“Meeting Challenges”
Fall 2007
August 17, 2007
Welcome to the new academic year. I especially want to welcome the new faculty, many of whom were introduced earlier, and the staff and students new to the University. We are delighted with your wise decision. To those returning, welcome back.
There have been a number of changes in the administration during the summer. Patricia McNeill joined us as the Vice President for Development. She had been previously at San Jose State University. Dr. T.K. Clarke has assumed the position of Acting Dean of the School of Business and Economics. He is no stranger to that position having served in a similar capacity a few years ago. We will initiate a national search for the permanent deanship in the next few weeks. Matthew Lopez-Phillips has become the Acting Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management with the retirement of Dr. Katharyn Crabbe and her return to the faculty. A national search for this position also will start in the next few weeks. A search for the Dean of the School of Extended Education is ongoing and hopefully will conclude by the end of the Fall semester. Dr. Les Adler, who has retired and joined the Faculty Early Retirement Program, will continue as Acting Dean for this semester.
The theme of my remarks today is “Meeting Challenges.” There is no doubt that as a public California university we are facing a number of difficult and troubling challenges. These are challenges in finances, regulations, vision, and trust. I have been discussing and planning regarding these issues since the end of last semester. The lack of sufficient and appropriate resources for higher education in California has aggravated these challenges. Meeting our mission in a truly satisfactory way becomes harder to do because of the limitations of the financial resources. We are asked to do more with less and this has been going on for too many years. We are all stretched as individuals and as an institution and are paying a very personal price for the extremely high quality work we do.
In the midst of these challenges, and in the wake of a difficult collective bargaining process and other issues that emerged, the faculty voted in favor of a no-confidence resolution at the end of the last academic year. I want you to know that I clearly heard your concerns and I share them regarding academic quality. I pledge to do what I can to address them.
As much as I would like to solve our largest issues expediently, that work requires patience and perseverance. I pledge to communicate with you more often and more clearly regarding the challenges that face SSU as we work together for academic excellence.
When I began to write these remarks a week ago, the State of California had been without a budget, and today, seven weeks into the fiscal year, we still do not have a budget. It is distressing that a compromise solution has become even more elusive. A basic problem is that California’s budget is so riddled with mandates and formulas that the State continues to spend more than what revenue takes in. The discretionary part of the budget, where higher education resides, continues to be reduced as a percentage of expenditures and it is always very vulnerable. Budgetary assumptions are highly optimistic and dependent on extraordinary performances of the economy. The State budget process has become an exercise in crisis management, full of anxiety and disappointment. Unfortunately, this state of affairs deeply affects all of us.
Every year I travel several times with many others to Sacramento to advocate for better funding of the California State University and its mission and we meet with many well-intended and sympathetic legislators and government executives who share their own frustrations and can do little to help. Believe me, it is not because we do not successfully make our point that the CSU must have greater funding. This year the CSU asked for more funding for additional compensation, student services, applied research, clinical nursing support, special education teachers, and student outreach and preparation. Only the $7 million for student outreach and $3.6 million for nursing were supported.
No one disagrees that investing in higher education is the right thing to do, and they recognize that it is an investment that pays off in a more educated and competitive workforce and results in significant greater revenues in the near future. They acknowledge that since 2002 the CSU has been reduced by $540 million and that the increased fees have made up for less than two-thirds of that loss. They also accept that the CSU is carrying every year about 6,400 additional FTES for which there is no funding, at a cost of about $54 million a year. Translating those system figures to SSU means that just in the past 5 years we have sustained a net loss of more than $5 million or 7% of our general fund budget. Our government leadership and legislators sadly admit that they simply do not know from where to make those needed investments in higher education and they add that there is so little to give and there are so many compelling requests.
The expected CSU budget for this year has an increase of $302 million reflecting the Compact for Higher Education. If this budget is finally approved without further reductions, it will provide funding for a 4% increase for general operations which includes $28 million for increases in health care benefits, funding for enrollment growth of 2.5% or 11,000 additional students, $2 million to increase the number of K-12 math and science teachers, $7 million for outreach, $3.6 million for nursing education, and the revenue generated by fee increases of 10% minus a third of that revenue dedicated to financial aid. Bargained compensation for the represented employees surpasses the 4% increase in the budget with an additional cost of $42 million which will have to come from campus allocations.
What does this means to Sonoma State University? We are growing by 344 FTES, including summer enrollment, which results in new revenues of just over $3 million. We are fortunate that we are growing otherwise instead of some new money there would have been major cuts to the base, as is happening at other campuses. From this $3 million we are going to fund the enrollment growth at an SFR of 18.9 to 1 which results in just over 18 new, additional faculty positions to accommodate the growth in enrollment. A new faculty development fund of $200,000 beginning this year will continue to grow at that pace for the next five years until it reaches $1 million a year. And, we will fund the additional compensation costs of $850,000. The rest is allocated for operations.
As you can see there is really not much in terms of additional funding and flexibility but this distribution shows that the priorities are:
1. compensation
2. instruction, and
3. faculty development, in addition to classroom renovation.
I hope to do better in funding these priorities every year including maintaining and improving an overall SFR similar to the CSU average.
One of the challenges we face is to have a common vision for this university. The strategic plan underway must be completed this year and strategies with benchmarks must be developed and agreed upon. This plan must be ambitious yet realistic at the same time. It has to be based on the expected funding limitations and the parameters established by CSU such as enrollment growth targets, marginal cost funding, and numerous regulations, policies and expectations. We can wish that funding, regulations and mandates would be different, but they are not and we have to be realistic. We are a campus within a system, not an independent, autonomous institution and we have very limited degrees of freedom to set our own course and resources. One area where we can and have exercised greater differentiation is in securing more private support through fundraising. Our endowment this year has distributed more than $1 million for academic support including $310,000 for student scholarships. As our endowment grows, and we have millions in planned giving and wills, these amounts will get even better.
We also have to operate from the reality of what Sonoma State is today, not what it might have been in a distant past, or what we wish we were. We are a public, medium size, comprehensive university in California. At more than 8,200 students we are no longer a “small” CSU campus. On the national stage we are no longer comparable to the small, liberal-arts colleges, mostly privates, from which we initially derived many ambitions, practices and expectations. Our freshmen class alone is the size of the entire enrollment of many of those colleges. And, we certainly are neither funded nor regulated like them. One of our challenges is to match who we are today with our expectations.
There are a number of features and characteristics that should continue defining who we are, including a commitment to high quality instruction, close relations between faculty and students, the teacher/scholar model, engaged and supportive staff and administration, opportunity for student leadership, community involvement, a residential campus, greater diversity, and the emphasis on the liberal arts and sciences with distinguished professional and graduate programs.
The centerpiece of this shared vision is the commitment to the students and their education. President John F. Kennedy saw this education as the coming together of personal and societal benefits when he expressed that, “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”
We definitely will have another year of “meeting challenges,” but we have been there before and I have great faith in the commitment and dedication of each person at the University. Working together we will continue to offer our students the excellent educational experience they expect in an atmosphere of collaboration and teamwork. To that end, should you have any comments for me, please do not hesitate to e-mail me or to make an appointment to see me.
I wish you a very good semester.
Dr. Ruben Armiñana