Budget cutting as a component of strategic planning
It is clear in talking to people on campus that most of us are worried about the effects of budget cuts we have taken over the last two years, as well as about what additional cuts may be on the way in the coming years. It is natural that people focus mainly on the impacts on their own programs. I share here the perspective of the central administration, where we need to focus on the overall health of the campus and not only the effects on individual programs. It is thus worth thinking about how our approach to budget cutting fits with the strategic planning efforts that have gone on over the last several years.
Since I took on the role of Campus Provost/Executive Vice Chancellor in 2005, I have thought a lot about how to advance the quality of UC Santa Cruz in both research and education. The first step in thinking about this is to be clear about the mission of the university. My view is that the role of a public university is to serve society. We do that primarily (though not exclusively) through educating future generations of citizens and through research that advances the quality of life for citizens.
We have the responsibility to expose our students to different modes of thinking so that they become independent thinkers. Our science and engineering majors need to learn about the social impacts of scientific studies and their applications. Our arts, social science, and humanities students need to understand scientific concepts that will affect the world. This perspective is, I think, reflected in the faculty's formulation of the new campus General Education requirements. To be effective in providing this type of education for our students, we need a campus that has strong educational programs across all of our disciplines.
To advance that goal, I concentrated on two things when I first became CPEVC. The first was to focus on moving more of the resources of the campus toward the academic divisions in order to provide them with resources to create the strongest academic programs they could with the resources available to us. The second was to develop a campus-wide academic plan that mapped out how we could most productively invest in academic programs as the campus grew in enrollment and, therefore, faculty.
Investment in academic programs
In the first area, since becoming CPEVC in 2005-06, I allocated funding and support for 66 new faculty FTE, restored previously withheld instruction and research support, committed over $20 million for start-up costs associated with new faculty appointments, and created new teaching assistant positions in response to growth in our undergraduate student population. Despite the impact of budget cuts and the concomitant slow-down in the recruitment of new faculty, UCSC hired 135 new faculty between 2005-06 and the start of this fiscal year. After taking into account retirements and other separations, the number of filled faculty positions has grown from 512 in 2005-06 to over 550 in 2009-10.
We have increased support for our graduate students by allocating additional funds for graduate student fellowships, providing funding for the Disciplinary Communications Initiative, and increasing funding for the library collection. We have also invested in many promising new research initiatives, and this fiscal year I bolstered the flexible funding available to the divisions by allocating overhead to them generated on private grants that have originating sources fully funded by the federal government. Central campus resources totaling over $20 million were provided to support the construction of the Digital Arts Facility, McHenry Library Addition, and the Biomedical Science Building. We have also sought to make employment at UCSC more affordable to our faculty by building homes at Ranch View Terrace and creating the low-interest option supplemental home loan program.
The importance of investing in academic programs should be obvious. They directly support expression of the reason for the existence of the university: teaching and research. To understand how such investment can be maximally productive, however, we need to be clear about how resources are most effectively used in making decisions at the campus level.
Development of a campus strategic academic plan
While the campus had for many years regularly obtained planning documents from academic departments and divisions, these had not been integrated into a campus-wide academic plan, one that could reveal how allocations of the limited resources available (even when we were in a growth mode) are made strategically to create strength across the campus and have maximum overall impact. Making it clear to the public where UCSC is headed is also critically important to increasing private gift support for individual programs and the campus as a whole. We thus engaged in the development of a strategic academic plan for the campus.
The plan began with very high-level assumptions about the distribution of faculty positions across the existing five academic divisions. These assumptions drew on comparisons with comparable institutions. The result was a model of how faculty could be balanced across the divisions so that each division would have the ability to develop strong academic programs. Previous attempts to give a campus-level view of the productivity of academic programs focused entirely on student credit hours as a measure of faculty productivity. That approach seemed to me to be inappropriate for a research university whose function involved both the production of new knowledge, as well as the dissemination of knowledge to students.
Instead, we took a more nuanced view of how to generate divisional sizes in a way that could create strong research profiles, as well as meet the curricular needs of students. We looked at faculty distributions on other campuses, as well as at the particular interests and history of UCSC. After much discussion, we proposed what percentage of the faculty should be affiliated with each of the five existing divisions. There was no effort in this process to determine within these broad divisional categories distributions to individual programs. The assumption has been that divisions would make their own decisions, perhaps in collaboration with other divisions, on how to balance their anticipated resources across programs to achieve the best balance of productivity.
Once we established an estimate of how big (in terms of faculty positions) each division would ultimately be after anticipated enrollment growth, we asked deans to develop realistic divisional plans given the faculty resources they could anticipate. They began, appropriately, with plans from every department to create integrated academic divisional plans. We asked each program to assess where their field was heading, what their strengths were in terms of contributing to their field, and how they should direct growth resources to maximize their contributions in the future. In creating a divisional plan, deans were asked to maximize the impacts of new resources across the entire division.
