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2000-2001
FACULTY COUNCIL
MINUTES
Meeting #11, Tuesday, November 7, 2000
Present:
McKeever
(chair), Smelser (vice-chair), Bitterwolf, Brunsfeld, Chun, Coonts,
Finnie, Foltz, Fritz, Goble, Guilfoyle, Haggart (w/o vote), Hong,
McCaffrey, Meier, Nielsen, Olson, Pitcher (w/o vote) Absent: Glen,
Goodwin, Kraut, McClure, Nelson, Thompson, Trivedi Observers: 3
Call to Order.
A quorum being present, Faculty Council Chair, Professor Kerry McKeever,
called the meeting to order at 3:35 p.m. in the Idaho Commons.
Minutes.
The council, by voice vote, accepted the minutes of the October 31, 2000,
meeting as distributed.
Chair’s
Report. Chair McKeever reported on the recently held Parking Forum.
She said that the forum was well organized, but a very
"controlled" meeting. Councilor Meier said that the editorial in
last Friday’s (11/03/00) Argonaut was a fair commentary on what
happened at the forum and a fair interpretation of the general feeling of
dissatisfaction of the students with the presentation of parking plans to
the university community. He said that it seemed to be a "directed
process" to achieve a certain preconceived goal rather than a true
forum. Councilor Olson said that she would have expected the parking
committee or university officials to share more background information
with those attending the forum. All of the information from this forum and
other discussion venues are being put on a web site. Faculty, staff, and
students have been invited to visit the site http://www.dfa.uidaho.edu/parkingforum
and make comments about the parking plans via email from that location.
Dan Schoenberg will be giving a report on parking to the council at its
November 28th meeting.
McKeever handed
out a list of faculty members who had left the U of Idaho during the
last 5 years. Council members were asked to divide up the list
(according to college designation) and call department heads or deans of
the former faculty member and obtain information about the reasons why the
faculty member left and the kind of job he or she took. McKeever urged the
council to also try and get in contact with the former faculty members to
get a personal perspective on the reasons for his or her departure
from the U of Idaho. She also provided the council with a list of
appropriate questions to ask. McKeever will take the information reported
by the council and put it in a form that can be shared with the
administration and the legislature. The resulting documentation will be
used as a resource for facts about why faculty members are leaving the U
of Idaho. McKeever asked that the questionnaires be returned to her by
December 5th.
A memorandum
was received by the council from the Faculty Secretary, Peter Haggart. He
requested that the council allow his office to publish the University of
Idaho General Policy Reports at the Faculty Council Web site. He
said that this would save on paper and mailing expenses. Notices of the
publishing would be printed in the University of Idaho Register and
emailed to the DDD distribution list. Haggart emphasized that only routine
policy items would be published in this manner and that all other policy
matters would be brought before the faculty for a vote at general faculty
meetings. It was moved and seconded (Meier, Nielsen) to approve the
publishing of routine General Policy Reports at the Faculty Council web
site according to the procedures outlined in a memorandum from the faculty
secretary dated November 7, 2000. The motion was adopted by
unanimous voice vote.
Councilor
Finnie asked which version of the University of Idaho catalog should be
considered the "official" version – printed or web
version? After some discussion, the faculty secretary said that he would
make inquiries and report back to the council at the next meeting.
Fee Revenue
Attribution Model. Associate Provost, Leonard Johnson presented the
council with an overview of the current administrative thinking about the
fee revenue attribution plan associated with Responsibility Center
Management (RCM).
Johnson began
by stating the goals of the U of Idaho budgeting process using RCM:
-
put
the budget process on a fiscal year basis
-
bring
all revenue streams into the budget process
-
make
the revenue projection of all RCM units (i.e., college, department)
more predictable
-
tie
some of the budget to enrollment growth, which also translates into
credit hour growth
In response
to a question concerning possible revenue enhancement resulting from
performance factors, Johnson remarked that the basis for performance
based enhancements to a budget has not been worked out yet. He did note
that ensuring rewards for quality programs would be a complimentary goal
to the budget process. Other goals would include having incentives for
institutional academic priorities, such as offering interdisciplinary
core curriculum courses, providing needed services, and advising.
