carnesale: focus on
excellence
UCLA to consider resource shift
BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
For UCLA to maintain and strengthen its status as one of the world’s
great universities, it must continue through tough budgetary times
to strengthen its foundations, build on its comparative advantages
and focus resources on what it does best, Chancellor Albert Carnesale
told faculty representatives at a Nov. 18 meeting at the Faculty
Center.
“There are some things we have to do to concentrate on excellence,”
Carnesale said during the Legislative Assembly meeting. “One
is to maintain excellence where we already enjoy it. We must be
careful not simply to make cuts across the board and damage those
programs that are excellent in ways that may take decades for them
to recover.”
To meet this key challenge as the resource gap between public
and private universities widens and state funds decline requires
a major reallocation of base resources, one that will be difficult
and will require the input of all faculty, he said.
“It is impossible to sit in Murphy Hall and know all we
need to know to make decisions of this kind,” Carnesale said.
“We need your views, your sense of priorities, your sense
of where we should invest. And perhaps most difficult of all, we
need your sense of where we might disinvest.”
Discussions are under way across the campus as part of a new budget
process that was shaped by the recommendations of a Competitiveness
Task Force action group chaired by Social Sciences Dean Scott Waugh,
said Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Daniel Neuman, who described
the process in detail.
After broad consultation with faculty, units will submit preliminary
budgets based on a 5% reduction, a “best guess” preliminary
target, beginning this month. These early budgets will be shared
with the Academic Senate’s Council on Planning and Budget.
“We can’t expect to achieve our goals without major
reallocation of resources,” the chancellor said.
He outlined some areas to be explored:
- Areas of high priority for investment —
In addition to areas where UCLA has already developed excellence,
there are areas in which investment is essential to achieve excellence
in the future. Examples of such initiatives include the California
NanoSystems Institute, society and genetics, life sciences and
biomedicine, the arts, and international studies, to name a few.
- Areas for disinvestment — While the
task is difficult, Carnesale emphasized these are ideas that must
be explored. “I cannot repeat enough times that this is
not a veiled decision; these are the kinds of things we have to
think about,” he said. For example, a number of states —
Michigan and Virginia among them — have moved toward making
some professional schools self-supporting. In exchange for receiving
less state funding, these schools have been given the freedom
to charge tuitions closer to market rates. Research units with
a high potential for raising funds from other sources may be areas
where state funding may be reduced. In addition, said the chancellor,
the faculty must consider disinvesting in academic activities
“that we are not particularly good at and don’t have
to do.”
- Reallocation of growth resources — While
the general rule of planning has been that faculty FTEs follow
enrollment growth, in practical terms, FTEs vary wildly across
the university. To allow the university to concentrate faculty
FTEs in areas of the highest priority, some academic areas should
perhaps be allowed to grow more than planned without additional
faculty FTEs, and vice versa, the chancellor said. Also worth
exploring is the idea that all ladder faculty (not just those
in the UCLA College) should teach undergraduates, a policy implemented
by some other universities. There would be exceptions, based on
the best and most effective use of faculty’s skills and
time, Carnesale said.
- Administrative cost savings — E-mail
systems, purchasing, travel and other business practices may be
more centralized to achieve savings.
Said the chancellor: “We do have some tough times to get
through, but we also have some opportunities that we can take advantage
of and come out substantially better than when we went into this
crisis.” |
