The questions and comments can be downloaded as a PDF

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Dean Wendy Wintersteen
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dean Michael Whiteford
December 15, 2009—3 p.m.
Great Hall, Memorial Union

LAS Dean Whiteford and CALS Dean Wintersteen began the forum with comments on budget planning for Fiscal Year 2011 and a set of slides (a PDF document of the slideset is available here [link]). The deans made the following key points:
• Faculty, staff and student input and ideas are welcomed — but needed quickly. The budget planning timeline is short. The university must finalize its plan in March 2010.
• LAS and CALS are holding a series of open forums to gather input from faculty, staff and students because of the many formal and informal linkages between the colleges, and the many shared connections, especially in the biological and social sciences.
• The colleges are planning for what could be a 20 percent state budget reduction beginning July 1, 2010 — as the 10 percent mid-year FY10 reduction is made permanent and the expectation that another 10 percent cut could be made prior to the start of FY11.
• Cuts of this magnitude are unprecedented and will require vertical cuts — elimination or significant restructuring of departments, units and programs.
• The expectation is that each college will emerge from the budget crisis smaller and more focused.
• The two overall budget strategies are cost savings (including elimination or reorganization of departments and programs) and revenue generation (including growing enrollments, instituting differential tuition and expanding distance education).
• Goals of budget planning would be to continue to provide a high-quality education, maintain student credit hours, protect research excellence and reputation, and protect programs addressing critical needs of Iowa, the nation and world.

Two more LAS-CALS open forums are scheduled: 3-4:30 p.m., Jan. 14, 2010, in the Sun Room, and 1-2:30 p.m., Jan. 26, 2010, in the Great Hall.

At any time, send your comments, questions and ideas by e-mail to Dean Whiteford [jefe@iastate.edu] and Dean Wintersteen [wwinters@iastate.edu].

Below is an edited summary of questions, responses and comments heard at the Dec. 15 open forum:

Question: California raised tuition 33%. Have the Iowa Regents worked with the Iowa Legislature on a plan so that further budget reductions could be offset by tuition increases?

Response: The Legislature may believe there are still places to cut within the Regents universities. The Regents propose to increase tuition next year by 6 percent; a double-digit increase is unlikely.

Comment from audience: Consider setting tuition at 103 percent of what it actually costs for an undergraduate education. There’s already a lot of financial aid built into tuition, based on skills and needs, and other resources provided by federal and state governments. We should state that this is what it actually costs to educate a student, and then provide as much aid as possible. The extra 3 percent is included because we want to improve how we educate undergraduates.

Question: It seems unlikely that tenured faculty would be eliminated, so how would closing departments save money?

Response: The savings would not come immediately and might take 5-6 years to fully accomplish. Closing departments may work because over time we would begin to defund departments through no new hires and begin to close undergraduate and graduate programs. When a department is closed, some faculty may leave immediately, others may leave over time and for some we may try to find appropriate positions in other departments. What we accomplish when we combine departments is much the same—we would achieve some efficiencies through reduced administration, and our faculty numbers decrease through attrition until we reach a new, appropriate faculty level. Any decisions on closing or combining departments must be very carefully and strategically considered. We do not know how the president and university will respond, or the process that would be followed, to a strategy that recommends terminating tenured faculty.

Question: I haven’t seen anything other than routine messages about the budget. I haven’t seen any ideas other than nibbling away here and there. Where are the unprecedented measures that administration will take? If we protect tenured faculty and unionized staff, where exactly are we saving money? Relying on attrition is not strategic.

Response: We are at the start of the budget conversation. Nothing has been decided. We're required to give regular updates to the university administration on how we're going to meet reductions. However, it will not be possible to make these deep cuts without extreme measures. The best way is not through attrition, but to take actions more directly. We’re not at the point yet where we know what decision will be made on tenured or tenure-track faculty, or lecturers. Right now we don’t know what process we will need to follow. We need your ideas to develop the best plan. We want it to be open and transparent.

Question: Where can we see data on student credit hours, FTEs, majors, etc., to be better informed?

Response: Check the university Fact Book online, http://www.ir.iastate.edu/factbk.html. If you want more specific information from LAS or CALS, e-mail a question to one of the deans.

Question: We keep hearing a $50 million reduction number. How is that calculated? Are the federal stimulus (ARRA) funds included?

Response: The $50 million is made up of about $25 million from the mid-year reduction in state funding, about $10-15 million from anticipated cuts next spring and $10-15 million needed to replace one-time ARRA funds that were used for instructors to meet student demand for courses, as well as funds that would be needed to pay potential faculty-staff salary increases, funds for mandatory costs increases (e.g., utilities) and other resources needed to ensure functioning of the university.

