CFO being recruited to handle CAS

By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor

The hiring by early fall of a chief financial officer for the College of Arts and Sciences should begin to address the financial problems in the college, Provost David J. Triggle said at the May 3 meeting of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.

Speaking to FSEC members and members of the CAS Policy Committee, Triggle acknowledged that the merger two years ago of the former faculties of Arts and Letters, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Social Sciences had been "very badly handled." The merger took three different financial cultures-Arts and Letters, which receives most of its money through the state budget, Natural Sciences, which receives substantial sums of money through research grants, IFR and federal grants, and Social Sciences, which falls "somewhat in between"-and combined them "without the realization that these streams of money came from different sources" and weren't automatically renewable or interchangeable.

The Faculty Senate Budget Priorities Committee has reported that the college faces a shortfall of more than $4.8 million by the end of the current fiscal year "unless decisive measures were taken." Dean Kerry Grant has limited hiring in the college into the 2001 academic year.

In retrospect, prior to the merger of the three faculties, audits should have been conducted of the three separate faculties, the three separate financial systems should have been merged and a CFO recruited, Triggle said. Had this been done in advance, "we would not be sitting here with the angst that we have now," he noted, contending that inadequate understanding of the financial operation had led to the overexpenditures in the college.

"If we could do it all over again, we'd do it very differently," he said of the merger.

For the past three or four months, staff members from the Provost's Office have been working through the college's books, reconciling the budget, putting paperwork in order "and, frankly, trying to trace a very complex and often poorly managed stream of financial operations," Triggle said.

This work is expected to be completed by July 1, and a CFO with significant managerial and accounting experience should be in place by early fall, he said.

Tamara Thornton, associate professor of history and vice chair of the CAS Policy Committee, said she was glad "there are changes in the works like this."

But, she said, she wanted to "transmit" to the administration "the sense the faculty has that this is not business as usual this year," that this "two-year slide"-with a hiring freeze and stipends for graduate students that remain at an uncompetitive level-"could really signal something of a death blow for the College of Arts and Sciences. We feel as if we've reached a tipping point beyond which it will be very difficult to recover."

Thornton; CAS Policy Committee Chair James Bunn, professor of English, and Lewis Coburn, professor of mathematics and chair of the CAS Budget Committee, asked for the FSEC's assistance in monitoring what Bunn called the college's "progress or regress" in the coming year.

Bunn distributed copies of the college's bylaws and two resolutions that were approved overwhelmingly by CAS faculty members last month.

Thornton pointed out that the resolutions focus on the "particular policiesŠthe particular issues that we feel are leading to a decline-and a rapid decline-in the college."

One resolution asked that the UB and CAS administrations:

-Lift the CAS hiring freeze by the end of this academic year

-Increase all stipends for teaching and graduate assistants in the college to nationally competitive levels by next year

-Remove immediately the automatic requirement that all CAS undergraduate courses enroll at least 15 students

-Provide the CAS Budget Committee with such information as the number of faculty members at the time of merger, present losses and locations of part-time instructors

The second resolution states that the administrations' plans to cope with the CAS budget crisis were adopted without significant faculty participation, and therefore, do not have the confidence and support of the faculty.

Charles Smith, associate professor of music, noted that, contrary to the way the situation was portrayed in the media, he did not consider the vote on the resolutions by the CAS faculty to be vote of no confidence in President William R. Greiner. "This was very much an issue of some complaints about the way the College of Arts and Sciences was being run," he said, adding that he regrets that the no-confidence issue has served as a kind of "smokescreen that has obscured what the real concerns are."

Nicolas Goodman, vice provost for undergraduate education, took exception to the sentence in the preamble to the resolutions that maintains that the caliber of UB undergraduates has declined.

""There are no data that will support that claim and making that claim publicly does considerable damage to the university and to our future....I really challenge you to find data to support these claims."

Thornton disputed that contention, noting that she has had numerous conversations with colleagues about the declining quality of students over the past few years. "Our data are our classroom experience," she said.

Charles Fourtner, professor of biological sciences, emphasized that the problem in CAS is not strictly a budgetary problem, citing the poor communication between the departments and the Dean's Office, as well as between offices within the Dean's Office.

Greiner noted that while it originally had been thought that the major problem associated with the merger would be the "clash of different faculty cultures," the major issues instead have come from the different "administrative cultures of the three faculties that have come home to roost."

Once a new management system is established for the college this summer, "then we ought to be looking forward, and doing it in a way where everybody gets to see the data that describes the college, the quantitative data....It's a good place to start the conversation," he said

The president added that there should be an open organizational scheme in which budget information and departmental rosters are available to all. "Then," he said, "we dispel the kind of cloud that comes from lack of information."