The
University Faculty Senate
Tuesday,
April 24, 2007, at 1:30 p.m.
The
University Faculty Senate met on Tuesday, April 24, 2007, at 1:30 p.m. in room
112 Kern Graduate Building with Dawn Blasko, Chair-Elect, presiding.
MINUTES OF THE PRECEDING MEETING
Chair-Elect Blasko: Before
we begin today’s meeting, I ask that you join me in a moment of silence to
remember the 32 Virginia Tech faculty and students who lost their lives last week.
In the lobby there are tables with paper and pens where you may write a note to
our faculty governance counterparts at Virginia Tech. Your notes will be sent along with a letter
to Kerry Reddington, President of Virginia Tech’s Faculty Senate.
As you may have noticed Senate
Chair Joanna Floros isn’t able to be here today due to a family medical
emergency.
MINUTES OF THE PRECEDING MEETING
Chair-Elect Blasko: The
March 20, 2007, Senate Record, providing a full transcription of the
proceedings, was sent to all University Libraries and is posted on the Faculty
Senate Web site. Are there any
corrections or additions to this document?
Seeing none, may I hear a motion to
accept?
Senators: So moved.
Chair-Elect Blasko: Second?
Senators: Second.
Chair-Elect Blasko: All in favor
of accepting the minutes of March 20, 2007, please say aye.
Senators: Aye.
Chair-Elect Blasko: Opposed
say nay. Ayes have it, motion
carried. The minutes of the March 20,
2007, meeting have been approved.
COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SENATE
Senate Curriculum Report of April
10, 2007. This document is posted on the
University Faculty Senate Web site.
Appendix B provides an update on the implementation of the Uniformity of
Course Abbreviations. I would like to
take this opportunity to thank Lee Kump, Chair of the Uniformity of Course
Abbreviations Committee and ask him to stand and be recognized for his many
efforts in implementing this legislation.
REPORT OF SENATE COUNCIL – Meeting of April
10, 2007
At the end of the Senate agenda are
the minutes from the April 10 meeting of Senate Council. Included in the minutes are topics that were
discussed by the Faculty Advisory Committee to the President at the April 10
meeting.
ANNOUNCEMENTS BY THE CHAIR
Chair-Elect Blasko: Out of
courtesy to our presenters, please turn off your cell phones and pagers at this
time. Thank you.
I would like to ask Dale Holen,
Chair of the Student Life Committee, to come forward and introduce the John W.
White Fellowship recipients.
Dale Holen, University College, Worthington Scranton: One of the real pleasures of serving on
the Student Life Committee is having the opportunity to interview the
candidates for the John W. White Graduate Fellowship. These are outstanding undergraduate students
who are graduating with highest distinction and will enroll in graduate
study. This year there are four
recipients of the John W. White Graduate Fellowship. Each student will receive
a $1,000 award.
The John White Fellowship is one of
the oldest and most enduring fellowships at Penn State. The award was established in 1902 by James
Gilbert White to honor his father, Rev. John W. White of Milroy, Pennsylvania. In addition to myself, serving on this year’s
review committee were Alexandros Vgontzas from the College of Medicine,
Bénédicte Monicat from the College of the Liberal Arts, and Tim Frazier,
graduate student in Geography. There are
also those individuals who work behind the scenes to make sure that the work
gets done, so I would like to thank Anna Butler for her efforts.
Our first 2007 Fellowship recipient
is Kate Brizzi.
Kate will graduate as a Schreyer Scholar
with a B.S. in Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering option. Kate has been accepted to several medical
schools and plans to pursue a joint M.D. / Master of Public Health degree. She is interested in working in the interface
of health and human rights, specifically through research into infectious
diseases. Kate has been involved with
the dance marathon and is a Pennsylvania Literacy Corps volunteer.
The second recipient is Rachel
Evans.