Question: I understand you want transparency, but can you give us details or examples on evaluative measures you’ll use or examples of how you’ll evaluate?

Response: We are evaluating our decisions using traditional data, including student credit hours, external grants and other performance measures. The Resource Management Model is driven by tuition and indirect cost-recovery, and they are huge factors in how we consider any evaluation of performance. It comes down to teaching and research performance and prominence. We have nothing to share right now because we're at the beginning of our quest to collect information. We hope to have ideas to share by the end of January. The timetable we’re on is to finalize a plan by March 2010.

Question: What about NTEs (non-tenure eligible faculty)? The elimination of NTEs would mean a loss of a lot of teaching or push the remaining faculty to do more teaching and reduce their research programs.

Response: We see NTEs having important and critical roles on our campus. Some NTEs have multiple-year contracts to fulfill teaching responsibilities.

Question: You plan by the end of January to have a plan in place. That's an extremely short timeframe. What kind of input are you really looking for from faculty?

Response: The timing is not good because people are not on campus during the winter break, but there is nothing conspiratorial about it. The colleges are on a deadline to present to central administration preliminary budget plans. What we know is that in February and March budgetary decisions will be made. We don’t like the pace, but we have to participate. Our idea is to get conversations going as early as possible to get input from faculty and staff. Both colleges have put out requests for input. We also are waiting for direction from central administration. We know the Regents will approve budgets by May, so getting preliminary plans out to faculty and staff by the end of January is something we have to do. It is critically important that our departments start having conversations now on the future of their programs. Our college advisory groups continue to provide advice to us. What may be most helpful to us is for a department to focus on how its own programs can efficiently operate on a smaller budget. What are the things we do that are most essential? What are the things we can eliminate and still be productive to do important teaching, deliver the same or more student credit hours and perform high-quality research?

Comment from audience: Tenured faculty should only be released in a worst-case scenario. Decisions on program reductions or eliminations should come from faculty committees. There are established processes recommended by the American Association of University Professors, AAUP.
Response: We are working with central administration, which is working with the Faculty Senate, on decisions about tenured faculty. Nothing will be done without consultation with faculty.

Question: Are you listening to academic advisers or should advisers talk to individual chairs or one of you?

Response: The provost has a cross-unit group that is looking at advising, and LAS is, too. The issue of student support is important; we don’t want to jeopardize good advising. Central administration and colleges are talking to advising groups.

Question: I have heard about handling cuts with little discussion on finding additional sources of revenue. What are your thoughts on this, including a strategy for increasing revenues from intellectual property?
Response: We have listed budget strategies for revenue generation in the PowerPoint. These are real ways to generate significant amounts of money. There continue to be serious discussions on intellectual property as a good opportunity for growing licensing fees.

Comment from audience: Revenue generation is very important. We should do more with patents, consulting, fees-for-extension. We should do more creative and entrepreneurial research that returns money to the university. We should do more investments, like Grinnell College. We have to change our model and break the mold. Quit with the notion that we can’t or shouldn’t compete with Iowa businesses. Times are different now.

Response: We do need to have more of an entrepreneurial spirit.

Question: Is the university also looking at non-state appropriations? Is it a 100 percent state appropriations-level crisis? Are moneys from grants or foundations being used wisely [or can they also be trimmed]?

Response: Grant income and fundraising are both increasing. However, those dollars are for very specific purposes and that is how those funds are used and should be used.

Question: For unilateral cuts, what if we kept everyone employed and cut their salaries to a past year’s level?

Response: We believe the strength of the university would be seriously harmed if we do not have competitive salary levels. At the college level, it creates new challenges if we are required to fund faculty and staff salary increases internally.

Question: All the strategies listed for budget cuts seem to be reasons for new faculty to decide not to come to ISU. How do we maintain quality, maintain our reputation for close contact with students?

Response: If we don’t become more realistic on what the costs are for a high-quality education at ISU, we will become mediocre, which is the worst possible future. Students want a high-quality experience, but we’re underpriced with tuition compared to nearly all of our peer institutions. We’re a very good deal, comparing the price of an undergraduate education as a percentage of median family income with our peers. A freshman leadership class in CALS recently told us they want high quality. The LAS student leadership group said you get what you pay for. It is important that we focus on quality and ensure that quality will not be compromised. We do look at the demand for education based on what people will pay.

Question: Are we having discussions with other Regents and neighboring institutions so we can partner to offer a larger breadth of courses through technology?

Response: The Great Plains Institute already does this. Elsewhere we partner to provide distance education, such as the Midwest Poultry Consortium in CALS with the University of Wisconsin. Distance education is a great opportunity to serve student needs and provide revenue generation. We have talked with the University of Iowa about programs and courses they can’t afford to teach themselves.