In which I ponder the budget.

Several years ago LSU moved to a business model budget. Under this model, each department has control over its own funds. We might choose, for example, to give everyone a big raise. Or, we might choose to hire new faculty. We might purchase equipment, or furniture.

As with all such schemes, the administration makes sure that they will get money from somewhere to sustain their bloated salaries. Each department pays a "tax" to the college, which is determined by enrollments and indirects as earned in "Year Zero" (the year before the new budget took effect). If the department fails to generate at least the enrollments and indirects earned in this year, the college will take the shortfall out of the departmental budget. We're not talking about that funny fake money that colleges usually shuffle around, but real dollars: my raises.

You can imagine what this has done to inter-departmental relationships. It was hard enough to get department chairs to sign off on interdisciplinary grant proposals before, and now it's almost impossible. Each chair wants the indirects to go exclusively to his/her department, or they quibble for weeks over who is getting the larger percentage. There is no incentive to establish research "centers," which have no budgets of their own and which funnel indirects away from the departments. We used to have really strong centers in Population Studies, Cognitive Science, etc., but they are now moribund.^*

Each department is now in direct competition with every other for undergraduate enrollments. Sexy majors are being trotted out every year, like "Visual Communication" and "Forensic Sociology." In the social sciences, every department is trying to offer statistics courses in house, so we now have about 8 courses titled "Introduction to Statistics in [insert department name here]." Because all new course offerings must be approved by a college level committee, many of these redundant courses are being offered under old course numbers and titles: "Applications of Industrial/Organizational Psychology" is now "Introduction to Statistics in Psychology," but you wouldn't know that by looking in the student handbook. The Engineering College is fighting to (wait for it!) offer all core curriculum classes in house, including the writing core, History, and foreign languages.

The new budget has erased some of the lines between pots of money that used to be sacrosanct. New construction and building renovation were once paid for from a "capital improvements" budget, but no more. One department in my college is responsible for several million dollars of the construction costs associated with their new building. My department and several others have taken advantage of the new model by "firing" the custodial staff provided by Physical Facilities and hiring a private contractor to keep the bathrooms looking spiffy. I must say, the bathroom has never looked cleaner, and my office carpet has been vacuumed for the first time in several years.

But shiny, fresh-smelling toilets will only go so far. I see nothing but disaster on the horizon. The strongest departments in the college are struggling to maintain the numbers established in Year Zero, and are starting to lose faculty members as a result.^* Since the new budget was established, we have not had one faculty meeting in which we discussed curricular issues from a teaching and training perspective; we have only discussed strategies for getting more butts in the lecture hall. Departments within the college are fighting with each other, rather than forging interdisciplinary programs. There is no hope at all for Humanities and Fine Arts.

Only two groups of people seem to be benefitting from this model: the deans and the marginal-at-best departments. The dean no longer has to make the hard decisions about which programs to support and which to cut. S/he no longer has to deliver bad news, but only sits back and watches the marketplace in action. The marginal departments, the ones with the lowest possible academic standards, are pulling in vast numbers of warm bodies and the tuition dollars associated with them.
The departments that formerly only provided degrees to the football players are now thriving.

The system can't possibly last much longer. Eventually LSU is going to drop so far in the national rankings that someone will realize that the business model must be scrapped. Someone in the administration must recognize that higher education can't be sold like burgers at McDonald's. Someone will have the guts to tell the trustees that a university is not supposed to make a lot of money, and that we should strive for academic excellence above all else. The provost who championed this system has left LSU to plunder some other university, and surely no one wants this to continue any longer than it has already.

Right? Right?

^*My best friend's husband had a chaired position in Political Science, and he established the Population Studies Center. The dean then refused him any budget from the indirect costs generated by the Center's own funding. He left to take a faculty position at a real university, and took my friend with him. Yeah, I'm a little bitter.