Complete recording of the CAL Budget Reduction Task Force (BRTF) meeting held on Friday, August 21, including opening remarks from Dean Long, initial remarks by BRTF Steering Committee Sonja Fritzsche, and brief updates from each of the BRTF subcommittee chairs: Jackie Rhodes (Curriculum Integrity and Programmatic Shifts Subcommittee); Arthur Versluis (Academic Structures Subcommittee), and Yen-Hwei Lin (Staff Structures and Personnel Adjustments Subcommittee). Questions shared via webform were then addressed, followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Complete transcripts available at:

Partial transcript appears below.

************************************************************

Danielle Nicole DeVoss:

I have 12:30, and I don't think we want to lose any time today. Is everyone good starting? I'm imagining a lot of nodding heads, thumbs up. Welcome and thank you all so much for being here today. After our June 23 college meeting, we discussed a meeting to specifically address budget reductions especially because we're learning more and more on an essentially weekly basis. As many of you know, we've established a 2020 budget reduction task force to provide structure, space for engagement and transparent decision making around recurrent budget cuts.

DeVoss:

The steering committee and subcommittees are meeting weekly, if not more, and preparing recommendations for Dean Long. All of our discussions and recommendations align with the college's core commitments to equity, openness and community. Today, Dean Long is going to provide opening remarks, then the chair of the steering committee will present, followed by each of the three subcommittee chairs will then address questions that you all shared before the meeting and hopefully have some time to take some live questions during the meeting today.

DeVoss:

As with our June 23rd meeting, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to post questions. Everyone is muted, not because we don't want to hear your voices, but because it will be hard for Sarah, Ryan and I to pay attention and to moderate if we've got a cacophony. This webinar is being recorded. The video and a complete transcript for accessibility will be available on the college's website under the budget reduction task force landing page ideally by this coming Monday.

DeVoss:

With that said, thanks again for being here. I'm going to turn things over to Dean Long.

Dean Long:

Thank you, Danielle. It is great to be with everyone. I want to begin by saying thank you to all of you and by recognizing the situation that we find ourselves in just with respect to the decisions that were made earlier this week. I realize that all of us have been spending a lot of time working on trying to figure out how to do the reopening process. I think that was necessary to see if we could do everything we possibly could to get our students back in person on campus, and the decision to move online earlier this week was just a recognition that we needed to do something from a public health standpoint.

Dean Long:

I realize that that on top of everything else that's going on for everyone is an enormous amount of work, and I know all of the staff has been working very hard to move courses as needed in addition to all the work that's been done over the summer. All the faculty, whether you've been on or off contract over the summer working on your classes, working on research in this environment of uncertainty has been taxing. I want to recognize that here at the start and thank everybody for your efforts and for all of the thoughtfulness that you're putting into everything you do, and we are working very hard to make sure that we're as responsive as possible to everyone's needs in this really challenging time of uncertainty.

Dean Long:

I'm really grateful to be able to have this conversation. As we rolled out the budget reduction task force process, one of the important parts of this was communication, so this is an important component of that communication process. Having a town hall meeting and having a free flow of information has been critical, and it's rooted in our commitment to transparency and openness and to community and to building equitable relationships with one another. I have been talking a lot about how important it is to have trust and to build dialogue in this context, and I hope that we'll further that as we move ahead together.

Dean Long:

I wanted to start with a quotation from Brittney Cooper's book, which I think I mentioned for those new faculty or the new faculty meeting. But it's actually striking to me right now both in terms of the reckoning with racial justice that we need to undertake in everything we do and also with respect to the budget task force. She says in eloquent range, she says, "We can either heal nor fix that which we will not confront." At the heart of all of this is us trying to think very intentionally and directly about what our college will look like in the next years to come and how we can navigate the challenges around the budget in a way that's not just piecemeal, that's not just cutting away at various components in a haphazard way and not just passing the mandate to cut four percent this year and potentially six next and six the year after down to the units but also to think holistically about the college.

Dean Long:

I want to just say a couple of word about that now. I want to assure everyone that this is really a good faith effort on my part, on the part of the dean's office, on the part of everybody involved. I do not have a preconceived plan for where these cuts are coming from. The whole purpose of this process is for recommendations to come up through the subcommittees to me as the dean so that we can think intentionally and holistically about how potential budget reductions would enable us to be true to the core mission of the college, to ensure that we are getting better even as we're taking a serious look at the budget and doing some things that will be, I think, challenging for us as we think about moving forward.

