Tuesday's Faculty Senate meeting had a bit of heated discussion in it, all due to the newly proposed 10-5-5 budget plan.
"You are asking us to trust you and trust the people who have just joined the university for the past 18 months," said Jamie Barlowe, professor and interim chairwoman the department of women's studies, with applause from the senate members. "We're being asked to trust people who do not have the experience, expertise and knowledge that the people in this room have."
This is the second Faculty Senate meeting where the proposed plan, drafted by Scott Scarborough, UT associate vice president for finance and administration, procured discussion - the first being the Feb. 19 meeting.
The proposed budget plan involves a university-wide 10 percent budget reallocation. Half of the 10 percent would be redistributed within the unit, and the rest would go to a central pool within the university to be reallocated to strategic initiatives.
"When you project how much new revenue the university will receive next year, not a lot of money is left over to fund the strategic plan," Scarborough said, explaining the reason for the reallocation.
"The proposed cuts to fund the strategic plan are going to cost the programs that people think are important to the university," said Sharon Barnes, associate professor for interdisciplinary studies. "A lot of us feel that the people at the top upper level of the administration, who [are] maybe newer to the university, do not have a clear sense of what the consequences are."
"We're trying to create conversations about whether we can move base-budget dollars from the lower-priority programs to ones with higher priorities," Scarborough said.
Before the draft budget is recommended to UT President Lloyd Jacobs, the Strategic Planning Steering Committee and the Finance and Strategy Committee were set up to review the draft and provide feedback on it, Scarborough said.
"One of the concerns of the Faculty Senate is the heavy emphasis on science, technology, engineering, math and medicine (STEMM)," said Barbara Floyd, chairwoman of the Faculty Senate. "If a certain program or personnel has nothing to do with those five areas, there will be a possibility that it may be cut."
The question is how to support STEMM areas while maintaining arts and humanities, Floyd said.
Another major concern was that the Faculty Senate felt it was not as included as it should have been in the "exercises and conversations" on the new strategic budget plan, Floyd said.
When you take into consideration how much energy some of the faculty and staff have put into the programs, which they have built and seen through, it's no wonder that one of the Faculty Senate members was so emotional when she spoke out on the consequences the new plan will have on her department, Barnes said.
During Scarborough's presentation, he encouraged the Faculty Senate to "think-outside-the-box."
"I think the fund-raising people are the ones that should 'think-outside-the-box,'" Barnes said. "Reallocation is one of the oldest methods there is."
The UT Board of Trustees is full of politically-connected and affluent people, and with the merger, there are so many other opportunities to consider instead of cutting programs until UT can't offer a university-class level-of-options for students, she added.
The students' voices are very important as well, Barnes said. When students speak out about something, the administration has to care about it.
"This is the first time that this plan was presented to the Faculty Senate, but we have already presented it to the Faculty Senate officers," Scarborough said. "We should have the draft budget sometime in April, and then it will go to the Board of Trustee to be approved in June."
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