Associate
Provost Johnson’s presentation to the Faculty Council was focused
primarily on "revenue dependent budget sources" which are
based on matriculation fees – one of three general sources of revenue.
Johnson called the council’s attention to a document that he had
provided them which listed several assumptions used in the revenue model
the university is proposing to use:
-
relative
weighting of revenues generated by majors and credit hours is assigned
25% to the major and 75% to the department generating the credit hours
-
the
average revenue per credit hour weight for graduate credit hours would
be 1.5 times that of undergraduate credit hours
-
the
average revenue per credit hour weight for interdisciplinary core
courses would be 2 times that of undergraduate credit hours
-
the
system will use the results of the immediately preceding year to
establish the percent of budget reflected in attributable revenue –
providing a "real-time" attribution of revenues
Johnson said
the attribution of fees starts with the current budget of an RCM unit
(i.e., college, department) and then determines what part of that budget
can actually be attributed to the fees that are generated by students
majoring in or taking courses in that RCM unit. The model the U of Idaho
is using is a hybrid – part of the budget will be revenue dependent and
part will be non-revenue dependent. This proposed model also retains the
flexibility to test alternative ways of fee attribution and offers the
possibility of redesigning the process based on the impact of the proposed
model.
The council was
reminded that the model the U of Idaho is going to use is a revenue attribution
model, not a revenue distribution model. In the distribution model,
money comes in to the university and the RCM unit gets its cut. In the attribution
model the amount of fee revenues returned to the RCM unit is directly
attributable to the number of majors and number of credit hours generated
by that unit. Fees will still go to the restricted purposes they were
intended. However, an amount of money (from other sources) equal to the
amount identified earlier as fees, will be sent to the RCM unit. These
funds will come from a pool of fee funds that can be attributed to a
particular RCM unit. The fees include:
matriculation
fees
restricted
course and major fees
summer
enrollment fees
off-campus
and outreach enrollment fees
non-resident
tuition
Johnson said
that in order to determine net student fees the following
adjustments would have to be made and these items would be tracked
separately:
subtract
waivers from matriculation fees
subtract
current restricted course fees (i.e., lab fees)
remove
percentage of fees for restricted activity fees (i.e., facilities,
athletics)
subtract
professional fees (i.e., architecture, law)
Net revenue
student fees will be tracked in two ways:
net
revenue based on credit hours for the academic year and for summer
net
revenue based on majors – tracked separately for undergraduate and
graduate majors and full-time vs. part-time students
The end result
is a revenue pool that has two attribution streams – majors and credit
hours. The majors stream will get 25% of the pool and the credit hours
stream will get 75%. For example, a senior student majoring in one area
and taking courses taught in that area would generate fee dollars that
would go totally to that one academic program. A freshman student would
generate 25% for the department offering the major, but the 75% attributed
to credit hours would probably be split between several academic areas,
based on the variety of courses usually taken at the undergraduate level.
Johnson said
that there are other weighted formulas that apply to this process (such as
the higher weighting of graduate and core course offerings), but it should
be kept in mind that the same dollar amount in fee money is simply being
split into more parts. The amount of fee money generated can only be
augmented by increasing the total university enrollment. He said the
original intention was to keep the process simple. That is still the goal,
but as the model is tested we will run into exceptions and special
situations. The goal is to have a process that fits 90% of all the cases.
He also warned
the council that any time you put a numerical formulation into place it
does not take people long to figure out the kinds of behaviors that are
encouraged and discouraged by the formula. This potential for behavior
modification is something that we have to recognize and try to deal with
early on in the process.
