A&S Planning and Budget Commmittee Minutes Feb 25 2002

Minutes: A&S Planning and Budget Commmittee

February 25, 2002

 

Members present: Bruce Adams, Susan DeWitt, Dean Julia Dietrich, ex officio; Linda Gigante, P. J. Ouseph, Thomas Riedel, Nancy Theriot

Guests: Dean Brennan

The meeting was convened at 11:05 A.M.

The main item on the agenda was an opportunity for the committee to ask the Dean specific questions about the budget and plans for the College.

1. Budget

The Dean reported that the University faces a permanent 2% cut in the budget. The president is committed to a salary raise for the faculty in the order of about 2.5%, which will have to be funded through reallocation. The benchmark adjustments are expected to continue for this year. The College's share of cuts, reallocation, and benchmark adjustments has not yet been determined.

The College will also face another $330,000 cut in lecturer lump sum as part of the previous reallocation for benchmark raises.

The Bucks for Brains program will continue for a third year, but as a bonded program rather than funded by lawmakers.

Deadlines for decisions regarding the budget are not yet known.

2. Staff

The College has not heard back from Price Waterhouse even so feed back on the first findings was provided in December. The amount of $1,800,000 has been set aside for staff reclassification and raises, but the survey calls for $3,000,000.

The issue of overstaffing and of staff not working the required hours was raised and the Dean will look into it.

3. Information Technology

The data line charges that departments will be paying are to bring the IT budget into order. They were overcharging on long distance billing and initial installation of data lines, but not charging monthly access fees. The total effect should be zero (a shifting of $300,000-500,000 occurs, but it supposed to be a mere shift in charges). Problems arose from "illegal" connections, which will cost extra money to "legalize".

The College has an instructional technology budget of about $275,000 CAR money; a pool created by former Dean Shirley Willihnganz. Further details can be found in a white paper created by a college ad hoc committee for instructional technology to be shared with faculty.

4. Summer Program

The role of the summer program needs to be examined; can we offer a 12 months program on 10 months funding, should the program be a minimal one taught be primarily by non regular faculty, can some faculty, who choose teaching as their emphasis be put on 12 months contracts?

The College will not be offering any courses in the short, first summer session. This will affect about 900 students (last years enrollment in that term), but we will raise the number of hours a student can take in the remaining summer terms to help alleviate problems.

5. FWLA Negotiations

On a trial basis, the would like to consider giving some chairs more freedom in negotiating FWLA's with their faculty; the College would still be checking for fairness and to insure policy is followed.

Some concern was expressed about Chairs handling this.

6. Advising

A distinction needs to be made between advising and scheduling. Often students want scheduling help not advising. This may be helped by the online degree audit plan soon to be implemented. Some problems still exist in advising between A&S; and REACH.

To move toward mandatory departmental advising, will require careful examination of the resources required. This would still leave the problem of faculty accessibility, an issue that departments will need to address.

Dean Brennan concluded by telling the committee that he will inform us as soon as details about the budget become available.

On other business, a copy of the Humanities Ph.D. proposal was handed out to the committee to study for the next meeting.

The next meeting will be Monday March 4, 2002 at 11:00 a.m.

The meeting adjourned at 12:15 p.m.