Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
bjbj s wonderful to see you all. There is probably some more coming that will come in.
The first thing I have to tell you is that this is being recorded. So if there s anything
you don t want to hear yourself say later on, you might not want to say it. The reason
we re recording this is because we want to start changing the format the way these meetings
go. We re going to broadcast the Flash talks that are going to be given as well as all
the other information being given out today. Now, that is everything except the final Q&A.
so, you do get your chance at me and all the other associate Deans at the end without being
recorded. As I mentioned, we re going to try and do format for the faculty meetings, because,
quite frankly they have been boring. And the ID is not just give you information or talk
at you but, to use the faculty meetings, both in the spring and the fall, as ways to start
networking among each other. To start hearing what some of our new faculty, our more seasoned
faculty are doing in their research and projects and to really start a more interactive meeting
format. So, we ll see if this works, and after it does work really well today, make sure
you tell your colleagues to continue it on in the fall. Now I am going to begin with
a real quick update about something that is near and dear to all of us: money. Now, as
my little graph says, it s been a wild drive the last several months, as far as budget.
And a wild ride at UNT; we have had a new exciting legislation session going on, we
ve had a new president t his academic year appointed, we have had a new Provost, a new
Dean, so lots of things happening. Now, the legislation session continues. The house passed
HB1, which is the House Budget bill, which you probably have all heard is a pretty draconian
budget. It guts Medicaid, public education, and has a profound impact on higher education.
Now, what looks to be the senate bill, is a little softer, there is a little more money
in the senate bill. There will be some negotiation after the senate passes this bill as they
negotiate to the final bill. I expect that we will continue to see pretty drastic cuts
to Medicaid but, those have softened up quite a bit in the last couple weeks. Public education,
you re all hearing about in the school districts that you are in, there s some pretty severe
cuts being proposed right now by the school districts in response to the budgets coming
out. Again, I don t think we ll be at the place in a month or so that we are at right
now. I think everybody s going to say, we really don t want to cut 800 teachers in a
particular school district, which is being discussed in school district after school
district, so I expect we ll see from change in that. We ll also see something happen,
a little softening up in the higher education budgets. Now, in a perverse sense, UNT has
come out pretty well relative in the budget process. We haven t been strong politically,
so we don t have a lot of line items, and line items have been the target. So, unlike
our colleagues at UT, A&M, and Tech, we re not seeing a lot of our funding cut because
of line items. Some of those line items and special funding will come back in, I expect,
as negotiations happen, but we re going to see severe cuts at many of our colleague institutions.
We ve brought in revenue through enrollment, through tuition, and we expect to see that
continue. We re in the fastest-growing metroplex in the country, we do have capacity though
some of us may question that as we see our packed classrooms and our individual class
schedules, but we do have capacity to grow, and that is someplace that we can grow, and
as I ll talk about in a minute that we ll see that the revenue coming in can fund the
other things that we want to do at the university. Now, the university asked each of the colleges,
each of the units, to prepare a 95% budget scenario; that is a five-percent cut. Arts
& Sciences budget is roughly $45 million, so 5% cuts $2.5 million or so. So, that s
a pretty severe cut. In Arts & Sciences we ve prepared a budget which minimized, as much
as possible, the impact to people on campus here today. So, there were a few anticipated
cuts to some temporary lecture positions, but that was the brunt of it, so we were able
to make our 5% cut scenario primarily through freezing current searches, not fulfilling
searches from people who had resigned or had gone on the other positions, or retirements,
and so we were able to make our cut scenario with minimum impact on people currently drawing
a paycheck. Now, I think the president, when he heard the budget presentations from the
individual colleges, I think he was kind of shocked. We were on a pretty lean operation
on UNT. Some of the colleges proposed zeroing out their MNO budget to make their 5% cut
scenario. MNO budgets are low enough already, going to zero is probably not reasonable.
We proposed, and it would come out to about 22-25 faculty cuts, cuts to faculty positions,
and I think that was a pretty sobering presentation to the president saying, As we re talking
about growing, that this is what a 5% cut would mean. So, academic affairs did not receive
this across the board 5% cut. So what the vice president for academic affairs did is
to take the cut that was handed to academic affairs and to allocate that highly differentially
across the units; across the colleges. So, some colleges received an increase to their
budget. Some colleges received a pretty severe cut. Arts & Sciences, we came out okay. So,
our overall cut was 0.9%, so we re going to be able to make that cut by rebalancing some
positions, and so we re going to come out relatively okay through this budget process.
Now, there s also the projection for enrollment increase, and we passed a 2.8% tuition increase
to the students. The anticipated revenue from the tuition as well as the reinvestment from
the voluntary separation program will be invested into faculty positions. So, the provost projects
hiring on the magnitude of 50 positions across the university. So, those of you who are chairs,
I know you re busy right now, and your faculty members know how busy you are preparing these
requests, which are due to the provost in, what s today, two weeks, or so? So, we re
going to be reviewing these at the college level, prioritizing them, and passing them
on the provost and hopefully getting decisions very quickly on what positions are approved.
