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Members of Faculty Senate vote on a issue during their Jan. 9, 2017 meeting. 

Faculty Senate discusses budget plans

Monday’s Faculty Senate meeting consisted mainly of talk surrounding Ohio University’s budget. 

OU President Duane Nellis said he is working to help fix OU’s budget. 

“I’m really trying to get a handle on what’s happened in the last four or five years,” Nellis said. “This isn’t something that just happened this year at Ohio University. There are enough parameters that have attributed to where we’re at today.”

Nellis said attributing factors of the problems with the budget have been based on trajectory formulas mandated by the state of Ohio. The projections are relative to OU’s growth. 

“I want to look at this because we are an academic institution, and we want to have strategy drive our finances, not finances drive our strategy,” Nellis said. “We need to be thinking about when we make budget decisions on how it correlates on our strategic pathways, priorities and positioning … We are certainly up in headcount at our university, except for this year. This year, we took a fall down that costs us approximately 4 or 5 million based on the number of students we have this year.”

Faculty Senate Chair Joe McLaughlin said the meeting was all about the budget and how every department should be doing the same type of planning.  

“The academic colleges should not be planning for more substantial cuts than other academic areas,” McLaughlin said. 

Deb Shaffer, vice president for finance and administration, said the athletic department took a 5 percent cut to athletics last year, and additional 2 percent this year.

For the 2016-17 academic year, the academic units took approximately a 1.6 percent cut. Nellis said the administrative units took an average of a 4 percent cut.

“This was designed as a three-year plan to try to get out of the budget deficit,” Nellis said. “We have a fairly significant budget gap based on all these other factors that I mentioned to you.”

Nellis said he asked deans of different colleges to model different decisions and how it would affect their budgets, which he believes has caused confusion throughout faculty. 

Due to many academic colleges receiving different responses about the budget, McLaughlin said he would like to see clarification and rectification about the budget. 

“I don’t know if there’s a transparency issue, but I do believe there is a communication issue,” McLaughlin said. “I think some people hear things more than others.” 

Rob Brannan of Applied Health Sciences and Wellness said the reason the immediate budget push has come up now is because it now directly affects many of the Arts & Sciences faculty, who are a large group of the senate body. 

“The reason we’re having this discussion is because Arts and Sciences had a bad meeting last week,” Brannan said. “It’s been going on for years.”

Additionally, a bill to pass legislation for sales tax exemption on textbooks will be reviewed during the January meeting. 

Katherine Hartman of Educational Policy and Student Affairs Committee held a discussion about Reading Day and said she will bring more information about it to the January meeting. 

Also, the Finance and Facilities Committee passed a bill to have academic units model a 7 percent budget cut for the 2019 fiscal year. 

The next Faculty Senate meeting will be Jan. 22 at 7:00 p.m. in Walter 235.

@AshtonNichols_

an614816@ohio.edu

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