Rachel will graduate as a Schreyer
Scholar with a B.S. in Environmental Resource Management, a B.A. in Comparative
Literature, and a minor in French. She
will be attending Harvard
Law School
and plans to practice in the area of environmental law. Rachel did her internship with the
Environmental Protection Agency and Cooperative Extension. She volunteers with the State
College food bank and Habitat for Humanity.
The third recipient is Craig
Schwartz.
Craig will graduate as a Schreyer
Scholar with a B.S. in Meteorology and a Bachelor of Music in Composition. Craig will continue his studies in Atmospheric
Sciences at the University
of Oklahoma while
remaining an active musician and composer.
He wants to use music to improve science literacy. Craig has been president of the student-run
campus weather service.
The fourth recipient is John Waldeisen.
John will graduate as a Schreyer
Scholar with a B.S. in Engineering Science and Mechanics and minors in Bioengineering
and Economics. John will study Biomedical
Engineering at University
of California Berkeley. He
has been active with Coaches vs. Cancer and has helped raised $75,000. I have
to admit these are very brief descriptions of these students that really don’t
do them justice. Their academic
achievements are overwhelming and we have every reason to be extremely proud of
them, so please join me in congratulating them.
Chair-Elect Blasko: At the
end of each academic year, a number of senators complete their terms of
office. I will read their names and ask
you to join me in thanking them for their service.
Binh Le, Penn State
Abington
College of
Agricultural Sciences: Thomas Bruening,
Diana Cox-Foster, Gregory Roth, and Richard Yahner
Penn
State Altoona:
Sylvester Osagie
College of Arts
and Architecture: Christine Gorby and
Katsu Muramoto
Smeal College
of Business: Susan Xu
College of Earth
and Mineral Sciences: Terry Engelder
College of Education: Beverly Vandiver
College of Engineering: Nadine Smith and Robert Voigt
Penn
State Erie,
The Behrend College:
Victoria Kazmerski
Penn
State Harrisburg:
James Ruiz and Matthew Wilson
College of Health and Human Development: Kathryn Dansky, Thomas Frank, Karthik
Namasivayam, and Careen Yarnal
College of the Liberal Arts: Bénédicte Monicat and Iyunolu Osagie
College of Medicine: Barry Dworkin, Ira Ropson and Harjit Singh
Military Sciences: John Kilgallon
The Eberly College
of Science: Paul Babitzke, Craig
Cameron, Qiang Du and Bing Li
University
College: George Franz, Delaware County;
Fred Adams, Fayette; Michelle Kline, Lehigh Valley; James Donovan, Mont Alto;
John Urenko, Schuylkill; Parminder Parmar, Worthington Scranton.
I would also like to read the names
of the student senators, many of whom will not be returning. Katie McNiff,
Perry Bindelglass, Sari Santoso, Elizabeth Rodgers, Christopher Hanson,
Christopher Engelhardt, Damir Amonov, George Khoury, Leslie Stahl, Michael
Anderson, Laura Nolan, Eric Wertz, Amanda King, Jeffrey Dew, Jim Kimmel, Paul
Fogle, Resham Patel, Anthony Zmoda, Adam Seitz, Matthew Mobilio, Kaushik
Chatterjee, Leah Liu, Meliss Franklin,
and Ricardo Torres.
The following ex-officio and
appointed senators will not be returning to the Senate; Stephen McCarthy, Gary
Miller, James Thomas, and Vicky Triponey.
We appreciate all that you have
contributed to the Senate, and we will miss each one of you. Let’s show our thanks to these senators for
their good work.
At this time, we have special
recognition to three members of this group who are leaving us with particularly
distinguished records of service. As
each comes forward, I will present them with a certificate signed by President
Spanier and Joanna Floros acknowledging their dedicated service to the Senate.
Would Gregory Roth please come
forward?
Greg has served eight years as a College of Agricultural Sciences senator. He is currently serving as vice-chair of the
Senate Committee on Outreach. We would
like to thank Greg for his service, and we will mail his certificate to him.
I would also like to acknowledge
Tom Frank who could not be with us today.