Dean Long:

I want to give a little bit of a context to what's happened so far as I put in the communication about the budget task force. We had a 1.3 million dollar budget reduction that we had to come up with this year for fiscal year 21, which is the fiscal year we're currently in. That is a 3% budget cut plus the 1% regular cut that we take for the tax that we always pay every year for performance improvement sometimes known as the PERF. Ken will remind me exactly what PERF stands for, but I think of it as the tax. Four percent, that was 1.3 million dollars. We got to that number this year in a number of ways. First of all, we had some retirements. Second, we did a suspension of travel for the year. We said that we weren't going to do a building improvement, and then there were some other small things like we got rid of lease spaces and the dean's office and other kinds of things.

Dean Long:

The idea here was that we needed to bridge to the next couple of years of reduction so that we had time to think reflectively and together about how we were going to navigate the budget situation at the university. The president has said that we are looking at between 150 and 300 million dollars in budget cuts at the university level given the fact that we have had a decision not to have football, which is a revenue generating sport not only for athletics but also for the university as a whole.

Dean Long:

Given the decision that we've just now taken not to have students in the resident's halls, I think we are moving from a financial standpoint away from the 150 million dollar best scenario. I don't think we're at the 300 million dollar worst case, but I think we're moving in that direction, so we do need to be mindful of that.

Dean Long:

We are looking at over the next couple of years a 2.8 million dollar budget reduction for next year and then probably another 2.8 million dollars the year after. That's kind of the scenarios that we're looking at. None of that is set in stone. We are still going to hear from the university about what our actual budgets are going to be. I'm hopeful that there might be some action on the federal government stage to support Michigan as a state, maybe even to support higher education, so there may be some ways of having some resources come in that way.

Dean Long:

The state appropriation will be highly dependent, I think, on that, but the university remains very much a tuition driven institution. The work that we're doing with our students and our classrooms are important, and my hope is that even though we've moved online this fall, we won't see a massive reduction in enrollments this fall.

Dean Long:

I wanted to put all of that on the table and to say in closing my opening remarks here that this is an enormous learning opportunity for us all. I hope that we in the dean's office learn more through this process about the challenges and opportunities we have at the unit levels for making changes that will make us better, and I hope that you all, both those leading this initiative and the faculty will learn the complexities of how the budget works, how money flows within the university, how we can be on the same page about advancing the defending the importance of the arts and the humanities in 21st Century education for our community and the research and creative activity that we do to really enrich the world, and I would say these activities are critical to responding with integrity to the challenges that we face.

Dean Long:

I will say a number of the questions that are coming up are seeking some definitive answers, but we're not at the definitive answer moment yet in the process. This is an update about where we are and an opportunity for us to get a sense of what you're all concerned about and to hear from the subcommittees about where they are with respect to the recommendations that they're going to make.

Dean Long:

The charge is for recommendations to come at the end of September. We will be sharing a decision making matrix that we're going to be using in the dean's office to sort through these recommendations, and then hopefully in January we will... I'm sorry. In October or early November, we'll have some more concrete decisions based on the recommendations.

Dean Long:

With that, I see my 10 minutes are now up. I will turn it back over to you, Danielle.

DeVoss:

Thank you, Chris. Again, we'll be using the chat to share resources and links that the subcommittee chairs and others would like to share, but we do ask that you share your questions through the Q&A. Sarah Jackson is here to help moderate. Ryan is also here too. So, again, the Q&A to share questions. Again, where we're going to go next is we're going to turn over to first the steering committee chair and then the subcommittee chair. I'm going to turn things over to Sonja who is the chair of the steering committee.

Associate Dean Sonja Fritzsche:

Thank you, Danielle. I just reposted a link that I'm referring to in case you came late. I have five minutes, so I'm going to be good about that. I'm the co-chair of the steering committee along with Jackie Rhodes. My portion today is to outline the rationale behind the creation of this budget reduction task force and to introduce its framework and structure and to identify the overall charge of the subcommittees.

Fritzsche:

Following this, each subcommittee chair will report on the work of their respective subcommittee. I want to give you a little context from the summer because I know many of you have just gotten back here and are thinking about starting your classes. As we know, in April it became clear that economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic would impact us here at MSU. What had begun as a public health crisis was now a fiscal one. So many of us were just beginning to heal after the Larry Nassar trials. Now we suddenly find ourselves in another series of unprecedented events. It is uncertainty that seems to be a perpetual condition in the arts and humanities and higher ed in which we operate.

