Report from the Council on Planning and Budget
Over the past two years, the Council on Planning and Budget (CPB) has taken on a newly active role in the academic planning and budget process. The Administration has given us full access to the strategic plans and annual budget requests of the twenty-odd campus units along with the Chancellor’s responses to these requests. As a result, we have developed procedures for analyzing, discussing, and reporting on these documents that we continue to refine on the basis of our growing experience. At the end of the academic year, after hearing the Executive Vice Chancellor’s budget presentation and completing our analyses of each unit, CPB distributes to the Senate leadership and the central Administration the planning and budget portion of our Annual Report, in which we sum up our unit analyses and pinpoint major overall problems—two years ago, the College; last year, the Library; this year, graduate student funding. This year, we intend to distribute this report to the Faculty Executive Councils (FECs) as well. CPB also participates in the Academic Program (“Eighth-Year”) Review process, most importantly by providing a preliminary analysis of the Self-Review designed to suggest questions about the unit/department for the use of the inside and outside reviewers. This year we are being asked by the Graduate and Undergraduate Councils to prepare a budget template that will be included in the instructions for the Self-Review.
Capital Programs at UCLA
The other half of CPB’s activity, contributing the faculty perspective on campus short- and long-term capital programs, has been less well defined. Our chief avenue of communication for the past few years has been our participation in the Chancellor’s Capital Planning Advisory Committee (CCPAC); we trust that this group or a similar one will remain active. With regard to long-range capital planning we are preparing a tentative agenda, following a suggestion of EVC Neuman, for a retreat/convocation on the topic of “A 2020 Vision for the University” in order to provide some preliminary thinking before the campus designs its next Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) or Campus Master Plan, now anticipated toward the end of the decade.
Interconnection with FECs
A crucial factor in CPB's budgetary and planning analyses is our interaction with FECs, which we see as our chief means of ascertaining the needs and views of faculty within each unit. We are emphasizing contact between the CPB member assigned to each unit and the FEC chair of that unit. In past years we have sent out letters requesting information from the FEC chairs; this year we are encouraging our members to initiate direct personal contact. These relationships are not only of interest to CPB. After distributing the names of our unit representatives at the first meeting of the Council of FEC Chairs (CFC), we were pleasantly surprised when a number of FEC chairs took the initiative of contacting us. These contacts permit our membership to obtain a faculty perspective on the budgetary and planning concerns of individual units while helping “raise consciousness” about the budget within the FECs and the faculty as a whole.
Budget Issues on the Horizon
The above falls in the category of “business as usual,” which should not be made light of, particularly when this “usual” reflects the enormous progress in shared governance made over the last few years. The question on all minds this year, however, is how we should deal with the State’s current budgetary crisis, which threatens major funding cutbacks for UCLA and its sister campuses.
One of the difficulties of the present moment, which may also prove a blessing, is that no one from President Atkinson on down knows exactly how much of a crisis we are in. Much will depend on the Governor’s post-election implementation of the authorized discretional supplementary cuts of up to $750 million, involving a maximum of 5% of the budget of each state agency, of which UC is one. Five percent would be a drastic cut, compared to--and on top of--this year’s reductions of about 2% with respect to last year. We anticipate that any such cuts will be targeted rather than across the board, perhaps on the model of this year’s 10% reduction in organized research funding. This will become clearer in November, and still clearer in January when the Governor makes his 2003-04 budget proposal; meanwhile, we remain in a state of alert.
One thing we must remain particularly alert about is pressure from the Governor’s office to increase faculty workload. The current load, mandated by the University’s Partnership Agreement with the Governor, is 4.8 “primary courses” per regular faculty. The recent audit carried out by the Bureau of State Audits (BSA), shows that we are in fact carrying a load of 4.9, but it was also discovered that 28% of all UC courses have fewer than six students and 13%, fewer than three; some of the latter group are indistinguishable from independent study. The BSA recommends tightening the definition of “primary courses” and, more generally, compiling far more detailed information than in the past on the workload of the various classes of instructors at UC. (Fortunately for UCLA, where standard measures suggest that faculty teach the least, the University does not release campus-specific data to the State.) It is important for us to devise a way of reacting to this initiative that is neither defensive nor supine, that will relieve inequities in our workload distribution without furnishing government with a means to extract more teaching from us for less money.
Vigilance Today, Guarded Optimism Tomorrow
There are two main points I think it important to make about the current situation. The first is that, with the support of the Senate leadership, CPB is making it our top priority to be closely involved in any emergency planning activity that may arise, both as a partner in discussions with the Administration and as a two-way conduit for faculty information and opinion. Members of CPB, as well as of other Senate Councils, have been included in the action groups recently appointed by the Chancellor to devise means of maintaining UCLA's competitiveness in the present budgetary climate, and we will make sure that the Senate is informed of these groups' agendas and that its concerns are clearly articulated in their deliberations.
My second point is a more general one. Although things look bleak for the next year or two because of structural imbalances in the State’s revenue stream, we should not anticipate, and above all not focus our planning toward, an overall diminution of the University of California or of UCLA, in either funding or quality. Not only do we anticipate continued student growth in “Tidal Wave II,” but California is an increasingly wealthy state with a diversified and functioning economy—a state that, notwithstanding our endemic feelings of vulnerability, desires and has shown its willingness to support the nation’s premier public university system. We should continue to plan in the long term for growth and transformation, even as we fight in the short term to protect what we already have.
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In the interests of promoting interest in and discussion of the budgetary process, we are posting for general information on our web site a “CPB Manual” that brings together the Council’s various functions with guidelines for carrying them out. This manual will remain an active document subject to continual revision and improvement.
Eric Gans, Chair
Council on Planning and Budget