it, and is there a way to do it smart. We look at every expenditure and ask, “Why are we spending money this way? Are there smarter ways to spend the money?” Professor Ray noted that as part of that process, there is a big idea generation within it. There is always, at some point even after that detailed analysis or before it, some discussion of well, “Are there some obvious things we are doing that either don’t make sense from a procedural policy standpoint or don’t make sense from a budget standpoint? Those ideas are then being looked at and gone through one by one. Ultimately, there is an endpoint where all of those ideas including the bottom-up ones and the big ideas, where the decision is made that either these make sense and let’s do them right away as quickly as possible or they need more discussion or we need to figure out exactly how to do this or whether it makes