Tom has served as a Health and Human Development senator for eight
years, and served as vice-chair of the Senate Committee on Faculty Benefits for
the past three years. We would like to
thank Tom for his service, and we will also mail his certificate to him.
I would like to ask George Franz to
please come forward.
George Franz has served as a Delaware County senator for 34 years, and the
Senate Parliamentarian for 14 years. He
will retire from Penn
State at the end of
June. With us today, and we hope it is a
surprise to George are his wife Kammy, and his staff assistant Jeanette Rieck. George’s Chancellor, Sophia Wisniewska, was
also scheduled to be here but had a family emergency.
Without objection I would like to
present to the Senate for its consideration the following resolution. George W. Franz, Director of Academic
Affairs, Penn State Delaware
County, Associate
Professor of History and American Studies.
WHEREAS, George Franz has had a
distinguished career at Penn State since joining the Delaware County
campus faulty in 1968, and
WHEREAS, George Franz is a Martin
Van Buren scholar who has published and presented many papers on the American
Revolution and Pennsylvania’s early days, and
WHEREAS, George Franz has served
with distinction as Director of Academic Affairs at the Delaware County Campus
since 1997, and
WHEREAS, George Franz has served
the University Faculty Senate as a Delaware County campus Senator for 34 years,
making him the longest serving senator in the history of the Senate, and
WHEREAS, George Frank’s vita
constitutes a compendium of University service, reflecting his leadership as an
elected officer of the University Faculty Senate from 1978-1982; his service to
43 University and Senate Committees; his participation on 34 college,
department and campus committees, and
WHEREAS, George Franz has spent
thousands of hours in meetings and driven thousands of miles on the
Pennsylvania Turnpike (with occasional stops at the Lancaster Outlets), and
WHEREAS, George Franz has been the
recipient of awards for excellence in teaching and advising and for his
contributions to the welfare of the University faculty, and
WHEREAS, George Franz in his 14
years as Senate Parliamentarian has brought order to Senate meetings, and
WHEREAS, through his knowledge of
parliamentary process he has guided many Senate chairs through such
parliamentary minefields as assessing the relevance of an amendment, fielding
multiple points of order and calls for Division of the Assembly, and skillfully
dodging substitute motions, while still retaining his unique sense of humor,
and
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the
University Faculty Senate of the Pennsylvania
State University
on this 24th day of April 2007 expresses its deepest gratitude and
appreciation to George Franz for his many contributions on behalf of the
University and its faculty. The Senate
offers its fondest best wishes to him as he turns his attention to his family,
community, and a happy and productive retirement. I would like to ask the Senate for a vote of
affirmation on the resolution.
Chair-Elect Blasko: All
those in favor of affirming the resolution, please say aye.
Senators: Aye.
Chair-Elect Blasko: George
will also receive a certificate for his 34 years of service to the University.
George Franz: I am sure some
of you are sitting out there thinking that I am truly insane, and you may be
right, doing this for 34 years. You need
to understand that I was even nuttier when I first started in the Senate,
because in 1971 we met every month even in the summer. I may have taken Senate service to an
extreme, but I do think it is important.
If we may take seriously our role in shared governance, then faculty
needs to participate actively in the governance structures of their campus,
college, and university. Some of us need
to do it over an extended period of time so that there is an institutional
memory. In my case it may have moved
into dementia, but there needs to be some continuity among the faculty on the
governance structures of the University.
Service on the University Faculty Senate is important because it is one
of the few organizational units in the entire University that functions
effectively across all locations, and it is in fact, what helps make us one
University. University Libraries and Employee Benefits are units that I think help
support this concept. There are many
units that pay lip service to being University-wide, and I think it is
important to state that the unit with the greatest faculty voice and control
over its structure and function, truly is University-wide and it has been that
way for 30 some years.
