Some additional thoughts on the budget
The chapter’s resolution and my e-mail to the bargaining unit yesterday prompted several e-mails to me in the evening and overnight, and a few have asked why the union chapter isn’t officially recognizing a possibility of budget problems and at least looking at a worst-case scenario. So here is my individual (not chapter) analysis:
USF is stretched in terms of budgets because of state underfunding in general as well as the failure of the Florida legislature to give public colleges and universities the authority to raise undergraduate tuition 5%. That structural problem is different from the governor’s request for agencies to plan for a 10% reduction from the new fiscal year’s state budget and a parallel request by the university system’s chancellor for each university to make such plans.
There are other funding threats, as well: next year’s state budget, a lower hit rate in many federal grant agencies, and the giant sword hanging over everyone in the state’s public colleges and universities, a referendum in January that would dramatically cut local property taxes and revenues, cuts which will inevitably affect the state-funded agencies as well. On the other hand, there are some possible upswings in revenue, from an increase in graduate-student tuition recently approved by the USF Trustees to a newly-filed lawsuit by former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham and others challenging the authority of the legislature to set undergraduate tuition, a lawsuit that seeks to shift that authority to the state’s Board of Governors. (That lawsuit will take months to work its way through the state courts.) Sorting out the net effects of all these changes is difficult.
I have no problems with faculty providing suggestions to the administration about budget items, but I have deep concerns about doing so in a crisis context, as if the only time when faculty should be involved in budgets is when there is a threat and when the administration asks the faculty for permission to erode working conditions and educational quality. If the chapter had been inclined to address specific issues in the budget right now, I would have had two strong suggestions — to talk with the administration about the ownership of information (and I mean the real information about choices and flexibility, not the way that spending is reported), and to make sure that any collaboration on budget planning is multi-year, not confined to a single perceived or real crisis.
In a collective bargaining relationship, management generally retains the prerogative to manage budgets, and at USF, the administration historically has kept budgeting decisions very close to the chest in terms of where the flexibility really is (as opposed to publicly-reported information, which is a matter of public record). That is their legal right, as far as I know. That also doesn’t have to be the case: I know several education union leaders who report a collaborative relationship with their school boards, and the crucial factor is some agreement about shared ownership of information. That doesn’t mean that key people on each side trust each other without double-checking figures — I know that double-checking happens! But there is a level of trust in several issues, and one is the willingness to share information.
The second issue of trust in information is about its use. Some colleagues have suggested that asking for faculty input is a method administrators can use for providing political cover, for legitimizing whatever decisions are made. That concern speaks to the second issue of trust in sharing information, trust that the exchange of information will be used to inform discussions rather than as a weapon (and the reciprocal willingness to give up that leverage if it will benefit the collective-bargaining relationship). At least some of my colleagues distrust the administration’s motives in asking for input, and I would be foolish to assume that such motives can’t exist or fail to guard against the possibility. I am well aware that this is a two-way issue. I suspect that administrators can point to several examples when individual faculty members have been more intent on embarrassing administrators with information than accomplishing a specific end. I can’t really blame administrators for acting with that history in mind.
That persistent dynamic can probably change, and I hope it will. But it would not be the wisest effort to try to make that change in a crisis environment, without considerable discussions about how to build up the trust in both the information itself and also how it might be used.