Fritzsche:

COVID-19 has only brought this into greater focus on a professional and personal level for all of us. It is this uncertainty that I think we need to keep at the forefront of our minds and ways that we're trying to reduce uncertainty for ourselves through the 2020 contingency planning process and the associated budget reduction task force.

Fritzsche:

I ask you to refer to the contingency planning letter that I've posted that link in the chat that's in the CAL website, and it was made available widely on July 9th. So please keep this link in a good place that you can refer to now and continue to refer to because it's a guidance document for this whole process. It really isn't just this one pandemic in which we find ourselves that we need to respond to. We are also still responding to Larry Nassar, to the challenges that came before and the ones that will likely come next whatever those may be.

Fritzsche:

We do not need to think about the year immediately in front of us. We need to think in a longer term, and I know that's not easy right now. My day today actually has been focusing on what really comes next in the next hour. Just before this meeting I got off the phone with my son's new resource room teacher to make sure that he's... We got to switch his class so he could start in the right place next week. That's how we are all operating.

Fritzsche:

We need to take the time to study what it is that we do, why we do it, how we do it and through scenario planning, which is this process, strategic planning, we can each of us in our units and as a college continue to think about what are important contributions in the arts and humanities that we are making now that we want to keep and continue making and what new directions can we come up with and new thoughts to respond to uncertainty.

Fritzsche:

We're doing that as we speak as we merge from day to day. We're living this right now anyway. What are the needs that we define to be the most compelling? Where are the greatest needs? How can we also though at the same time map these out so that we can build both resilience and flexibility into our structures and curriculum to adapt to these continued uncertainties in which we find ourselves? Now referring to the document, the planning process empowers participants to proactively think through ways to frame and strategically respond to shifting circumstances over time. That's why we have this process and this letter.

Fritzsche:

How we do this and trust each other in the process? This is, again, the great unknown in all of this. How do we do this? We create certainty out of uncertainty. We have to have this process based on our collective college values that have already been mentioned several times. We've formulated these together post Nassar, and we created a culture of care, and we're still doing that. That's the context in which we work. These are equity, openness and community, and constantly be thinking about those as you go forward.

Fritzsche:

These have not changed and nor have our priorities, enriching undergraduate and graduate education, recruiting and retaining more class faculty, enhancing research and creativity. These are our values and our priorities. In addition to these, the dean's chairs and directors formulated guiding principles in June and got a lot of feedback to help ground us in our work when we start to lose focus on what we have said is important to us when we start feeling like we're shifting and we're becoming lost in so many contingencies and so many challenges. We have to come back to our values and our priorities. I ask that you, again, hold on to this document when you feel you and your unit are losing focus or you, yourself, or you feel the college is, come back to return to this list.

Fritzsche:

Here are the guiding principles that we distilled in June. These are referred to in the letter. One, protect and put people first. Two, is enact our commitment to equity. Three is advance our core academic mission and four to lead transformative change. We had a little bit more here that I'm going to read. Periods of intense disruption open new opportunities for the arts and humanities to shape a more just and meaningful future. We will summon the courage to enact the change we envision. But we have to do it while we're keeping all of these other things in mind. The remaining strategies in this document guide the work that we are all doing in greater detail, and a lot of thought went into those. Please, hopefully you can respond to them and be thinking about your space and what you bring to the table with that.

Fritzsche:

Now to the 2020 budget reduction task force, it was created in the spirit of this document and also with a dedication to faculty governance. Each subcommittee is chaired by a department chair and contains representatives from the staff advisory council, faculty senate reps, the college advisory council, the group of chairs and directors and one associate dean as well.

Fritzsche:

Members of each of these bodies were asked to specify which subcommittee they most wanted to join and were put on those subcommittees. This diverse membership allows for different points of view, creativity and brainstorming, and that is the phase in which we all find ourselves. These subcommittees work as a team of members who are interested in gathering information and providing context from across the college so that the task force can provide a holistic college level view of who we are as a community that can then help to inform conversations in departments and units.

Fritzsche:

Now, just briefly, these subcommittees are the following. The academic structure subcommittee. Arthur Versluis is chairing this in the Department of Religious Studies. He's from the Department of Religious Studies. The Curriculum Integrity and Programmatic Shifts committee, Jackie Rhodes chair of WRAC is chairing that committee. Then there's the Staff Structures and Personnel Adjustments Committee, and that is chaired by Yen-Hwei Lin of the Department of Linguistics & Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages. I will take a moment to say that fast. The financial advisory board exists as a resource for the committees, and this is led by the chief of staff, Ken Desloover.