I would be less than honest if I
did not admit that I have sat through a number of boring Senate meetings, but
that is the price you pay for letting faculty colleagues have access to the
floor in a deliberative body. However,
if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing. I want to emphasize what I have said at
numerous new senator orientations, the important work of the Senate is done in committees. I want to give one example from my
experience. In the mid seventies, I served on the Undergraduate Education
Committee and we went around talking to student groups in various colleges
about their perception of the quality of their education and the experience at Penn State. The better students across the University
consistently complained about the lack of challenge and intellectual rigor of
their classes. In 1976, when I became chair
of the Undergraduate Education Committee, we did a study of academic
programming for superior students and found that while there were a few
programs, most colleges and departments offered very little for superior
students. The result was a committee report calling for a University-wide
review of programming for academically superior students. Since I chaired the committee calling for the
study, I was named chair of the Task Force by President Oswald and Senate Chair
Daubert. The result was a report calling
for the creation of the University Scholars Program, the predecessor of the Schreyer Honors College. At that time, it was a very controversial
report because many at Penn State thought that the honors programs had no place
at a land grant University.
Having been at this University for
39 years, and having been fortunate to see many things from a University-wide
perspective, let me say that is what makes this University work is the people,
the staff, and the faculty. Penn State
is a very complex place and very bureaucratic.
In fact, I think we give bureaucracy lessons to the Pentagon. It works because Penn State
people make it work, and I thank all the very dedicated staff members that I
worked with over the years in the Senate Office, the Office of Human Resources
and in virtually every office that I ever contacted. However, let me beat a dead horse one last
time. I think we lost something of the
sense of family when we stopped publishing Intercom. The Faculty Staff newsletter doesn’t cut
it. We really don’t have a mechanism for
informing the broader University community at all locations about the people
that make this a great University. We
need to do something different to make sure that we recognize that it is the
quality and commitment of our people that makes this place work, and makes Penn State
a great place to be a student, a staff member, or a faculty member.
Chair-Elect Blasko: Thank you George. At this point I would like
to recognize the Senate committee chairs and vice-chairs. Will you all please stand. This group of individuals has provided
leadership to the Senate this year, and will you please join me in thanking
them. I would like to thank all the senators
for their willingness to serve our University and for their hard work in the
committees they served, and for providing their valuable expertise for the
Senate body to successfully complete its work.
The Senate officers and I are grateful to all of you, the faculty and
administrators, as well as the Senate office staff, with a special thanks to
the Executive Secretary Dr. Susan Youtz, and her assistant Patty Poorman.
The First-Year Seminar Committee
was constituted and charged on April 5, 2007. Past Senate Chair Kim Steiner and
Patti Mills the Associate Dean at Altoona
are serving as co-chairs of that committee.
In fall 2006 a report from the National Academy of Sciences and
Engineering, and the Institute
of Medicine was
issued. The report is entitled Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential
of Women in Academic Sciences and Engineering. In response to this report, Senate Chair
Joanna Floros appointed a special committee, co-chaired by Renee Diehl and
Dennis Thomson to assess the status of tenured and tenure-track women faculty
in Science and Engineering at Penn State.
The committee was charged on April 21, 2007, and will report out at the
end of March 2008.
President Spanier has accepted the recommended
revisions to HR-10; distinguished professorships passed at the March 20, 2007,
Senate meeting, and have asked the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and the Associate
Vice President for Human Resources to work together in revising the
policy. We also received communication
from the President on the status of the Advisory and Consultative report on HR-21
passed at the last Senate meeting.
President Spanier has accepted a
portion of the report and has directed that HR-21 be modified to incorporate
the rank of “professor of practice,” which will be available to Deans and
Chancellors to use in a narrowly defined manner. Quoting President Spanier, “Professor of
Practice should be reserved as a title bestowed on those individuals who are
non-tenure track faculty, hired by the University to engage in teaching,
research, and service, but who may not have terminal degrees, or may not have
had the traditional academic background that is typical of faculty, as they move
through the professorial ranks.” The
President has not accepted the remainder of the report, and it will be directed
to Faculty Affairs for further consideration.
