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Senate
Leader Sees Broader Budget Issues
Though most of the debate about the campus's financial situation has been confined to Chancellor David Scott's handling of the matter, the chair of the Faculty Senate's Rules Committee says the issue extends far beyond Amherst. Speaking at the March 9 senate meeting, professor Joseph Larson asked faculty to enlarge the budget debate to pay particular attention to the President's Office and Board of Trustees. "I'm concerned that there's been little attention to the cast of characters outside the campus," he said. He requested that the faculty review the Rules Committee's draft of a special report concerning factors affecting the Amherst campus's budget, which includes recommendations to the president and trustees, and send written feedback to the Faculty Senate Office. "The Rules Committee is planning to put these recommendations to the Senate for a vote," he said later. "There are a number of things that reasonable people can debate about the chancellor's choices of how to play the cards that he's been dealt, but if anyone feels we've been allocated sufficient resources on this campus - that's not true. So you have to look at the President's Office and the trustees. And you have to look at what they've requested of the Legislature, the decisions they make in allocating money to the different campuses, and you have to look at the initiatives that they come up with that the campuses are taxed to support." The purpose of the report, according to the draft, is to "place the current debate on the fiscal status of the campus within the context of the overall University budget" and "specifically to include the President's Office and the Board of Trustees." Larson said that Scott has been the only chancellor in the system who publicly and consistently states at board and systemwide meetings that new funding is required. "The chancellor has been saying all along, since shortly after his arrival, that the University budget as a whole grows each year roughly 6 percent and the state budget never meets that in any consistent fashion," Larson said. "We're going to have to have another major reduction in faculty positions in order to keep the core going, and the problem is: he's been right. None of us wanted to hear that message." Larson said several Rules Committee members regularly attend trustee meetings and other sessions with systemwide administrators and have spoken with many faculty and staff on this campus and representatives from other campuses. "We look pretty carefully at initiatives coming out of the President's Office. We think that it's important that this issue be looked at much more comprehensively." In other senate business, Scott and Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance Paul Page responded to questions about the nature and role of the University's financial cushion. Page explained that the financial cushion is not a central pot of money or fiscal reserve. "It is a snapshot taken at the close of the fiscal year," he said. "It shows liquidity. All of the funds are in accounts on campus; very little is held centrally." Page said examples of money that remains in accounts at the end of the fiscal year are Physical Plant's funds for summer work and the money Housing Services needs to sustain itself between the end of the fiscal year and its next influx of revenue, which it receives from students in September and October. "The financial cushion is a ratio of unrestricted monies: the expendable fund balance as a percentage of the previous year's expenditures," he said. It doesn't include state appropriations which are "use or lose." "The trustees are very concerned with the financial condition of the institution," Page said. "The fund balance, the cushion, is an indication of financial health." Scott said the University's current cushion is around 12 percent but that peer institutions tend to have cushions between 23 and 26 percent and that the trustees' goal is to reach at least 17 percent. Graduate Employee Organization president James Shaw asked why, given that one function of the cushion is to see the University through bumps in the financial road, the campus shouldn't dip into the funds next year in order to prevent the need for budget cuts in the academic area. Scott replied that the fund is meant to cover unforeseen emergencies. "It is not meant to cover a planned, anticipated shortfall of money," he said. In times when you use monies from the cushion, he said, "you have to have a cast-iron plan on how you are going to replenish it soon." Massachusetts Society of Professors president Jane Giacobbe announced
that a closed assembly of the union on March 30 will include a
discussion of the faculty response to the budget situation, and
she urged faculty to consider ways to take the budget issues to
the Legislature. |
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