Budget Discussion November 30, 2012
M. Purser
January 27, 2013
Basic Data:
31 people attended. The event lasted 3 hours. People were encouraged to rotate through a series of
discussion topics at separate tables. Each table group wrote up notes and posted them on the walls of
the room at the end of each 20-minute interval. People then put ‘dot’ post-its on ideas, comments, or
questions they agreed with or found important, as they moved on to the next table discussion.
Departments represented included: Anthropology (4), Business Administration (5), English (2), History
(1), Hutchins (2), Library (4) Math (2), Nursing (1), Philosophy (1), Physics/Astronomy (1), Political
Science (2), Psychology (1), plus Academic Affairs Office.
Table discussion topics used during the retreat:
The first four topics below had been pre-selected by the Senate Budget Subcommittee, and were
reflected in the earlier survey sent out to all department chairs. In some cases, several sub-topics were
created at the event by participants. The remaining topics were additional ones created by the retreat
participants at the event.
“Generating Money”
 How to make money
 Generate revenue
“Saving Money”
 Round 2 (separating 2 discussions)
 Motivation/Engagement with Process
“What’s Working?” (to do either of the above)
 How to allocate funds to support mission
 Working but NOT sustainable
 What’s working/could do more
 What’s working/need more
“What’s Getting in the Way?” (of either of the above)
 Getting in the way
 In terms of workload, rigidity – resources
“How to Do More with Less Money”
 We need more money; how do we get it?
 How to do more with less w/o sacrificing quality AND without increasing workload
“What’s Not Working?”
“Awareness”
“What Else?”
“Debrief”
Comments with most ‘dots’, for each topic: the number of dots given to each comment is listed in
parentheses at the beginning of each line. Additional comments that received no dots are not listed
here, but are referenced in the complete transcripts, and in the topics tables (in separate files posted to
the website).
Generating Money
(7) Capital campaigns (with endowed chairs? General OE support, equipment funds?)
(7) IDC rebates regularly, so departments can benefit
(6) Better ORSP support -> more grants
(6) Find external funds to hire university (students, faculty) to provide programs to businesses,
nonprofits
(5) accept the reality that making $ at SSU is not a bad thing
(4) “student success fee” – supplemental fee to support academics -> 4 year graduation
(4) strengthen faculty oversight of certificate programs to increase value
(4) to what extent do ExEd profits benefit university? Academic Affairs? Individual programs?
(3) Office: help connect faculty and businesses/nonprofits/ etc. to make contracts/help each other.
Connect community needs with university expertise
(3)Get more out-of-state and international students
 Implications for needed services
 Competing with privates – back to identity and public face question
(2) Sustainability?
 E.g. certificate programs go away
 Coordinator – burden of program
 Certificate program – lack of appropriate oversight
o Don’t create as moneymakers at expense of curricular control; education
(2) Create professional education media projects
(2) Creating an environment that incentivizes raising $ - e.g. IDC back to department
(2) Share practices – and $
(1 for each of following: )
 Technology transfer programs (patents)
 Open opportunities to do community outreach
 Hire a grant-writer
 Incentivize/streamline certificate program creation
Saving Money
(6) Let us buy food for events from off-campus
(5) Our current budget process distracts from/hampers pedagogical and curricular activities
(5) Institutionalized risk aversion prevents creativity, innovation, (necessary) risk-taking
(3) Repurposing under-utilized staff and managers across campus -> decentralize decision-making to
units
(2) Reduce administrative redundancies -> make tough decisions about what we can afford
(2) Admit only the number of students that we can serve with the academic budget, not the number
needed to fill the dorms
(2) Accept HS students earlier (Juniors?) conditional on being ready for college by the time they
graduate from high school
(2) Hospitality/Tourism management degrees/certificates
(1 for each of the following: )
 Lecturer entitlements at university level, not department (more flexibility)
 Perform some staff tasks via student community service (i.e. landscaping)
 Switch to breadth-based GE courses (instead of course-based designation)
 Go paperless
 Align expenditure authority with program responsibility, department, and implementation
What’s Working:
(4) Don’t compromise quality
(4) challenges of teaching larger courses (not best education)
(3) can we fund humanities?
(3) Exec MBA – generating revenue support for postgraduate programs
(3) Interest in certificate programs brings community support/engagement
(3) Subsidize small seminar type classes with large lecture
(3) Even small amounts of seed $ and stipends work – “big bang for the buck”
(3) Interaction with our colleagues
 Seminars, conversation (audit each other’s classes)
(2) We want to be Liberal Arts and Sciences
(2) Ways to generate income or do business differently
(2) Student access to faculty in office hours and beyond: works/needed by students, but disappearing
because of workload
(2) Increasing workload (class sizes, etc.) “Plugs the holes in the dike”, but not sustainable – quality
declining
(2) Ground-up curricular innovation works really well, and independently of budget – to a point
(2) IT needs to be in AA
(1 for each of these: )
 Enrollment (reg., waitlist, etc.) needs tweaking; we should use more
 Moodle (but more training/help would be useful)
 Do we agree we have a budget problem?