President Spanier’s letter will also be posted to the Faculty Affairs
Web site.
A presentation of spring 2007 major
construction projects at Penn
State can be viewed on
the University Planning Web site.
COMMENTS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY
Chair-Elect Blasko: I would
like to invite President Spanier to come forward to make some remarks.
President Spanier: Thank
you. I thought I did some weird things,
but George you take the cake. It has
been a great pleasure for me to work with George for 12 years in his University
Senate leadership roles, and I think he has spanned five University presidents.
He has reformed all the others and is still working on me. George is one of those people who, early on
in my first year as President, demonstrated to me what is possible for a
Faculty Senate to do in collaborating with University administration on a range
of issues, and George was on that leadership group who helped us work through a
lot of changes in the University. This
Senate over the time he has been involved has really been a model nationally of
what faculty can do and what a model of shared governance can be by all working
together. I would like to join with your colleagues here and thank you for your
great service.
This has been a very difficult week
for all of American higher education because of the circumstances at Virginia
Tech. We have expressed our condolences in many ways, and Penn State
has extended its helping hand by being supportive and helpful in any way that
we can. I am the chair-elect of the
Association of American Universities, and in Washington on Sunday we had
discussions about things that could happen at the national level, to have all
of us be better prepared and more responsive.
Perhaps this involves changing some Federal legislation and taking a
fresh look at what we all know as the Buckley Amendment, what information a
University is allowed to share with parents of an 18 or 19 year old. This also
involves actions a University can take when it sees certain issues coming up,
issues of communication and cooperation with those who should be involved. There may be some issues surrounding the
Americans with Disabilities Act, which need to have a fresh look in this regard.
All of this is going to be examined at the national level and AAU and other
higher education advocacy organizations will be involved in that effort.
At Penn State
we have done a number of things. Various groups have convened to take a fresh
look at our policies and procedures, and a general view of where we are. I
shared this in an email that I sent out about Penn State,
and some of you may have seen an op-ed piece published in the Harrisburg Patriot News. I give a general reflection in two areas
about which changed over the last decade for us in higher education as we deal
with different crises. We have them
often, and most of them do not make it into the papers. Two of the areas I talk
about are the changing landscape of the media, and what the media is and isn’t,
and how they respond and the pressures they put on all of us in circumstances
like this. It also reviews the growing attention to issues of safety and security
that exists on campuses like Penn
State, and is something
that we pay more attention to over time. In that piece I mention some of the
areas that Penn State pays attention to. We are probably as well prepared as any
University in the country, but this does not mean we have all the answers to
deal with every issue as it comes up. If
any of you would like to view that second op-ed piece, I think on the newswire
you received the first statement that I wrote, and the op-ed piece is available
on line. You can email me or anyone in public information can share it with
you.
On a positive note, we are really
pleased that we hit the jackpot in our opinion on the hiring of a new Penn State
head woman’s basketball coach, Coquese Washington. She is a rising star in women’s basketball
nationally, and we were very pleased to have her interested in Penn State.We
think this is going to be great for women’s athletics and for Penn State
sports. Please welcome her to Penn State
when you see her; she is a remarkable human being in many respects.
There is not much new to report in Harrisburg; we are still
working on our appropriation. What is occupying a fair amount of our attention
is the Right-To-Know legislation. The
Right-To-Know law is something that would not be good for a University like
ours; they are generally designed for state agencies where it is appropriate
for all of their business to be in public, and where they are entirely funded
by taxpayer dollars. For a University
that raises a couple hundred million dollars a year from donors who expect a
certain degree of privacy; for faculty members who operate in a very
competitive market place who are involved in developing intellectual property
that may be licensed along the way; for faculty members who are engaged in
industry sponsored research. I can go down the list of different things that I
think anyone in this room would agree you would not want to have to disclose; the
contents of your email, contents of private correspondence, and letters of
recommendation for certain people.