Johnson
provided a number of examples illustrating how fee revenues generated by
credit hours and majors would work. He also reviewed the problem of
weighting credit hours, counting courses taken by U of Idaho students at
WSU, and the potential of differential course pricing. He noted that
differential fees would probably work the same way that lab fees worked
now – a distribution rather than an attribution to the
college.
Johnson then
provided a detailed example of how the process worked at the college
level, including the steps necessary to develop a budget using this model.
He said that there are still a lot of policy decisions that need to be
made. He reminded the council again that his remarks only referred to one
source of revenue – matriculation fees. Other funding sources can be
brought into the picture to solve problems involving academic offerings.
This is a work in progress. His PowerPoint© presentation will
soon be available at the Institutional Planning and Budget web site: http://www.its.uidaho.edu/ipb/
under the RCM section.
Comments and
Questions. Councilor McCaffrey noted that departments within colleges
may generate differing amounts of fee revenue, but the college seems to be
under no obligation to allocate funds accordingly. The college must
examine the total program offerings, particularly if they are trying to
maintain a graduate program. The model was built with the idea of
having different fee weightings for different kinds of offerings – like
graduate programs and core offerings. These involve policy decisions that
are still being discussed.
Councilor
Coonts asked what would happen to budgets for programs like the Honors
Program? This budget is prepared by the Honors Program and submitted to
the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs who then makes it a part of her
budget presentation. The money for this program would probably come from
sources other than the ones we are talking about today.
Councilor
Finnie asked whether the model had been applied to this year’s budget to
see what allocation changes might have resulted? We have preliminary
data for the fall and we are trying to build a database for last year.
There are a number of things that we need to test. Once we have data for a
year then we can go back and capture the necessary data from other years
– the last three years, plus this year.
Councilor
Nielsen noted that this will be the first year that the summer school
budget has been incorporated into the fiscal year budget. Summer courses
tend to be marginal and sometimes lose money. What we are trying to do
is make the summer revenue very identifiable so people will have a good
picture of how summer school fits into the total academic picture. The
results should provide an even larger incentive to offer summer school
courses. The provost added that the last three years have shown that
summer offerings were self-supporting at the college level. Nielsen noted
that this is not always true at the department level.
Councilor
McCaffrey noted that his research grants also directly and indirectly
support his teaching activities. How is this co-mingling of funds factored
into the formula? Part of the process we are involved in is to identify
all of the sources of revenue and in what areas they are making a
contribution. There are multiple pieces to the revenue pie. It is
sometimes difficult to separate out the contributions that each source
makes to teaching. The provost added that what we are working toward
in the budget development process is the ability to be very clear about
all of the revenue that is available to a college or department. Johnson
added that if we have reliable and accurate data, then it will be easier
to develop a high-quality budget for every RCM unit.
Councilor Meier
asked how new faculty and staff positions can be built into the budget? If
the unit had real growth then you would have extra funds available to use
in that manner. What if the department is already understaffed and
overworked? How do you get out from under those conditions? You will
now have the facts to communicate with the dean of your college what is
really happening in your department. The numbers will help you make your
case for more support. It may be just the leverage that you need. It may
take time to work your way out of the situation, but you will now have a
factual basis to start a meaningful and productive conversation with the
dean.
Associate
Provost Johnson concluded by asking council members to send any additional
comments and questions directly to him or to use the previously noted RCM
web site.
Chair McKeever
reminded the council of the deadline for submitting nominations for the
university promotion committee and to review the scholarly activity report
in preparation for a discussion with Dean Hatch at next week’s meeting.
She also told the council that many faculty members have commented to her
about how enthusiastic they were about the work that the council is doing
and discussions that are taking place this year surrounding issues that
are important to the university community.
Adjournment.
It was moved and seconded (Goble, Smelser) that the meeting be adjourned.
Chair McKeever adjourned the meeting at 5:02 p.m.
Respectfully
submitted,
Peter A.
Haggart
Secretary of
the Faculty Council
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