Getting Out of Our Own Way
SSU Responses to Long-term Shifts
in Funding
Budgeting Without Numbers:
A Campus-wide Conversation
 What are we budgeting for?
 What are we trying to sustain?
 What are we trying to change?
 What do we need, to do all this?
 What is getting in our way?
Key Agreement:
The SSU Mission Statement
 The mission of Sonoma State University is to prepare
students to be learned men and women who:
 have a foundation for life-long learning,
 have a broad cultural perspective,
 have a keen appreciation of intellectual and aesthetic
achievements,
 will be active citizens and leaders in society,
 are capable of pursuing fulfilling careers in a changing
world, and
 are concerned with contributing to the health and
well-being of the world at large.
Key Disconnect:
The way we get our $ from
Sacramento means:
Budgeting for Classes
Not
Curriculum
What Do We “Do”?
(as opposed to how we get our money)
 Yes, faculty “teach”. But
WHAT do they teach?
 Faculty don’t build
buildings, they build
programs
 Healthy universities have
programs that grow and
change (just ask WASC)
 What gets taught has to
hang together, and be
part of a total university
experience
 Universities are said to
“produce” students.
 What they really produce
is experience:
downloading information
is not the same as
acquiring knowledge.
 What universities “do” is
help students learn how
to make that conversion.
What if building curriculum was like building planes?
From the faculty perspective, the current budgeting process that looks like this:
lots of bits being manufactured, but no plane being assembled.
From the student perspective, this budgeting approach
increasingly looks like this:
“…Some Assembly Required…Some Assembly Required…Some Assembly…”
Signs of change…
 Initial success/positive feedback from students on a few
pilot projects: FYE, Learning Communities, GE revisions,
program revisions after program review. Suggest that
curriculum-focused programming pays off: retention,
graduation, student success
 Recognition of a need to market curriculum to attract
students: both beyond CA recruitment and on-site vs.
online recruitment
 Indicators that the funding allocation formulas for CSU
may shift from exclusively enrollment-based to include
retention, graduation rate factors
…And this is about our
budgetdiscussion, how, exactly???
 Senate Budget Subcommittee process – summary
 What the results were
 What the results mean
 How to start the conversation
“What do we want to do?”
(to generate either revenue or savings)
 Development
 Grants and Contracts
 Partnerships (“resources” vs. “revenue”)
 Fee-based programming (especially via ExEd)
Observation 1: We have a large ‘pent-up demand’
for faculty involvement in revenue generation…
 This counters current
orthodoxy that ‘faculty
don’t care about that’
 Current campus policies
and funding allocations
aggressively discourage
faculty from pursuing
this.
 As a result, faculty are
taking their revenuegenerating work
elsewhere (and are being
aggressively recruited by
other UC, CSU campuses)
If we want this revenue, maybe we
should rethink that?
“What are we doing already?”
(that works, and is it sustainable?)
(Hint: 99% of this is about curriculum: expanding it,
updating it, and making it all fit together)
 small-scale pilot programs that expand as they
succeed (eg. FYE)
 “bottom-up” curricular innovation that is targeted,
low-cost (eg. restructuring majors, Social Sciences
SYE pilot, Writing Across Curriculum)
 Instructional technology
 Department or school-based revenue generation
through self-support programs (EMBA, certificate
programs)
Observation 2: If you look around, you realize
people are already working on solutions…
 Faculty participation in these
efforts is VERY high: they are
seen as ‘bottom up’ rather than
‘top down’, and they show
immediate benefit to students.
 Most are a low or no cost (which
is why they do not trigger
bureaucratic intervention, to shut
them down).
 Burn-out in these efforts is high:
they are on top of a full
workload, not as “buy-out”.
 They will require a shift in
funding structure to become
sustainable.
“What’s Getting in the Way?”
 Disincentives: there’s no
point in trying to raise
revenues, because it will
only be taken from you.
 Policy: we actively prevent
people from even trying to
raise revenue, be
professionals, or support
students
 There is a critical failure in
the lack of any shared sense
of institutional
commitment to the
mission.
Disincentives
“Institutionalized risk aversion prevents creativity,
innovation, (necessary) risk taking”
“Creating an environment that incentivizes
raising $ - e.g. IDC back to Department”
“Skepticism that innovative programs won’t be sustainable
– fear it’s a time-waster; reward?”
“Get rid of the disincentives for
either saving or raising $.”
CSU/SSU Restrictions/Redirections
“Transparency of budgets & expenditures
to facilitate/inform our own budgeting
decisions. (Both within AA and
university-wide)”
“Redesign the flow of money between the AA & A.F.
– no more “paying” for doing our job.”
“To what extent do ExEd profits benefit university?
Academic Affairs? Individual programs?”
“We don’t invest in making $,
finding resources, no “seed $”
(invest in infrastructure to make
academic money).”
Lack of accessible/timely information
“Talking around (The) real problems”
“Provide more open forums on budget
education/discussion. “
“Resource information not available in
understandable format to faculty/staff” “Lack of continuity in planning
 old agreements disappear”
“Looking at real-time programmatic
impacts of budgeting decisions before
Implementing”
Planning depends on unknown budget
Need more consensus on “mission”
Lack of trust
Build mission/vision consensus
Feeling “lost”/isolated at the departmental
level; lack of an over-arching goal shared across university.
Faculty need more clarity on how to make the mission “real”
Align budgeting process w/ the actual academic mission
Mission-centered VS market-centered
Assessing on efficiency vs. Mission Statement
Closing Observations
How can we budget better, to achieve our
mission in spite of the changing times?
And
How can we use this process to overcome
these recurring rifts in the institution?
Part 1: What we could do with these
survey results
 There are opportunities here to articulate these
interests, issues, and efforts with the work of the
short-term task forces, to model collaborative
problem-solving on campus.
 The issues of a perceived lack of shared mission are
real, not trivial, and have significant negative
impacts on our problem-solving abilities: on
innovation, experimentation, and development.
Part 2: Necessary Shifts in our
Culture
 Foster ongoing curriculum
development
Incentivize independent resource
development ACROSS THE
UNIVERSITY
Transparency/lateral information
flow
Foster ongoing curriculum
development
We need to align resources and budget
planning with a more holistic
framework of the whole curriculum and
links to co-curriculum, all other aspects
of university programming, to support
students across their whole university
experience.
Incentivize independent resource
development ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY
This means BOTH redefining what
counts as “resources” to meet actual
needs, AND ensuring that people can
believe their efforts will accrue
genuine benefits to the programs
they are trying to build.
Transparency/lateral information
flow
We do not actually know each other very
well, across the institution, and
especially across divisions. We have only
very primitive mechanisms for moving
information across units, (as opposed to
up and down hierarchies within units).