Budget Feedback Received AFTER September 1, 2015
To see the feedback that was received prior to September 1, 2015, please see the documents
located at http://www.uwplatt.edu/budget/budget-reduction-planning.
(budgetfeedback@uwplatt.edu)
Standard reply: Thank you for your input. Your feedback will be included in a summary document located at
http://www.uwplatt.edu/budget/2015%E2%80%9317-budget-reduction-planning-process. If questions were asked
that could not be answered by the budget office, the email was forwarded to Cathy Riedl-Farrey and Rob Cramer
for their input prior to posting the feedback and response(s).
Student & Alumni Responses/Questions:
10/15/15: Budget suggestion: limit high salaries. Pick five people who can make over $125,000
and no more. The others can be rehired in a renamed position for less money. It is very
disturbing to see the salaries of so many highly paid administrators. Many of them, particularly
the Chancellor and Dean of LAE, appear to be off-campus more than they are here.
Budget suggestion: moratorium on Dean fund-raising, since it clearly isn’t working, and also put
a moratorium on international travel except for teaching faculty in cost-return programs.
Budget suggestion: audit and report amount of all international travel by university employees
and their spouses (if the university has paid for the spouse.) Put a moratorium on this and
count it as savings.
Budget suggestion: audit and report all salary and travel fees paid to consultants and list what
each person or group was consulting about. On a case-by-case basis, declare a moratorium on
particular types of consulting.
Question: under the new model, Deans are supposed to spend half of their time fund-raising.
This seems like a poor model since Foundation went into the red. People who donate to
Foundation are not encouraged when we see this.
Budget suggestion: audit fundraising activities of Deans and if this shows a net loss (i.e. if he or
she has not raised more than half of his gross salary), then have the Deans stay on campus and
work. Reduce the number of associate deans.
Budget suggestion: any high-level (salary over $80,000) administrative position which becomes
vacant should not be replaced immediately. If it is a critical position, then we should hire an
interim person from within the university. We should not hire any administrator from outside
of the university until the budget crisis has past. The university seems critically short of
institutional knowledge especially with so many long-time employees leaving.
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If qualified faculty members can take vacant positions, then those faculty members should be
moved in to the vacant positions. That would allow us to lay off fewer academic staff.
Eliminate the Economics program. It has no major or minor yet some of the highest paid
faculty members on campus.
Eliminate the Speech program or else hire a faculty member. Speech has no major, minor, nor
faculty but administers a critical and required general education course. Take the requirement
seriously or cut the program.
10/15/15: The Budget Commission needs to ask hard questions about the number of people in
high paying positions, especially when we are talking about laying off so many people in lowpaying positions. We need to stop using three years ago as a measure and instead use five
years ago. Picking three instead of five paints a very false picture.
How many high-level administrators do we have now compared to five years ago? It appears
that the previous Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, who never made more than
$110,000, has been replaced by three people who each make more than $125,000, even
though part of his responsibilities (directing the Confucius Institute) is now part of the workload
of the Associate Dean of LAE. Why is this?
Is appears that the previous Director of International Initiatives, who made about $60,000, has
also been replaced by three people, all of whom make more than she did.
WE NEED THIS DATA to make informed suggestions. Please ask for it. It appears that you could
easily cut over half a million dollars from upper administration and still have more people there
than five years ago.
General Public Responses/Questions:
Faculty & Staff Responses/Questions:
9/25/15: Hearing about people possibility being laid off is a terrible alternative. It creates a
scary work environment that divides lines among co-workers, departments and bosses
further. Plus, certain tasks are misinterpreted as expendable, when they could actually be a
key component to helping the whole university get through this. My suggestion is to cut
salaries by percentages. Pay cuts instead of layoffs. Most people would accept a cut in salary if
they still get to keep their job and benefits and don't have to move their family, and that could
create a sense of camaraderie that we are ALL in this together. Productivity and teamwork
could increase on all levels. It could give everyone a sense of purpose. Here are the proposed
rates:
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Employee Salary --> pay cut %
$1-$50,000 --> 1%
$50,001 - $60,000 --> 2%
$60,001 - $70,000 --> 3%
$70,001 - $80,000 --> 4%
$80,001 - $90,000 --> 5%
$100,001 - $125,000 --> 7%
$125,001 - $150,000 --> 9%
$150,001 - $175,000 --> 11%
$175,001 - $200,000 --> 13%
$200,001 - $300,000 --> 15%
$300,001 - $500,000 --> 18%
$500,001 - higher --> 20%
Look at all the salaries and do the math. It only works if everyone gets a cut. Maybe this could
help all of us and save UW-Platteville.
