A&S Planning and Budget Commmittee Minutes Feb 4 1999

Art's & Sciences Planning and Budget CommitteeMinutes of 2/4/99 Meeting

    Members attending:
  • George Barnes
  • Ginger Brown (Staff Rep)
  • Julia Dietrich (ex officio)
  • Stephen Edgell
  • Robert Kimball
  • Nathan Schwartz (Chair)
  • Wiley Williams

    Visitors attending:
  • Shirley Willihnganz (Acting Dean)

The minutes of 1/19/99 were approved.

The majority of the meeting was a discussion between the Committee and Shirley Willihnganz, the new acting Dean of A&S;, concerning the 1% (of all salary lines) CAR reallocation within the College for salary increment. Shirley reported that, in a recent meeting she had with the Provost, it was made clear that we must do this reallocation. Further, the Provost said that the College was free to do this in any way we wanted to as long as student credit hours were not lost. That gave the group a lengthy and much needed laugh break.

Shirley requested that the Committee attempt to generate ideas for how cuts could be made that would have minimal impact on the College and also to generate ideas of how revenue might be increased.

Shirley suggested that we might be able to put off making the cuts by borrowing from vacant lines. Some problems with this that were considered were: it would only be a temporary fix, it would likely lead to permanent cuts in the number of faculty lines, and the money was already committed to technology enhancement for next year. There was some lack of information as to whether the last item was true or not. Permanent cuts in faculty lines hurt the college in teaching and research and puts us further behind the SAC's requirement for fewer credit hours produced by part timers.

Shirley also suggested that we might make up part of the money needed by an increase in efficiency by stringently enforcing the established section enrollment minima and making a faculty member whose section is cut teach another course. She suggested that part time instructors could be told that they might have a course to teach depending upon whether the faculty member needed to switch to the other course or not. Further, some nonproductive faculty might have their teaching load increased. In these ways, it might be possible to cut the number of courses without reducing the number of credit hours, if the students enroll in other sections or other courses. One suggestion to assist this was to have a web page where students could click on a requirement and see a list of courses that would satisfy it, so they could pick alternatives.

It was recommended that more information was needed for this decision making process.
1. What was the size of the rollover from last year and where did it come from? Will it be there each year?
2. What are other units doing to find their 1%? How is A&S; different from them in having opportunities for finding areas to cut? How does being the undergraduate unit impact us differently from other units? Can other units cut student credit hours without the same effect and resulting prohibition from the Provost?

Nathan and Stephen had a chance, informal meeting with Dave Baugh just before the Committee met. He reported that the technology enhancement report and plan were not in place yet, because we still have not determined the number of workstations in A&S; that will catastrophically fail at the end of this year. This was because I.T. still has not provided a complete testing package.

Stephen reported that he had contacted Mary Korfhage of the Office of Planning and Budget concerning the report on faculty salaries at the University. She reported that the report was still being revised, and that we would get a copy as soon as it was finished.

Nathan reported that he had contacted Mary Korfhage of the Office of Planning and Budget concerning information for comparing the funding of other colleges of A&S; within the State with us. She had not obtained the information yet, but would pursue that this week.

Nathan reported that he would begin drafting the annual report of the Committee to the Faculty.

The next meeting was set for Tuesday, February 16, at 1:00 in a place to be announced.

The time for the meeting having more than expired, the meeting was adjourned.

Respectfully submitted, Steve Edgell

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