Once the deans submitted plans from the academic divisions, Vice Provost of Academic Affairs Alison Galloway and I reviewed the individual plans looking for patterns across divisions that could create a more integrated campus plan that would support the ambitions of our faculty. VPAA Galloway looked at the plans in terms of how department goals could be categorized into a small number of priorities. I looked at them in terms of how campus strengths and ambitions could contribute to the needs of society in both research and teaching. These perspectives were put together in the then-draft strategic vision plan for the campus that could be realized at the end of an anticipated period of enrollment growth. The final plan is available on the web.
This high-level vision led to an implementation plan that assigned roles to each principal officer in order to make the vision a reality. It also prompted the development of a plan to monitor a variety of metrics to follow our progress.
In deciding to allocate new resources to academic divisions under the campus plan, we looked, in part, at how close each division was to the long-term size projected for it. In the previous decade, different divisions had grown at very different rates, resulting in substantial growth for some and near stagnation for others. I sought to compensate for this trend by making differential allocations that would bring the divisions more in line with the direction of the campus academic plan.
Impacts of change in budget climate on strategic planning
These plans were created at a time when we were expecting substantial growth in enrollment and in new state resources for the campus. However, two years ago we began facing a very different situation: one in which no new state funds were provided for increases in enrollment, and our existing budgets were substantially reduced due to a state budget crisis. In effect, we lost both the new funds anticipated for enrollment growth and had less state funding to support the programs and students that we already had.
The approach we took for the first round of budget cuts was to protect academic programs, health and safety functions, informational technology, and University Relations by assigning them a much smaller cut than administrative functions. This round of cuts resulted in cuts to institutional and academic support units ranging from 1 percent to 5 percent and a direct cut to academic units of about 1 percent. In dollar terms, a $2.9 million reduction was allocated to support units and $1 million was allocated to academic units.
This approach of protecting the core academic functions of instruction and research by making smaller cuts to academic units seemed appropriate because we wanted to continue to accommodate the needs of existing faculty and students. However, it is an approach that cannot be sustained in the long run. There are critical administrative support functions that are necessary for campus operations and the effective support of core academic functions. At some point, cutting administrative support functions has serious negative impacts on core academic functions (consider how few academics we could retain on campus if we could not get the payroll out in a timely manner).
This was particularly problematic since a series of budget cuts and differential investments over a decade or more resulted in some administrative programs being stretched very thin, leaving them less able to absorb additional cuts. These services are a necessary part of UCSC's future, and we must make campus planning decisions with an eye on creating a sustainable model for UCSC's future excellence. Thus, when we had to take a second round of large budget cuts this past year, we needed a different approach to assigning budget cuts.
The approach we took for 2009-10 was to try to assess the impact to all campus functions of cuts of various sizes for each academic and academic support division on campus. We asked each principal officer to create scenarios anticipating a budget cut of 10 percent, and a budget advisory committee reviewed all the scenarios. Overall, I think that approach yielded budget-cut targets based on good reasoning, even though no one was happy with any of the cuts we had to impose.
For administrative support units, we tried to be sensitive to the ability of the units to absorb additional cuts. For academic divisions, we looked at the level of cuts we thought they could absorb both from the point of view of growth they had achieved over the previous decade and the roles that they have in the current climate. In addition, we considered short-term consequences of divisional roles, as well as long-term campus consequences. Thus, we looked at the need for the campus to provide instruction for students and the need for the campus to generate new sources of revenues to offset the decreased state investment in higher education.
We accordingly assigned slightly smaller percentage cuts (a differential cut of about one percent) to some divisions. Considerations when allotting these differential cuts included historical student-interest patterns, the ability of particular disciplines to more effectively compete for grant funds from federal programs or private sources, and allocation of FTEs in each division relative to the FTE targets articulated in the academic plan.
Strategic planning going forward
To move forward from here, we are trying to assess the magnitude of the cuts we might have to endure in the coming year (a lot of educated guesswork at this point in time) and discussing how we can improve on last year's process with regard to consultation and transparency. This involves figuring out how to ask better questions at the beginning of the process, developing a process that allows for earlier consultation with the Academic Senate, staff, and students, assessing campus-level impacts that might not be clear from just gathering information from individual campus units, and a strategy for more effective campus communication as we go through the process.
With the huge cuts the campus has endured over the last two years, there are no easy cuts to be made. Any new cuts will cause inconveniences, weakening of programs, and pain at many levels. I hope we can approach this task with the understanding that we must make decisions that support the primary research and teaching missions of the campus, realizing that this is a complex organization and how these missions are best supported is not always obvious. In particular, we should be prepared to acknowledge that in some cases the best way to support our core academic mission is to provide funding for critical support functions in administrative units. We may also have to face the uncomfortable fact that the best path to sustaining quality in instruction and research may be to reorganize academic and administrative units to better support academic programs, faculty, and students.
I appreciate that the prospect of further funding reductions is dispiriting. I hope, however, that as we carry out our work, we can focus on how we can continue doing this work to the best of our ability with the resources we have and not only focus on resources we may lose.
