What's your favorite Thanksgiving tradition?
Comments (2)
News
UB community offering cost-cutting ideas
The committee advising UB’s leadership on how to deal with anticipated cuts in state funding has received at least 1,200 suggestions on how UB can reduce costs.
And the suggestions are good ones.
“I’m not surprised by the number of suggestions or the quality of the suggestions,” says Scott Nostaja, interim vice president for human resources, chief of staff for President John B. Simpson and facilitator for the Strategic Financial Advisory Committee. “The ideas are really good; they are not trivial or frivolous.
“The campus community is concerned,” he notes. “There’s a growing sense that we’re all in this together.”
Nostaja says the suggestions for cost-cutting—all submitted to a Web site built specifically to gather feedback on the budget problems—come from a mix of faculty, staff and students. Among the topic areas receiving large numbers of suggestions are the environment and energy—electricity, fuel and other sources of power; creating efficiencies in operations, including increased use of technology, to make administrative functions more streamlined; purchasing of goods and services; and creating alliances with other SUNY campuses to share services or combine functions.
Nostaja says the rationale for seeking input from the campus community on the university’s financial situation is found in three key principles of the UB 2020 strategic planning process: transparency, collaboration and inclusiveness.
The campus financial situation is a good opportunity to live those values, he says, noting that the administration is approaching the financial problem in the same way it approaches other aspects of UB 2020: reaching out and asking for ideas.
Nostaja urged members of the university community who have not yet submitted their suggestions to do so, by an online form [now deactivated]. Those submitted by Oct. 15 will be reviewed by the Strategic Financial Advisory Committee, which plans to present its report to Provost Satish K. Tripathi by mid-October.
There is no deadline, however, for good ideas, Nostaja notes. He says that all suggestions, including those submitted after Oct. 15, are being shared with campus leadership and the executives in charge of the areas where the suggestions have their roots.
Post a Comment
Comments from current UB faculty, staff and students will be published directly on this page after a brief editorial review process. You will be asked to sign in with your UBITname and password after clicking “Post.” You may not be asked to sign in again if you have already signed in to other UB services (e.g. MyUB, webmail, etc.). The UB Reporter does not publish anonymous comments nor comments posted under a pseudonym. Comments are limited to 125 words; those needing more space to make their point should write a letter to the editor, rather than posting multiple comments. The UB Reporter editor reserves the right not to publish comments that, in the opinion of the editor, make substantially the same point the writer has made in a previous post and do not add anything new to the public discussion of the matter at hand. Please send letters and general comments to the editor using our feedback page.
Reader Comments