10/6/15: Here are three budget recommendations:
1. Cut Interim Vice Chancellor for External Relations position.
2. Have the current Associate Director and Coordinator of Graduate Programs for the School of
Education return to full time teaching in Sociology. This person is currently serving in an
administrative function through the School of Education.
3. Eliminate the Distinguished Lecturer series.
10/7/15: As someone who has attended MCIC and participated in other diversity training
initiatives at UW-Platteville, and who lived for years in very urban surroundings, I appreciate
the value of multiple perspectives and experiences that result from a diverse campus
environment.
So it pains me greatly to say that I think the university should defund the VC/Chief Diversity
Officer position and redistribute the reporting entities to other positions. As important as
diversity is, I think the existing initiatives will function well enough in the short term without VClevel leadership. The $110,000 price tag of this position is money that should redirected to
shoring up other facets of the budget which represent a more existential threat to the
university’s future.
Here’s another idea, totally different topic: As fleet vehicles age out and come up for
replacement, take a look at hybrid and electric vehicles (where it makes sense), and alternative
fuels. Local fleet vehicles, lawn mowers, and other utility machinery which run on gasoline, for
example, and which are always refueled at the physical plant, could be converted to run on
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natural gas or propane. Both these fuels represent significant savings over gasoline, even given
the relative bargain of today’s gasoline prices. Both have the benefit of lower greenhouse gas
and other emissions, and both contribute to longer engine life, as well. Propane and natural
gas injection systems are even available for diesel engines.
Last item: This requires an investment, but think about it: UW-Platteville has, I’ll bet, acres of
rooftops which are ideal locations for solar panels. Cutting power consumption from the grid
(and probably selling some power back in the summer months) saves on energy costs…plus, it
reduces the university’s carbon footprint, and sets a good example of sustainable practice for
our students.
10/7/15: All degree programs need to research the possibility of adherence to granting
undergraduate degrees within a 120 - 125 credit requirement range. In some degree plans and
programs this may not be possible due to accreditation purposes. These high credit-to-degree
programs could offer all additional credits greater than the 125 limit at the Master's level. In
most cases the graduate level course will be taken in the final term and will serve as a
foundation for the students’ future advanced degree. Due to the UGrad vs Grad tuition
differential, this change could also produce an increased revenue stream.
This may be of benefit to bolster our current or potential new graduate programs, attract or
retain faculty interested in working with graduate students and attract or support the
undergraduate students looking for the 4+1 programs that encourage candidates to seek
advanced degrees.
Thank you for time and consideration of this suggestion.
10/7/15: As I sit and listen to the budget forums and discussion in my college, it occurs to me
that if we may be creating larger class sizes (which is a discussion in my college), we will need to
be able to better utilize our classrooms. I realize that using Ad Astra and getting it to function
well requires testing time. I’ve heard rumors that some people, particularly in the Registrar’s
Office, are recommending that we stop testing and using Ad Astra. If we are expecting the
academic colleges to gain efficiencies, we need the tools to be able to find those efficiencies. I
get that we need to offer classes outside of the peak times, however, tools like Astra help us to
find out what is possible to help us with those efficiencies. Please invest the time and energy
that is needed to work through the issues associated with classroom efficiencies. We need this
functional tool so that we can help us make strategic decisions.