Now this in an incredible position to be in, so we re hiring. As our colleagues around
the country are talking about furlough days, closing down programs, eliminating positions,
UNT, we re hiring. So we re taking the money we re projecting from tuition and voluntary
separation and reinvesting. Now the reinvestment will be highly strategic it will not be across
the board. So, we re going to be making decisions very, very intentionally on what areas we
need to grow, and there s two things we re going to be looking at, and that is balancing
instructional excellence, meeting our curriculum needs, and also growing programs to national
prominence, and those are going to be highly targeted, and may change over the years. As
we move programs forward, we ll be re-evaluating and look at the next programs to invest in
again. We re going to have to be much more differential, we re going to have to be much
more targeted in the sort of investments we make in the college, and so as a theme that
you re going to be hearing form the president, from the provost, from the deans, and from
your chairs, and as we go forward, we can t move every program forward immediately to
national prominence, so we re going to have to select programs and say, re going to make
significant investments to move these programs forward as opposed to kind of lukewarm investments
across the board. Now that s not saying anyone s going to be left out. Its high investments
in an area, get it up to where it s running at national prominence, international prominence
level, and then look for the next opportunity. So we ll be going through each year, the process
at the college, and saying, okay, now where are we going to move forward? And as the economy
of the country and the state improves we ll have more money to make these investments,
as well as continuing to hire to meet our curriculum needs. Now I put up this little
graphic to s going to be quite a balancing act over the next couple of years. We need
the revenue from student growth to be able to fund our programs. So we re not going to
be able to count on state funding, federal funding looks kind of iffy right now. The
budget being put forth by the House of Representatives is pretty lean. So we re going to have to
be generating our revenue through student growth as well as more engagement with foundations,
corporations, other places that we can find to support the many programs that we do have.
So it is going to be a balancing act. The president has projected for us to be at 45,000
students behind 2016. That s roughly 4-5% growth a year, which is about what we ve been
doing previously. It s going to be tough. There s no way around it, we re going to need
buildings, we re going to need faculty, we re going to need new large classrooms, we
re going to need advising services there s a lot that s going to go into making the experience
for the students that we are planning to bring in, [and] making it a quality experience for
them. So it s all of us working together, quite creatively over the next couple of years
to make this happen. But it s the way we re going to have to be to invest in the programs
that we want and to move forward with the university and so, I m not going to sugarcoat
that, it s going to be a challenge. Now if you ve noticed a theme in the graphics I have
is kind of forces of nature so, there are these forces of nature out there and like
we re seeing it is an incredibly interesting time in higher education. So I encourage you
all to read the Chronicle of Higher Education, read the publications out that your organizations
professional organizations are putting out, because the landscape is changing. The governor
of Pennsylvania, for instance, proposed cutting state support to higher education by 50%.
Now, that s an extreme position I m sure he s staking out to compromise back from, but
50%! So that s a pretty incredible number. The other number I found equally incredible
was, at Penn State, state funding is at 8% now. 8%. And they ll just move that to 4%.
Amazing, the level of funding out-funding has dropped at state supported institutions.
And I think we ll continue to see this trend. We re seeing it all over the country, where
state legislators are pulling back from this promise to support higher education. So we
re going to have to be much more entrepreneurial in supporting ourselves, because I don t see
the states doing it at this time. So I think we re just seeing a fundamental change. Another
example, the chancellor for the University of Madison the University of Wisconsin Madison
has proposed going out on their own. So jettisoning all the rest of the UW system and becoming
just the University of Wisconsin Madison, m kay? Pretty bold move if this goes through
and there seems to be some momentum in the Wisconsin s legislature to make this happen.
This starts changing the playing field pretty dramatically and there are many other flagship
universities in state systems that are proposing doing the same thing. So we ll continue to
see this kind of tsunami (?!) change in higher education. And maybe, again one of those perverse
ways, we re well situated for it. We don t have tremendous capital investments in particular
programs. We ve just started investing heavily in eras in plant signaling and computational
science, but we re still pretty nimble. We don t have huge research enterprises that
we have suddenly pivot because that particular federal agency funding that now is not it
doesn t have the money anymore. So, we have a real opportunity to find what we want to
be right now and to pick some areas where we can really achieve national prominence
and get ahead of the wave, instead of saying we want to be like because it s changed. So
I don t know a university out there that I could say I want to be like right now because
that whole model is changing. hOYg h;m) hTqY :pf1 [Content_Types].xml #!MB ;c=1 _rels/.rels
theme/theme/themeManager.xml sQ}# theme/theme/theme1.xml G$$DA : BR {i5@R V*[_X ,l\Y Ssd+r] 5\|E Vky-
V4Ej 6NGU s?^V *