Fritzsche:

Now, each of the subcommittees is tasked overall with the following three points. They have been subtasked as well that the chairs will go to in a minute. One to identify specific strategies and the potential recurring cost savings of each. Two, to make specific recommendations including the pros and cons of each. This is what all of these discussions are in the subcommittees right now examinations of all sorts of... taking everything into account. Then, finally, to provide chairs and directors with guidance, tools and recommendations for identifying reductions in their units according to the situation that Chris was outlining.

Fritzsche:

As I said, the subcommittee chairs will be talking about their work next. As they are tasked with scenario planning, remember they are exploring a lot of different scenarios. Just because you hear that one thing is being discussed in a meeting, this doesn't mean that it is even being taken seriously as a direction. They're playing with a wide variety of ideas, which is necessary to such a process at this stage. It is important that they have this ability that is continually also guided by the values, priorities and guiding principles.

Fritzsche:

Then, finally, there is a steering committee. This steering committee though was created to facilitate the communication and work between the groups so that they would not become siloed. It was not created as a top down overseer of all of this work. I wanted to point that out. It's facilitating communication and making sure we're all coordinated with our conversations. It is made up of the three subcommittee chairs, the associate deans, the chief of staff. Project manager, Deanna is also on this and then the dean as well.

Fritzsche:

The nature of this work has not been to dominate again what happens but rather to have each report out and make sure that we're all going to move to the deadline that we have set for ourselves. I know I'm probably over my five minutes, so I will stop, and I think this goes back to Danielle.

DeVoss:

Thank you, Sonja. Now we'll turn to Jackie Rhodes who is both co-chair of the Steering Committee and chair of the Curriculum Integrity and Programmatic Shift Subcommittee. Jackie?

Jackie Rhodes:

Good afternoon everybody. I'm going to say it too. The Curriculum Integrity and Programmatic Shift subcommittee has the following three part charge. First, we're supposed to identify and undertake data informed processes and policies for curriculum decision making that align with those college values that Sonja was talking about and also generate recurring budget savings.

Rhodes:

Our second charge is to explore opportunities for savings. I had to make sure I wasn't muted. Sorry. To explore opportunities for savings and enhancements regarding the structure of academic programs. And we focus specifically on the relationship between programs and departments. Finally, we're supposed to identify strategies to support student success efforts and reduce our reliance on ad hoc nontenure stream hiring.

Rhodes:

Our subcommittee has 16 members, and we have met five times so far, I believe. Three times as an entire committee and twice as smaller working groups, which we refer to affectionately as our sub-subs. Those four working groups focused on specific tasks and just this last week brought back their discussion. Those four specific tasks were one group was on course and curricular design. So they talked about things like team teach and cross department innovations, things like that.

Rhodes:

A second working group talked about rubrics and insights for building compelling curricula. A third group looked at the National Center for Academic Transformation, NCAT, looked at their ideas for curricular structure inspired by their report from a couple of years ago. Then the fourth group looked at process changes like changes to the work copy process among other things.

Rhodes:

The whole subcommittee was tasked this week with considering all of the discussion from the four working groups, and if I remember right, there's something like 17 or 18 scenarios that are supposed to play out. It is very much brainstorming, discussion. There's a lot of discussion about things as Sonja mentioned. Some people were taking them seriously. All people for a few of them were like, "Yeah, that's not going to work."

Rhodes:

Beyond all of that, we've been committed to collaboration. I think in all the scenarios we wanted to remember collaboration, creativity, curricular integrity and also protecting smaller programs. That's where we are right now. We're in the, "Oh, look at these 18 things. Let's try to think of the pros and cons." Back to you, Danielle.

DeVoss:

Thank you, Jackie. Again, we're going to allow presentations to continue, and then we're going to turn to questions that were shared beforehand and hopefully time for some live Q&A. So if you have questions, please do share them with the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window. With that, I'll turn things over to Arthur Versluis who is chair of the Academic Structures subcommittee. Arthur?

