Forum Post
Please provide detailed tables (not charts) for the last 5 years, at a minimum, showing the following:
- The income, expenditures, and outflows of each unit (assuming a unit is in the black). This includes each instructional unit, professional unit (e.g., nursing, the medical school, and the vet school), athletics, administration, facilities, parking, housing and dining, and auxiliary services.
- For any unit receiving funds from central, please detail the average year-to-year allocation and any associated change (i.e., percent and absolute budget increase or decrease).
- For each unit, please also provide the source of funds used for expenditures (e.g., tuition, ticket sales, donor funds, central).
- For each academic unit, please list the number of TT faculty, career track faculty, instructors, adjuncts, and graduate TAs.
- For each academic unit participating in research, please list the total number of graded credit hours or AAFTEs and provide a secondary column providing a ratio of faculty to the total number of graded credit hours taught.
- For each academic unit, please list the total research expenditures, the total amount of funds requested from external sources, the average overhead rate, and the success rate for each grant.
- All significant capital investments related to facilities and their source of funding and to which college/unit these projects will reside. An accounting of how these facilities will be maintained is also information that is informative.
- Please detail the composition of the Provost’s budget committee and address why there is no proportional representation of faculty on the committee (faculty in administration roles do not count).
Finally, with the Provost’s stated commitment to equity, please address plans to realize pay equity between men and women at the university. Additionally, please detail concrete plans to realize parity between units with respect to rectifying the penalty imposed on core instructional units by the current enrollment-based budgeting model.
Please avoid deflecting this request simply by stating that such information can be found on ir.wsu.edu. Unit-level data are not listed. There are dashboards and information that faculty are not allowed to see. The data requested appear to exist based on the dashboards, but the information presented does not provide the granularity needed to make data-driven decisions that impact individual units.
It is recognized that a report of this magnitude cannot be addressed within a single session of the faculty senate, however, this information is essential to factually assess the health of the institution. At a minimum, a college-level overview should be presented to the faculty senate, with the remaining slides provided as supplementary information.
Transparency will set you free. ~Anonymous Faculty
Response
The Faculty Senate Executive Officers have been notified of this forum post and will respond back once more information becomes available.
Comments
This is an excellent request. However I would like to see a bit longer time series that begins with the tenure of the current administration.
I also agree completely with this post and its call for increased financial transparency. My post “A Proposal for Shared Financial Governance” proposes a mechanism for the Senate to demand this type of financial information, funding to support a subset (the Budget Committee) to invest in really *understanding* it, and a regular-occurring advisory Senate vote on the fiscal year budget.