Legislation is allowed to look backward into
things that you wrote or communications that you made before you knew there was
going to be such a law. I would just
caution you, before you jump to a conclusion that total transparency and the
Right-To-Know is great in all circumstances, to think about being in a position
to disclose everything such as classroom notes, or notes of meeting that you
attend. What would be included is
evolving, and a lot of negotiations behind the scenes are what is excluded. The
list of things that is being discussed is growing, but frankly we would not
like to be included at all. Most of what
people want to know about Penn
State we disclose already,
and we will give honest answers to the media and about 99 percent of anything
they would ask about. There is a lot of potential for mischief making with the
Right-To-Know legislation, as some versions of it out there in Harrisburg now exists. Part of the problem is that you are shooting
at a moving target because it is evolving, and there are different versions of
the legislation that are out there.
May 1 is the official deadline for
students who have already been admitted into the University to tell us if they
are actually coming and sending in a deposit.
We are pretty much where we expected to be in that respect; we are up at
campuses around the state by 300 or so students. We are down, as planned to reach an area of
stability at the University Park
campus, and we will probably end up close to the target we had planned for
ourselves. We also have around 1,400 students who have confirmed that they want
to remain on the waiting list, and we will turn to that list if needed.
Our capital campaign is in the
leadership gift phase. It is going to be
focused on making Penn
State the top student-centered
University in the country. We have made some very good progress in that goal. I
am not sure it’s been widely reported yet, but over the weekend we had the
latest significant announcement in the campaign which is a $20 million gift
from Lloyd and Dotty Huck to support the Life Sciences at Penn State. The Huck’s have contributed more than $40
million to Penn State. Generosity like this is quite
remarkable and we are very grateful for it. We hope there will be a number of
other such gifts as we move ahead in the campaign.
Commencement is about three and
one-half weeks away and I do want to urge all of you to attend your college and
campus ceremonies. Some of you are
amazing, you are always there and never miss, and then there are a few of you
that I just don’t see at commencement. I
guess you figure you put your time in at the Faculty Senate meeting, and I
would love to see more of our faculty attend commencement. It is about the
happiest day of the year and it shows why we are here, and what it has been all
about. If you are one of those people
who attend regularly, grab one of your colleagues and make them attend with you
and take them to lunch.
In addition to thanking George, I
also want to thank Joanna Floros for all her great work last year. She has been a very dedicated and passionate
leader of the Faculty Senate and I think this has been a very meaningful
experience for her. I know we will have our chance to express our appreciation
to her along the way. A warm welcome to
Dawn who has been in the wings warming up for this and we are very much looking
forward to working with her as well.
Chair-Elect Blasko: Please
stand, wait for the microphone and give your name and unit.
Mary Beth Clark, College
of Health and Human
Development: I read your article in The Patriot News. In your article you mentioned that you have
50 well-trained armed security guards on this campus, as well as armed security
guards in the Harrisburg
campus. Will there be an initiative to
implement having armed security guards on campuses University-wide? I know at Hershey several University
colleagues of mine have discussed this issue because our security guards are
not armed and frankly that is a concern.
President Spanier: Some of
our campuses have armed police and some don’t.
It varies by the culture of the campus, what they have decided and
wanted along the way, and what their proximity is to highly train armed police
in neighboring communities with whom they have mutual aid agreements. It has to do with qualifications and all of
our armed police must have college degrees. They have to go through the state
police training as a “licensed” public safety officer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
We expect an additional layer of training to be able to deal with specialized
populations, mostly college students. It
is really about the training, the resources for any of our police to be armed
at other campuses, and the campus has to be willing to reallocate its budget
resources because those at that level of training are paid more than others. More
than anything it has to do with what the campus wants, the local culture, the
relationship they have with neighboring police units. Yes, it is possible for campuses that do not
have that and it is something that we review from time to time.
