Note: The Metropolitan State Faculty Federation has made the following request for budget transparency to Vice President for Administration and Finance/COO Larry Sampler. His initial response to our request has been promising and we hope that this budget data will be made available soon. We believe it is important that the Membership as individuals and our allied shared governance bodies reinforce this message of the importance of budget transparency, particularly in light of the recent Board of Trustees decision to increase student tuition by three percent in the spring. We are concerned this will impact our most vulnerable students, perhaps driving them out of our institution, and may depress future enrollment. Without the budget transparency we’ve requested, it is difficult to evaluate this decision. We ask that you share this letter with others in your department and with your Faculty Senate departmental representatives.
MSFF Steering Committee
11 September 2020
Metropolitan State Faculty Federation
04 September 2020
Larry Sampler
Vice President for Administration and Finance, Chief Operating Officer
Metropolitan State University of Denver
Dear Larry
I write to you on behalf of the Metropolitan State Faculty Federation. We ask that you release MSU Denver’s full line-item budgets for FY 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 broken down by department and including the specific and detailed expenditure lines for personnel, operating expenses, travel, professional development, and other miscellaneous expenses. We hope to be partners in a participatory accounting process, but we have been stymied by MSU Denver’s practice of releasing summative budget data and budgeting at the margins in the Budget Task Force. We believe that the uncertainty, even fear, generated by 2020 has made it even more critical that the University community see the detailed budget, which Vicki Golich used to refer to as a ‘budget book.’
The Price of Perceptions of Opacity
We appreciate the way you have moved toward increased transparency in your time here. However, without access to the full budget there is still a sense among some in the University community that the institution’s response to the budget crisis has not fallen equitably on all departments, has not put MSU Denver’s mission at the forefront of the discussions, and has not accounted for the many operating expenses now being born by faculty and staff working from home. These perceptions might be inaccurate; however, they are difficult to dispel when the actual, detailed, and specific expenditures of departments are unknown. Opacity feeds distrust and more inaccuracies.
For example, we frequently hear that 70 percent of MSU Denver’s budget is personnel so when substantial cuts are required those cuts must touch upon personnel. I’m sure this is true, but the number tells us very little about how that personnel budget is distributed across both specific academic and non-academic departments, how proximate particular personnel are to the core mission, or even how the cuts and voluntary furloughs were distributed across specific departments to generate the personnel savings. Without this specificity, there is no way to persuasively respond to, or even contextualize, concerns that some classes of personnel have borne a greater burden of those cost savings.
Another example of the price of opacity is the ongoing discussion of the viability of some programs that do not strike most as mission critical. At the top of this list is NCAA Athletics and the decision to hire a new AD in the midst of unprecedented belt tightening. What has struck many is what appears to be an unwillingness to even discuss the fate of NCAA Athletics publicly and reports that this division received no cuts in the emergency budget process. Are NCAA athletics so inexpensive they do not impact the overall budget? Are there contractual obligation that set it outside of the overall budget process? How do NCAA athletics promote our core mission? Are they wholly funded by outside sources? Without transparency, distrust has grown. In the absence of a full budget, this will continue to serve as evidence to budget skeptics that MSU Denver is not engaged in a good-faith effort to budget transparently or preserve it mission-critical elements.
Challenges to Transparency
We appreciate that the release of the full line-item budgets for last year and this year will be a courageous yet necessary step towards real transparency. There are legitimate concerns when the painful realities of a budget crisis are revealed.
However, in our estimation, the benefit of budgeting transparency in holding everyone accountable for making spending decisions that promote MSU Denver’s mission while clarifying how the cuts have impacted budgets across the University outweigh these concerns. Yes, the conversations may get uncomfortable but the simmering discontent and, perhaps, misinformation about the overall state of our budget is already ugly and threatens to boil over into even fiercer battles. As a public employees we are already aware that our salaries are publicly accessible. As members of the University community we have the responsibility to actively participate in shaping its future.
Budgets are moral documents; they tell us what this institution values. They are much more demonstrative of those values than CADRE posters or town hall meetings. We want to be on board promoting those values and mobilizing for the continued health of this institution but that is difficult when the institutional values embedded in the budget, the real values, are not available to us. If we are going to move forward as a united community to fulfill MSU Denver’s mission, we must have transparency, even if the price of this transparency are more difficult conversations and decisions.
If you would like to meet to discuss this or any other issues, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Sheila M. Rucki, Ph.D.
The Steering Committee of the Metropolitan State Faculty Federation