Versluis:

Hey, everybody. A few remarks about this committee. The Academic Structures Committee is really looking at questions concerning how we could develop collaboration or synergies between different programs and centers and departments. To do that, we're actually asking people, so there will be a set of questions coming from different committees and one of those to department chairs. One of those will be really a request for possible synergies. What we're not doing in this particular subcommittee is looking around at places to cut. What we're doing is looking for ways to transform that actually fit within something that hasn't been mentioned but is part of the larger context here so I'll mention it, and that's the university is shifting as I understand or probably will shift to responsibility centered management, which is a different mode of budgeting.

Versluis:

Part of the purview of our committee is to be thinking about that as well. That is to say if the university shifts its budget, the way it understands budgeting, how does that affect academic structures? Are there ways that we could position ourselves in relation to that? Right now, the subcommittee is really in an exploration phase. We're just thinking about different ideas, sharing ideas. The idea will be to put forward scenarios with pros and cons or maybe just cons. This is a bad idea. That's where we're at right now, and I anticipate we'll have a document that produces potential scenarios, but it's a collaborative document. That's the idea. That's down the road. Right now, we're just thinking about what is possible and what is potentially positive in all of this.

DeVoss:

Thank you, Arthur. Finally, to Yen-Hwei Lin, chair of the Staff Structures and Personnel Adjustments subcommittee. Yen-Hwei? Yen-Hwei, you're muted.

Yen-Hwei Lin:

Good afternoon. I'm going to share my screen so you'll see what we have been doing here. There are three goals in this subcommittee, and we'll look at the structure of the staff because the idea is that we're going to rely on attrition of the staff member or retirement to save money, and, therefore, we want to rethink how we actually structure the staff.

Lin:

Then we also want to review pathways to retirement strategies to make it meaningful for retirees pre-retirement and also post retirement. We also want to look at academic appointment types and how we actually continue our high quality teaching and research even if it's in the budget constrained context. Basically, we have three sub-projects. The first one is about staff restructuring. What we are doing with this particular sub-project is to work with the staff, work in groups, and there is a host of staff working in groups that will work with us taking reports from them. We also consider and review what kind of recommendations they propose. Also, thinking about what kind of model that we can actually have, and then we can have a model fitting between what they recommended, and what we think that are probably going to be possible scenarios to recommend to the team.

Lin:

So, that's sub-project one. Sub-project two is about pathways to retirement. What we are doing is to review and make recommendations, make suggestions to and finalize there is a document of CAL Pathways to Retirement. Basically, we will consider and propose CAL strategies/incentives to supplement the University of retirement packages. There's probably going to be some university wide retirement package coming through, and then we'll see what that is like, and then we'll see what kind of CAL strategy is going to be helpful to supplement that.

Lin:

We also look at relevant data to understand and estimate potential cost savings. The sub-project on personnel adjustments is maybe a little bit vague to many people. Basically what we're doing is to examine relevant data and see how we can improve and create efficiency. This particular part is really very closely tied to the other two subcommittees, so it's not just we decide how to do a personnel adjustment. What we are looking at are a lot of data. We look at appointment types, faculty and academic staff demographic data, thinking about DEI, course releases, administration cost, staffing practices and faculty workloads.

Lin:

We identify possible strategies under the budgetary constraints, and very importantly we want to make value-based recommendations. Here's the current status. For sub-project number one on staff restructuring, it's ongoing. What we have done so far is that we have reviewed reports from the staff working group on finance and human resources. There are more to come. We also reviewed models of staff structures from the Big Ten Academic Alliance, which the chief of staff, Ken Desloover, provided to us. It's very interesting, so we are going to entertain several possible hybrid models maybe about the staff structure.

Lin:

In the second one, we're almost done on the Pathways to Retirement. Basically, we are coming up with some potential options of retirement agreements and also suggestions for pre-retirement and post-retirement engagements.

Lin:

On sub-project number three on personnel adjustments, still ongoing. Right now, we just started to review data. However, for all three of these, we have developed rubrics to evaluate different models, and that's pretty much done.

Lin:

That's all I have to say for now, and I can answer questions later on. Back to you, Danielle.

DeVoss:

Thank you, Yen-Hwei. Hello, everyone who got to join us on our team chat during the meeting. We'd like to move now to questions shared before the meeting by the form we distributed. As Chris noted, we may not be in a place where we can offer definitive answers, but thank you for sharing your questions and concerns, and please continue to do so while being patient as we learn more. To turn to the questions shared before this meeting, and I'm going to toggle over to gallery view. Sorry to do that so jarringly, but you should be able to see us all now because these questions are directed to different people....