Paul Babitzke, Eberly
College of Science: My
comments and issues deal with the recycling of the budget. Our mission in the Eberly College of Science
is being severely compromised both at the academic and research levels. In my department, which is Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology, we have lost 25 percent of our office staff. Forty percent
of our business staff as a consequence, in which all ordering now falls into
the laps of individual labs. I estimated that the cost of my lab alone for
ordering supplies is about $10,000 worth of grant support per year. If you multiply that by the 35 academic
active research labs in the department, that comes out to $350,000 clearly far
higher than the cost of some staff support help. All of this ordering is
through the purchasing card which was originally a great and convenient way to
eliminate the need for petty cash. It
now has become an extreme financial burden on every lab that uses it. Finally,
I support a law school on campus, but I think every academic unit has suffered
as a consequence. Bringing in a law school would use new money, and I wonder
what has happened to the $1.4 billion from the Grand Destiny, and why that
couldn’t be used to support a law school.
President Spanier: With
regard to the budget of your academic department, I think it would be very
useful for you to invite the Dean in for a discussion, because there are no
departments in your college that have had their budget cut. What you are seeing is a reallocation where
the money may actually be coming back in a different way, and some things may
be shifting from one category to another.
We provide centrally to all units all the money for salary increases,
cost of faculty and staff benefit increases, and promotional increases. There is a recycling target that every unit
has, and it averages about one percent a year but a departmental budget will
generally increase three or four percent a year, because of the money coming in
for other categories. The College of Science actually has been a very
significant beneficiary of millions of dollars of other funds, and has been one
of the principle beneficiaries in the new positions, that have been created for
the Life Sciences and some of the other multi-disciplinary initiatives. I can speak with some certainty that in the
college as a whole, the budget has continued to increase and they benefited
from some of these investments.
It is not difficult to imagine that
in some categories of the budget, funds have been moved to other places to
support personnel, or to put their emphasis on investing in new faculty as
opposed to supplies or other things. I don’t want to say much more about that,
because I don’t know the specifics or the dollars and cents in your department,
but I certainly know the overall college budget and that is in pretty good
shape. A lot of faculty are not involved
in the budgetary decisions. It is not so much that the department is running a
deficit from where it was, but they measure the deficit in relation to where
they want the department to be, or what the department is not capable of, and
that is an area where we all feel that we are falling behind. We have the potential to be doing a lot
better than we are, but the resources are constrained to get there. I feel good about where we are, everything
considered, even if I were to acknowledge that the feeling may be different in
one department compared to another.
In terms of the purchasing card,
that has been a great thing to many in the University because is provides the
ability to go out and buy some items that there are funds for that you really
need. The purchasing card has saved us a
lot of money and has created a lot of efficiency. I am not sure of the
particular use of that card that is troublesome for you. My advice for you is don’t use the card at
all, or explore with the administrators in your unit what may be dysfunctional
about the purchasing card for a particular set of uses that you may have.
In terms of the law school, it is a
unit on campus that predominately is supported by the tuition of the law
students. It is the only unit at Penn State
that does not have in-state and out-of-state tuition. In effect, they charge
everyone what we would think of as out-of-state tuition. The increase of students that will come into
the law school, because of the dual campuses of the law school, will pay the
bills for the increased operating cost of the law school. For us the great advantage of having this law
school is a growing set of partnerships, and a number of potential partnerships
that are being discussed between the law school and other academic units. In the
Colleges of Information Sciences and Technology,
Communications, Agricultural
Sciences, Engineering, and Business, discussions are underway about those
collaborative arrangements. I think for
many faculties on campus this is a very positive thing, and we are not really
docking anyone’s budget because of the law school. The main investment that the University made
in the law school is facilities and that is being paid separately through ways
in which we manage our capital construction.
