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Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets
The Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets serves in an advisory
capacity to the president and provost. Its charge is to review
University budgets and make appropriate recommendations.
The Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets (FACB) met five times in the course
of the 2004-05 academic year. Although the committee brought no resolutions to
the Faculty Council, the meetings, which were characterized by frank, open, and
productive discussions, represented valuable opportunities for the FACB to make
known to the administration faculty perspectives on numerous budgetary issues.
The first meeting (October 18, 2004) began with “Budget 101,” a crash
course on the UT budget delivered by Executive Vice Provost Steve Monti. Its
purpose was to bring members of the FACB up to speed on both the general structure
of the budget and the annual budget formation process. During the last part of
the meeting, Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson briefly outlined the administration’s
budgetary priorities for 2004-05. At the top of the list were two items: (1)
funding at least a 3% raise for faculty and staff and (2) maintaining in aggressive
mode President Faulkner’s faculty expansion initiative. Discussion of the
various priorities was put off until the next meeting.
The second FACB meeting (November 22, 2004) was devoted to two topics: (a) the
report of the 2004-05 Tuition Policy Advisory Committee (TPAC) and its budgetary
implications and (b) a detailed discussion of the administration’s budget
priorities. The element of the TPAC’s report that elicited the most discussion
was the recommendation that the University adopt a college-dependent, flat-rate
tuition structure (based on a 15-hour course load) for all UT undergraduates.
A particular item of interest was the impact this change would have on the University’s
fee structure, since under the proposed model most fees would be folded into
the flat-rate tuition. [The UT-System Board of Regents ultimately approved the
bulk of the TPAC’s
recommendations, with one significant change: the base course load for the flat-rate
was lowered from fifteen to fourteen hours. The budgetary consequence of this
change will be the loss of roughly $5M in revenue for 2005-06.] The second half
of the meeting was a free-flowing dialogue on the budget priorities that the
provost had presented in the October meeting. The provost described how attempts
to address the stated priorities might fare under several scenarios, ranging
from the rosy to the grim, that might play themselves out against the backdrop
of the legislative session. He then turned the tables on the committee and asked:
Suppose that you were in my place and were confronted with a disappointing outcome
in the Legislature with respect to higher education funding, one that forced
you to choose between a raise for current faculty and continuation of the faculty
expansion program. What would you do? And what concrete measures would you recommend
for the reallocation of institutional resources so as to allow the administration
to address budgetary issues (especially issues surrounding faculty and staff
salaries) more effectively in both the short term and the long term? The meeting
ended with a charge to the committee to ponder these questions.
The third meeting of the FACB (January 31, 2005) dealt almost entirely with the
two questions the provost had posed in the November FACB meeting. On the first
of these there was plenty of give-and-take on the “keeping the home folks
happy” versus “bringing in the new blood” issue. In the end,
the committee reached consensus that the faculty expansion initiative was sufficiently
important that using a portion of the faculty raise pool to keep it afloat would
be in the best interest of the University, but that asking the faculty to forego
a raise entirely in order to fund faculty expansion would have a demoralizing
effect. The committee’s suggestions in response to the provost’s
second question were less satisfactory. Although a number of ideas for reallocation
of resources were put forth, most were either impractical or involved hidden
costs. This issue is plainly one with which the FACB will have to wrestle for
years to come. At the meeting the committee also endorsed two proposals that
it was asked to consider by the University Budget Council: the first was a proposal
to adjust the University’s ORP contributions for newer faculty in order
to bring them in line with the level of contributions received by faculty who
were already at UT when a change in state policy temporarily caused a discrepancy
in the contribution rates to arise; the second was a proposal to increase the
level of the “standard” raises that faculty receive in conjunction
with significant promotions (assistant professor to associate professor, associate
professor to professor, lecture to senior lecturer).
At its fourth meeting (April 4, 2005) the FACB was given a detailed report on
the results of the “We’re Texas” capital campaign by Vice President
and CFO Kevin Hegarty and Rick Eason, the new vice president for development.
Eason gave hints about possible future directions for development efforts, but
he did not get into specifics. Committee members made a number of suggestions
for Eason to consider, among them the following two: (a) that greater emphasis
be placed on raising money for graduate fellowships and (b) that faculty be invited
to play a more active role in the development enterprise, especially after a
potential donor has been identified and the University is attempting to convince
him or her of a gift’s concrete impact at the department or program level.
Eason seemed quite amenable to both suggestions, although he stressed the difficulty
of selling donors on the value (in particular, the PR value for the donor) of
graduate fellowships.
The final meeting of the FACB took place on May 16, 2005. The main objective
of this meeting was to update the committee on the happenings at the Legislature,
which was at the time of the meeting approaching conference committee deliberation
of a number of bills that relate directly to higher education budgets. A couple
of other matters were discussed at some length. The first pertained to a strategy
for maintaining a salary balance among a department’s “elite” faculty
(i.e., those most vulnerable to outside offers from prestigious institutions)
by allowing salary adjustments to be made for such individuals at the time when
a new faculty member of the same stature is hired at a higher salary. The provost
would oversee a pool of funds that could aid a department in forestalling attacks
on its star faculty by preemptive salary adjustments in the circumstances indicated
(rationale: it makes little sense to hire National Academy member X if Nobel
Laureate Y and MacArthur Fellow Z are lost in the process). The committee was
sympathetic to this proposal, at the same time expressing hope that a mechanism
could be found to address the broader issue of salary compression. The committee
also discussed the merits of doing some raises for 2005-06 on a deferred basis
(say, doing staff raises in the fall, faculty raises in the spring) if the outcome
of the legislative session leaves the University with a greater than anticipated
budgetary shortfall. Steve Monti explained how the deferred-raise strategy would
help to relieve certain budgetary pressures. Again, the committee was supportive
of doing this if circumstances dictate.
Bruce Palka, chair
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