 “Privatizing for Elites”
 Moodle is working, needs larger support staff
 Events like this! More talking to people we don’t usually talk to
 Faculty-administrative interaction is better
What’s Getting in the Way?
(8) Feeling “lost”/isolated at the departmental level; lack of an over-arching goal shared across the
university
(6) how workload is defined, and how it is allocated
(4) reluctance to change what’s proven to work to build students’ cognitive and life skills: e.g., powerful
research skills and the ability to express oneself with confidence in writing and orally
(3) We don’t invest in making $, finding resources: no “seed $” (invest in infrastructure to make
academic money
(3) Specific solutions universalized – CFO prioritizes budget rather than academic mission
(3) Our systems get in the way – lack of flexibility, systems that are too complex. No easy way to
implement actions. Lack of agility
(3)Skepticism toward university efforts to capitalize on faculty sense of responsibility and institution
(2)Our culture of “we can’t make money”, not willing to look at the true cost of educating students
(2) Why don’t we charge differential rates / fees for different programs?
(2) Lack of trust
(2) Talking around the real problems
(1 for each of the following: )
 Resource information not available in understandable format to faculty/staff – “Nothing”
 Burnout
o Lack of t-t faculty
 Lack of balance between UD/LD courses
 No place to go to ask “how do we make this place more efficient?”
 Skepticism that innovative programs won’t be sustainable – fear it’s a time-waster; reward?
How to Do More with Less Money
(10) Development: Beef up for Academics
(5) Creating and sustaining innovative programs like FYE (especially for faculty)
(4) [There] is a real separation between Stateside and Self-support: would it help to blend?
(3) Redesign the flow of money between AA and A&F – no more “paying” for doing our job
(3) Spend $ to make $: Time, resources
(3) Re-evaluate course content/pedagogy, expectations:
o Abandon lecture
o Self-based learning
o Flipped classroom
o Technology to enhance teaching, learning experience
o Resources to support (this)
o Student/faculty interaction
(3) Re-evaluate department tenure/promotion criteria/expectations
(2) Certificate programs: both stateside and self-support
(2) How to do more with less, without compromising quality
(2) Support effective large-lecture pedagogy
(2) Options for web delivery?
(1 for each of the following: )
o Faculty need more clarity on how to make the mission real
o We need more money? How do we get it?
o Support faculty collaboration
o Closing the assessment loop
o “Jack” (Jack in the Box)
o Structure of office hours, their purpose
What’s Not Working
(1 for each of the following: )
o Off-hours student services: forms, tutoring, advising – not available when students need them
o Planning depends on unknown budget
o Clear information flow and trust
Awareness
(8) Transparency of budgets & expenditures to facilitate/inform our own budgeting decisions. ( Both
within AA and university-wide)
(6) Get rid of the disincentives for either saving or raising $
(6) Align budgeting process with the actual academic mission
What Else?
[“The sense of mission in this room can be diffuse.”]
(6) Find ways to facilitate inter-departmental collaboration
(4) Build mission/vision consensus
(3) Provide more open forums on budget education/discussion
(2) Align $, committees “assessment of success”
Debrief:
The debriefing at the end of the event began with a request from the facilitators to talk about ‘where we
go next’. No ‘dots’ were placed on the note sheets, as people were leaving. However, the highlighted
text below were comments that people wrote on post-its, and attached to the final set of note sheets:
Give Donors ideas – not just music center.
How to use new tech?
-Donor $ guidance to SSU principles
Changes to exposure to Donors
Donor $’s w/ General Fund % Reg’s
Do we want to say, “we’ll do your job”?
Let’s help them
How to help see SSU so donors come across other Hows [? Possibly other opportunities?
Need to create culture of innovation – incentives, sharing, rewards, and support.
The following are the notes the facilitators wrote down during the debriefing:
Nice to converse – will anything come of it?
What happens after this?
Margie take responsibility & Provost
Don’t lose good ideas
Which are $ vs. orientation ideas?
What needs to happen first?
Simple strategic plans
Where has money been spent? (Content/Program Analysis)
Written reports that don’t get used
Commitment to take action
Tie this work to prior work
- Why aren’t decisions flowing?  Based on previous info
Keep doing same thing over again
-
How do we translate this to action?
“ Be the Change you want to see”: Ghandi:
- If you want Change, you have to Change it
- Alignment between faculty/Dept’s
Congruence between mission and actions
-
Clear mission that drives projects
Increased honesty about priorities for $
-
Give donors ideas – not just music center