OU professors speak out again on university's cost-cutting plan

As Ohio University looks to slash its structural deficit by placing freezes on some of academic departments' carry-forward balances and by shifting $2.6 million from housing and dining funds to compensate for the deficit, faculty members are speaking out again about the university's financial decisions.

The university currently has a $21 million structural deficit, caused mainly by $12 million in investment losses at the beginning of the decade and $7.5 million in Intercollegiate Athletics' (ICA) deficit spending.

"Part of the structural deficit has come from mistakes and certain expenses that were well outside the central academic area," David Ingram, faculty senator from the College of Arts and Sciences, said during Monday's Faculty Senate meeting. "It seems that the academic side is being asked to pay money to parts of the university that we have no control over."

The university's structural deficit comes from its fund balance. The university should have $65 million worth of carry-forward money from grants in its fund balance, but only had about $49 million as of June 30, according to Rebecca Vazquez-Skillings, assistant vice president for budget planning and analysis.

The university raised housing fees 7 percent last April to help fix the aging dorms, but some of that money is going to curb the deficit.

"As a member of Budget Planning Council, we recommended the raise in dorm and dining fees with the idea that we wanted to generate money to start to take care of the astronomical deferred maintenance issues on this campus," Senate Chair Joe McLaughlin said during Monday's meeting.

So far, plans to renovate dorms have not been put on hold, Vazquez-Skillings said. The $2.6 million taken from housing and dining is not truly enough to affect the housing renovation plans, she added.

Not all faculty senators necessarily oppose the administration's plan to deal with the deficit.

"We have to solve the structural deficit problem," Scott Titsworth, chair of Faculty Senate's Facilities and Finance Committee, said after Monday's meeting. "This strategy that is trying to do that is the most prudent way possible to get rid of the accumulated deficit as quickly as possible... If we don't do anything, the deficit will just get worse and worse."

The university's administration is defending the decision by President Roderick McDavis to tackle the structural deficit using funds from housing and dining services and from freezing carry-forward money for academic units.

"We are one university," said Becky Watts, chief of staff for McDavis. "It you started looking at every unit as an independent business that must sit on its own bottom, I don't know how many units would pass that test... Solving the structural deficit is going to take a variety of approaches because it took a confluence of factors to make it."

The university lost $12 million in endowment investments during the administration of the last president, Robert Glidden, when markets crashed unexpectedly, Watts said. The only other way the university could have dealt with those losses at that time would have been to cut the budget by $12 million the year the investments crashed, but the administration at the time chose not to do that, she said.

Many faculty members remain skeptical, however.

"What faculty senators seem to have a hard time seeing is a multi-year plan to reduce this repeated deficit," Chris Bartone, senator from the Russ College of Engineering, said after the meeting. "There doesn't seem to be a consistent plan."

With Intercollegiate Athletics' $7.5 million deficit spending over the last few years accounting for approximately one-third of the university's structural deficit, Faculty Senate moved Monday night to form an ad hoc committee to study athletic spending at OU. Steve Hays, senator from the College of Arts and Sciences, proposed the committee at Monday's Faculty Senate meeting.

"I propose that we use this time (over winter intersession) to study Intercollegiate Athletics and its impact on our budget," Hays said.

The committee will develop ideas about how to communicate data, he added.

After the meeting, at least three people volunteered to serve on the committee.

"This is a good idea," McLaughlin told senators. "This is something that keeps coming up repeatedly, and it's important to get good information."