Faculty members demonstrated concern with Syracuse University’s proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year, citing issues with the budget’s lack of transparency and a growing number of administrators.

The proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year will be presented to the Board of Trustees for approval Thursday. Faculty members have cited other issues, such as a lack of transparency and potentially unnecessary spending. Vice Chancellor and Provost Eric Spina and Senior Vice President of Public Affairs Kevin Quinn countered some of those arguments, saying the growth in the number of administrators helps the student body.

After being a member of SU’s Budget Committee for more than a year, Jeffrey Stonecash, a political science professor, said he still had unanswered questions about the bigger picture, so he began to look into the budget himself.

“You start piecing it together and reading the financial reports of the university and you sort of can piece the whole thing together,” Stonecash said about research he did using the Web and documents obtained at budget meetings.

Stonecash said the growth in administration is a countrywide problem. He said he is not convinced the number of administrators has been looked at seriously enough, especially considering that tuition is increasing and faculty are being told the budget is in trouble.

While most universities froze faculty searches, SU hired the largest amount of faculty in 20 years during the past year, Spina said. But the number of administrators has not followed suit, he said.

“In the last two years we have not hired a lot of administrators,” Spina said. “People have been coming and going, but the net number has actually decreased.”

The ratio of administrators and support staff to faculty decreased from 1.9-to-1 in 1998 to 1.7-to-1 in 2010, according to a new analysis process that was created last year to look at growth of administration. An analysis of changing director titles from 2000 to 2008 shows that 27 of the 63 new director positions were in the schools and colleges.

Spina also said faculty has been shuffled, with promotions accounting for many of the new administrative positions. Of the 198 increases in director titles between 2000 and 2008, 111 were promotions, according to the analysis. Spina said measuring growth by the number of administrators is a false indicator because people are promoted, but no one is hired to fill their old positions.

“Look back six or eight years ago and there were a certain number of directors, and you look now and it’s a bigger number,” Spina said. “But then if you actually ask the harder question — how many of those people have been promoted to a new title versus how many people have been hired — you get a very different answer.”

The campaign to raise $1 billion by 2012 has also contributed to the rise of administrators, said Quinn, senior vice president of public affairs. The university brought in administrators to the campaign, which will later help students by funding financial aid and new buildings.

Despite Spina and Quinn’s statements that administrators will help advance the university, Stonecash and other faculty members remain weary of the university’s budget priorities.

Student protest and faculty discussion has kept the budget a current issue with a call for more transparency and increased awareness about the budget.

“I’m still really troubled about the endowment,” Stonecash said. “I am worried that the budget is not being constrained, and the solution to that is to withdraw principal from the endowment.”

Stonecash and Robert McClure, a university senator and professor of political science and public affairs, have spoken out against the budget, looking at increased spending on financial aid, more higher-paid professionals and employee benefits as areas of concern.

“I’ve had a growing sense of uneasiness for three, four, five years, as it seemed to me expenditure were rising rapidly,” McClure said.

Difficult economic times make budget woes particularly worrisome, McClure said. He also said the budget structure and expenditures need to be more transparent. He was not convinced all university expenditures were necessary, such as spending on athletics and university promotion.

“I’m concerned that I don’t yet have a true accounting of all the expenditures and where money is coming from to fund some of the expenditures,” McClure said. “One is they’re from the endowment, the other from the academic enterprise of the institution itself.”

McClure said the loss of the resources would affect the missions of the individual schools.

Stonecash also raised questions about financial aid, but he said that did not mean he was against it. He said he depended on financial aid to get through college but is concerned with what increased financial aid meant for the budget.

McClure said he knows making serious changes to the budget itself or the overall process would take a long time.

“You can’t change these things overnight,” McClure said.

 

Published on March 10, 2010 at 12:00 pm

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