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The Faculty and the Budget
By Mary Burgan
If there is one activity that higher education administrations guard jealously from faculty review, it is the budget. A few enlightened college and university administrations are willing to open the budget for faculty discussion; they actually invite those faculty members with fiscal expertise—from the economics department or the business school, for example—to aid them in adding things up and making decisions. But most administrations prefer to shield the budget and the process of making it from the inexpert, prying, and trouble-making eyes of faculty.
In an era of open records, many budget numbers have become available, but interested citizens of the academy need to know how to persevere in getting them. Salaries of the five highest-paid employees at private institutions are required to be filed by law on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) "990" forms, which can now be scrutinized online by the general public at <www.guidestar.org>. One legendary school preferred to pay the IRS fine for failure to list top administrative salaries on the form rather than to let out the explosive information that its president had the second highest salary in the country!
Faculty salaries at public institutions tend to be matters of public record. But getting usable numbers can be difficult even at a state university. There is a temptation for budgetary of ficials to delay, obfuscate, and make access difficult. Early in the open-records era, one school so opposed the state-mandated publication of salary data that it responded to faculty requests by issuing the institution’s entire budget in an unwieldy, foot-and-a-half-thick printout. Those faculty members who wanted salary figures had to dig for them. And to make the digging harder, the administration chained the budget book to a desk in the affirmative action office, refusing to let the figures be copied except by hand.
This kind of stinginess with information has dissipated to some extent at schools where the publication of budgetary data has now become routine. But it lingers at many private institutions, and especially at smaller schools, where individual salaries are as closely guarded as medical records and frequently for the same reason—fear that the facts are shameful. Thus it is no surprise that many administrators continue to be grumpy about the AAUP’s annual salary survey—even as they use it in their own budgetary planning.
Why should the faculty know about the budget? What good is served by having everyone’s salary hanging out on the line, like so much raggedy underwear? Why should a harried budget officer have to explain the obvious fact that the overhead from grants does not belong to the primary investigator? Since the size and disposition of the endowment are negotiated by donors, doesn’t the faculty’s nibbing into foundation accounts threaten future contributions? Why are faculty so picky—like wanting to know why the visitors’ parking lot was resurfaced and how much it cost to put in a few planters filled with marigolds in the process? And, finally, what business of the faculty is the coach’s arrangement to hold his summer camp on campus?
The AAUP’s principles of shared governance assign decisions according to expertise, and so the administration is seen to have primary authority in managing resources. Along the way, however, the faculty needs to "follow the money" if it is going to succeed in maintaining its own authority over academic matters. I believe that when faculty have the appropriate information, they are likely to understand the budget and to make choices that may go against their own self-interest.
I have been a member of a faculty council that one year recommended that the library receive a higher priority than faculty salaries. And that same council, at another time, recommended that the institution concentrate on avoiding a tuition rise at the expense of salaries and faculty support. Another group of faculty (chairs, in this case) once agreed that all the money available one year for program improvement go to the math department to staff its introductory course with full-time faculty.
The faculty needs to know about the budget so that it can help the institution decide upon a spectrum of defining values. Perhaps most important, the budget gurus at most institutions can only benefit by having to explain themselves to their faculty colleagues. If their systems are healthy, they will be able to answer questions reasonably. And if the budget is inexplicable, then questioning it must be seen as the beginning of a cure rather than a disease.
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