What happened to the $1.4 billion
in the Grand Destiny campaign? What most
people do not realize is we are not like Harvard; we are better than Harvard in
many ways. Harvard has about a $30
billion endowment, and we think about $10 billion of that, is
unrestricted. Back in the old days, the
way people donated money to Universities was that they wrote a check to the
University, and said we believe in you and here is our check, do something good
with it. Over 99 percent of Penn
State’s $1.5 billion endowment
is restricted. When the Huck’s donated
their money they said this is for the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. All
gifts are restricted and some of them are too restricted. We have to get more
money into need-based scholarships and we have to get away from this usual mode
of thinking. People with scholarships say they are giving us $100,000 and they
want that scholarship to be for a brilliant 3.8 or above student. They have to
be from Lackawanna
County; they have to be
someone who played soccer in high school; who is in a fraternity; and who is
left-handed. Most of the scholarships we
get are very narrowly defined because the people are trying to replicate
themselves. Most all of our gifts are
restricted and therefore it’s all sitting in the bank and the only gifts that
we use for the law school are the gifts that come into the law school. We just announced $19 million of new gifts, a
$15 million and a $4 million commitment for the law school. A good share of that will be put toward the
building and renovations in Carlisle.
Mike Anderson, Division of Undergraduate Studies: I attended a Rally for Change today at
Old Main. I was also a student who walked from the capitol at Harrisburg all the way to Old Main to protest
tuition and one of the big pushes there was for a transparent budget. I am also
an executive ticket candidate for UPUA. We always get the question at the debates
on how are we going to lower tuition, and the common answer seems to be open
the budget. We feel the way for this
administration to get more appropriations is to open the budget, and when
people give money they like to see how it is being spent. If you feel like there was a real push from
students for a more transparent budget, how would this change your opinion and
how do you see the budget going, if at all?
Do you feel that opening the budget, while it may pose other problems,
will increase the appropriations and therefore lower tuition?
President Spanier: I thought
it was great that there were a number of students in the middle of things today
and they were concerned about this. We
are never going to be able to lower tuition, because at Penn State
there are two principle sources of funds for educational mission, tuition and
legislative appropriation. There has
been one year in the last 20 where legislative appropriation has even kept up
with inflation, let alone paid for any of the new bills, or the super
inflationary costs, that we have at the University. We would like to keep tuition increases as
low as possible, but we are never going to able to lower tuition unless we are
prepared to stop giving faculty raises for two or three years, and that is done
at some Universities but we don’t buy that philosophy here. Penn
State’s budget is as open
and user friendly in its openness, as any University that I know of. Forget Right-To-Know, you can go to the Penn State
homepage and go to the link for our budget.
What we have on there is the equivalent of 5,000 printed pages of budget
information. If you want to know what
the departmental allotment is for any department on campus you can find it on
the Web. If you want to find out what
Assistant Professors in the College of
Education make, compared to Associate
Professors in the College
of Earth and Mineral
Sciences, you can go and find out, we do not put the name right behind them,
but they are there. A lot of what we
hear about not being available is truly available. We get 1,600 hits a day on that Web site with
people looking at the budget, and we get several million hits a year with
people looking at that budget and accountability Web site. It is hard to imagine what other kind of
additional transparency people would want to know to see how the University
budget is actually dispersed and managed.
I don’t really think that tuition
is any higher or lower because of matters of transparency. If people were
thinking that they could see a particular purchasing voucher in a department,
and see what amount of money that department spent, then go on the Web to see
if it is less money, then would that prove they are not managing their money,
and that could lower tuition? You can check for money not being spent properly,
but we have professionals in purchasing who would do that, and do it well. You can look at someone’s travel voucher and
see that person stayed in a hotel room for $240.00, when I checked and there
was a room available for $189.00 down the street, so that is money not well
spent. What they may not know is that is
where the convention was taking place, and there is a reason they are all
staying in that hotel.
I don’t minimize for a moment the importance
of trying to keep our tuition down, but I would say to all of you that this is
a major issue hanging over our heads every time we make a budget decision at
the University. The single biggest trade
off that we will make in the coming weeks, once we get more information where
the legislature is going to end up is how big faculty and staff raises can be
in relation to our efforts to keep tuition down below certain numbers. Those are the two biggest items, and we don’t
have control over a lot of other items, like what the increasing cost of health
benefits may be, or what the State Employee Reti