I spoke with a colleague of mine in CS/SE and learned that when a tool like Astra is used, it
takes a good amount of time and energy to test the tool and we must tackle each nuance that is
not working one at a time to get the tool to work effectively. I suspect we may actually have
staff/faculty on campus who may be able to help with this. We’ve already invested time,
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money and energy into this, let’s carry it through and realize the investment in the program so
that it can be used at this very critical time when we need it.
10/8/15: Go to 3 Vice Chancellors and eliminate 4 Asst. Chancellors/Asst. Vice Chancellors and
their corresponding support staff.
10/13/15: Now that we are facing the disturbing prospect of cutting classes and instructors in
response to the budget crisis, we have to ask ourselves a hard question every time a cut is
proposed: Is what we're choosing not to cut really more important to the mission of this
university than the classes that this institution exists to provide? I'm not saying that we would
always have to choose to save classes over saving something else, because the classes can't
exist without a lot of other things to support them. But surely there are many things that, while
they would be good to have in the ideal world, should be gotten rid of now that things are not
ideal. There are three things that fall into this category that come to my mind right away:
1. The Office of Sustainability. I understand the benefits of having such an office, but I can't
understand maintaining such an office in the current budget situation. Between the salaries of
the director and 3 part-time workers and whatever budget the office itself has, that has to add
up to a lot of classes saved.
2. The governance secretary. It seems to me that the various governance bodies got by just
fine putting out their own agendas and minutes before this position was created.
3. The communications specialist for LAE. This position was saved from a previous round of
budget cuts because enough people thought it was providing something valuable. Even if it is,
however, that something can't be more valuable than classes.
10/14/15: "Doing things more efficiently" and cutting budget percentages from current
operations doesn't address the overall problems we have at UW-P. We should be asking more
serious questions like:
 Are there things we are doing which we don't need to be doing? What can we eliminate
(not reduce, but completely remove) that won't impact student learning and their
career potential?
 What are our primary educational emphases? Do we have programs that can be
eliminated without affecting those which drive our university's identity and mission?
What do we invest in for the future?
 Most faculty are here because they want to teach, yet many do "research" which
decreases their teaching loads. Are we a research institution? Does research bring in
sufficient funding to offset the additional faculty need to cover classes?
 Why is our budget 87% salaries? Are we overloaded with administrative staff and
faculty because of the previous questions? How have staff and salary growth over the
last 10-15 years compared to student enrollment growth?
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The current budget situation gives us the opportunity (forces us) to evaluate who we are and
what we're supposed to be doing. We need to prioritize our mission objectives and talk about
restructuring operations. We don't need to be more efficient at what we do now (which implies
we were wasting money and resources), we need to determine what we should be doing.
Corporations on the brink of financial ruin (eg, GM, Harley Davidson) resurrected themselves by
reorganizing and eliminating marginal value products and processes. They survived and
thrive because they were forced to shed generations of "business as usual" growth which
resulted in a bloated inefficient corporation. We need to do the same. To survive, we must
evolve. And that's true whether there's a budget issue or not.
10/14/15: As someone who spent nearly 22 years on active duty in the Army working in diverse
environments where race and ethnic cultures were rich, and while living in foreign countries for
over 9 years, I appreciate the value of ethnic differences and the importance for ensuring
students and staff are aware of the differences. But it has bothered me to think that our
investment in this area is at least $100,000 when other options could have been
considered. Expanding duties to justify retention needs to be based on documented training
and demonstrated competencies. With that overview:
Why can’t our flagship (UW-Madison) provide outreach diversity programs to the rest of the
System so that the smaller campuses can reduce overhead? Alternatively, why can’t we share
the cost of the VC/Chief Diversity Officer with other schools in our region (inclusive of schools in
Iowa) to leverage the need from other campus diversity programs to balance the cost?
Also, would it hurt people earning more than $125,000/year in this small, rural community to
take a temporary pay cut of 5 or 10% (remember the furlough days) until we get through the
painful state of frozen tuition?
None of my comments are meant to be personal toward any individuals but rather are shared
with the intent for us to focus on funding those core competencies that are needed to satisfy
our customer base (the students). In my experience, losing some administrative positions that
are not at the tip of the spear leaves an organizational hole for about as much time as it takes
for the void to fill when removing a person’s hand from a bucket of water.
