Getting Out of Our Own Way

SSU Responses to Long-term Shifts in Funding

What are we budgeting for?

What are we trying to sustain?

What are we trying to change?

What do we need, to do all this?

What is getting in our way?

Budgeting Without Numbers:A Campus-wide Conversation

The SSU Mission Statement The mission of Sonoma State University is to

prepare students to be learned men and women who:

have a foundation for life-long learning, have a broad cultural perspective, have a keen appreciation of intellectual and

aesthetic achievements, will be active citizens and leaders in society, are capable of pursuing fulfilling careers in a

changing world, and are concerned with contributing to the health and

well-being of the world at large.

Key Agreement:

The way we get our $ from Sacramento

means:Budgeting for

ClassesNot

Curriculum

Key Disconnect:

What Do We “Do”? (as opposed to how we get our money)

Yes, faculty “teach”. But WHAT do they teach?

Faculty don’t build buildings, they build programs

Healthy universities have programs that grow and change (just ask WASC)

What gets taught has to hang together, and be part of a total university experience

Universities are said to “produce” students.

What they really produce is experience: downloading information is not the same as acquiring knowledge.

What universities “do” is help students learn how to make that conversion.

What if building curriculum was like building planes?

From the faculty perspective, the current budgeting process that looks like this: lots of bits being manufactured, but no plane being assembled.

“…Some Assembly Required…Some Assembly Required…Some Assembly…”

From the student perspective, this budgeting approach increasingly looks like this:

Initial success/positive feedback from students on a few pilot projects: FYE, Learning Communities, GE revisions, program revisions after program review. Suggest that curriculum-focused programming pays off: retention, graduation, student success

Recognition of a need to market curriculum to attract students: both beyond CA recruitment and on-site vs. online recruitment

Indicators that the funding allocation formulas for CSU may shift from exclusively enrollment-based to include retention, graduation rate factors

Signs of change…

Senate Budget Subcommittee process – summary

What the results were

What the results mean

How to start the conversation

…And this is about our budgetdiscussion, how,

exactly???

Development

Grants and Contracts

Partnerships (“resources” vs. “revenue”)

Fee-based programming (especially via ExEd)

“What do we want to do?”(to generate either revenue or savings)

Observation 1: We have a large ‘pent-up demand’ for faculty involvement in revenue

generation… This counters current

orthodoxy that ‘faculty don’t care about that’

Current campus policies and funding allocations aggressively discourage faculty from pursuing this.

As a result, faculty are taking their revenue-generating work elsewhere (and are being aggressively recruited by other UC, CSU campuses)

If we want this revenue, maybe weshould rethink that?

small-scale pilot programs that expand as they succeed (eg. FYE)

“bottom-up” curricular innovation that is targeted, low-cost (eg. restructuring majors, Social Sciences SYE pilot, Writing Across Curriculum)

Instructional technology Department or school-based revenue

generation through self-support programs (EMBA, certificate programs)

“What are we doing already?”(that works, and is it sustainable?)

(Hint: 99% of this is about curriculum: expanding it, updating it, and making it all

fit together)

Observation 2: If you look around, you realize people are already working on solutions…

Faculty participation in these efforts is VERY high: they are seen as ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’, and they show immediate benefit to students.

Most are a low or no cost (which is why they do not trigger bureaucratic intervention, to shut them down).

Burn-out in these efforts is high: they are on top of a full workload, not as “buy-out”.

They will require a shift in funding structure to become sustainable.

“What’s Getting in the Way?”

Disincentives: there’s no point in trying to raise revenues, because it will only be taken from you.

Policy: we actively prevent people from even trying to raise revenue, be professionals, or support students

There is a critical failure in the lack of any shared sense of institutional commitment to the mission.

Disincentives“Institutionalized risk aversion prevents creativity, innovation, (necessary) risk taking”

“Skepticism that innovative programs won’t be sustainable – fear it’s a time-waster; reward?”

“Creating an environment that incentivizes raising $ - e.g. IDC back to Department”

“Get rid of the disincentives for either saving or raising $.”

CSU/SSU Restrictions/Redirections

“Redesign the flow of money between the AA & A.F. – no more “paying” for doing our job.”

“To what extent do ExEd profits benefit university? Academic Affairs? Individual programs?”

“We don’t invest in making $, finding resources, no “seed $” (invest in infrastructure to make academic money).”

“Transparency of budgets & expenditures to facilitate/inform our own budgeting decisions. (Both within AA and university-wide)”

Lack of accessible/timely information

“Talking around (The) real problems”

“Provide more open forums on budget education/discussion. “

“Resource information not available in understandable format to faculty/staff” -

“Lack of continuity in planning old agreements disappear”“Looking at real-time programmatic

impacts of budgeting decisions before Implementing”

Planning depends on unknown budget

Need more consensus on “mission”

Faculty need more clarity on how to make the mission “real”

Mission-centered VS market-centered

Feeling “lost”/isolated at the departmental level; lack of an over-arching goal shared across university.

Align budgeting process w/ the actual academic mission

Build mission/vision consensus Lack of trust

Assessing on efficiency vs. Mission Statement

How can we budget better, to achieve our mission in spite of the

changing times?And

How can we use this process to overcome these recurring rifts in

the institution?

Closing Observations

There are opportunities here to articulate these interests, issues, and efforts with the work of the short-term task forces, to model collaborative problem-solving on campus.

The issues of a perceived lack of shared mission are real, not trivial, and have significant negative impacts on our problem-solving abilities: on innovation, experimentation, and development.

Part 1: What we could do with these survey results

Foster ongoing curriculum development

Incentivize independent resource development ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY

Transparency/lateral information flow

Part 2: Necessary Shifts in our Culture

We need to align resources and budget planning with a more holistic framework of the whole curriculum and links to co-curriculum, all other aspects of university programming, to support students across their whole university experience.

Foster ongoing curriculum development

This means BOTH redefining what counts as “resources” to meet actual needs, AND ensuring that people can believe their efforts will accrue genuine benefits to the programs they are trying to build.

Incentivize independent resource development ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY

We do not actually know each other very well, across the institution, and especially across divisions. We have only very primitive mechanisms for moving information across units, (as opposed to up and down hierarchies within units).

Transparency/lateral information flow