10/15/15: Some suggestions:
1. Moratorium on new non-teaching positions unless federal compliance issues are involved.
2. Where vacancies among non-teaching academic staff are untenable, redistribute qualified
academic and university staff members and consider redistributing academic teaching staff
members whose positions have been eliminated. Internal vacancies in non-teaching positions
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should either remain unfilled or, where critical, be filled by reassigning others who are already
here.
3. Review all non-teaching academic staff members in positions that did not exist before
2010. Consider cutting some of these positions. That area of the university has grown far
faster.
4. Cut Interim Vice Chancellor for External Relations position and restructure the office. Ask for
a list of every person in this new division (they are not posted on our web site, which seems
odd for "External Relations.") How many people work in this division? Until we know who they
are and what they are doing, let's consider cutting the division. When we know more about the
program, perhaps keep people there based on seniority.
5. Eliminate the Chief Diversity Officer and Assistant Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion and
the new Strategic Planning title that's been added to the office. Now that we've cut MCIC and
the University Fellows program, this position is a bit questionable. Shouldn't the money go to
people like the University Fellows who are actually teaching?
6. Promote diversity on campus by hiring more international faculty in areas where we've had
difficulty hiring U.S. citizens. Related to this, out-source the occupational visa process and allow
the university to sponsor visas for academic teaching staff in engineering, accounting and other
areas where there are many qualified international applicants and where we can't fill or afford
faculty positions. A commitment to diversity could in this case actually save money.
7. Eliminate second-eight-weeks courses. Most students register for these courses because
they need to drop a class they are failing or performing poorly in. These courses add salary
dollars because they usually replace a class the student has dropped. We can no longer afford
this service for our students.
8. Consider any and all actions which will increase the amount per student we receive. UWPlatteville ranks at the bottom of system; places like UW-Superior (which should be closed)
rank at the top.
9. Consider any and all actions which will allow differential tuition for students in majors that
cost more, as is being done at several other UW schools.
10. In APC program prioritization, acknowledge that some programs cost more than others,
and include the differential cost-per-credit hour and differential salary costs in the rankings
using the same logic that is employed elsewhere in system for arguing for differential
tuition. General education programs should not be subsidizing engineering programs.
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11. Restructure remedial education courses. Many students in non-STEM areas transfer in
credits because our Math 15 here would count as a regular general education math score
elsewhere. Also, many students take Statistics class at Southwest Tech and transfer it in to
avoid two semesters of remedial math.
12. Actively solicit groups that want to rent out part of the campus over summer.
13. Increase on-line course offerings during the summer.
14. Restructure or cut the PACCE program. At the least, have the Director of the program be a
partial teaching reassignment.
15. Have the current School of Ed Associate Director and Coordinator of Graduate
Programs return to full time teaching in Sociology.
16. Eliminate the Distinguished Lecturer series.
17. Eliminate the Economics program or at least cut its staffing in half. It has no majors or
minors.
10/15/15: Any cuts to general education (and the resulting savings) should be credited to the
college that will be making the cuts. Yes, that means that LAE (which has already cut more than
the other colleges) would get "credit" for that portion of the cut. Math (which has offered to
make a substantial cut) should not be further cut until other departments in EMS come up with
cuts.
10/16/15: I would like to build on the recent budget suggestion that: "any high-level (salary
over $80,000) administrative position which becomes vacant should not be replaced
immediately. If it is a critical position, then we should hire an interim person from within the
university. We should not hire any administrator from outside of the university until the budget
crisis has past. The university seems critically short of institutional knowledge especially with so
many long-time employees leaving. "
I concur. A place to begin this would be with the current new position of Director of Teaching
and Technology Center (TTC) that is not yet filled. Instead of hiring a new employee in
an administrative role, let's consider utilizing the current individual this area would report to as
the "new director". To provide support to the Provost, he could serve as Director of TTC and
Director of Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment.
This allows the university to retain the experience and knowledge of a senior leader, but does
not add to the glut of administrative managers.
10/19/15: Questions/Concerns:
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1.) I am very concerned that we are supposed to take 2.5 million dollars out of the three
colleges. When you look at it in terms of people, that's over 69 academic staff positions (at
36,000/year). If we really cut that number of academic staff, we'd be cutting over 600 sections
per academic year, which seems completely unfeasible to me.
2.) I'm also worried about how decisions about curriculum will affect accreditation and longterm health of our institution. There's a clear schism between applied/professional fields and
academic fields. The latter tends to be under-valued anyway at this institution, and my fear is
that this mentality is being used to justify curriculum changes without little data or information
to support why they are effective (either financially or pedagogically).
Indeed, many of the proposed cuts to curriculum will actually worsen the problems pointed out
in our last accreditation report: for example, it's been suggested that students completing a BS
pick two options between gender studies, ethnic studies, and international
education. However, the results from the most recent NSSEE data shows that our students not
only score our university's treatment of diversity significantly lower than the mean for the UW
System, but that seniors score the university considerably lower than freshman. The Campus
Climate survey also reported many problems related to diversity. Given this data, how can we
consider cutting the diversity requirement? And how in the world would we justify such a cut
to HLC?
3.) I wish there was more information regarding how it was decided that 59% of the budget
decrease was going to come from the three colleges. Faculty governance groups have heard
repeatedly that 80% of the university's budget is salary. I'm sure that's true, but how much of
that salary is coming from faculty members and instructional academic staff? How much is
coming from administrative positions, non-instructional academic staff, etc.? In general, how
much of the university's operating budget comes from the academic side of the house and how
much of it comes from non-academic side?
Response: The faculty and instructional academic staff salaries accounted for 41% of the total
salary budget for fiscal year 2015.
4.) I also wish more information was provided about fundraising: starting this year, we're
spending $328,000 on Foundation. Are they raising at least that much? And why are we
including $250,000 annual travel budget and an extra $459,000 annually to
Foundation/External Relations? With all that extra money, Foundation has to bring in over a
million dollars a year just to support itself; is this happening? To my knowledge it is not, but
this information is not disseminated to the university community.
Suggestions:
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1.) Given that we're already funding 328,000 to Foundation, my preference would be to take
that suggested investment of 250,000 plus 459,000 and use it to address the 2.5 million that is
supposed to come from the three colleges. In other words, reduce the amount from 2.5 million
to 1.79 million.
Response: Since the suggested investments in the Foundation are additional outlays of money
from the University, removing them from that section and decreasing the amount of cuts to the
three colleges would result in a net effect of $0 on the total budget reduction.
2.) When dividing the cuts between the three colleges, take into account the reductions that
BILSA and LAE made last year.
3.) Cuts/Changes made to general education should be credited towards the appropriate
college. For instance, if we redesign remedial math as the Math Department suggested, we
should save approx. 250,000/year. Math/EMS should be credited with this cost-saving
measure. LAE should be credited if there are cuts made to the fine arts, humanities, and social
sciences components of the general education program.
10/30/15: Do we have class or section enrollment minimums? If so, what happens if that
enrollment minimum isn’t met for a term? If a class or a section is dropped, what happens to
the faculty member that was hired to teach that class/section?
I’m in favor of exploring this idea that was previously mentioned…
10/7/15: All degree programs need to research the possibility of adherence to granting
undergraduate degrees within a 120 - 125 credit requirement range. In some degree plans and
programs this may not be possible due to accreditation purposes. These high credit-to-degree
programs could offer all additional credits greater than the 125 limit at the Master's level. In
most cases the graduate level course will be taken in the final term and will serve as a
foundation for the students’ future advanced degree. Due to the UGrad vs Grad tuition
differential, this change could also produce an increased revenue stream.
This may be of benefit to bolster our current or potential new graduate programs, attract or
retain faculty interested in working with graduate students and attract or support the
undergraduate students looking for the 4+1 programs that encourage candidates to seek
advanced degrees.
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