Planning
and Budgeting
It’s
hard to believe that this semester is almost over.
In these final days before break, I want to turn
your attention—as if you didn’t already have enough
to do—to the issues around planning and budgeting,
the appropriate levels of senate involvement,
and what you can do to help move your agenda forward
in these areas.
At
the 1999 Fall Session, we held a breakout on planning
and budgeting in response to many complaints we
had heard about local senates being systematically
marginalized in these critical processes. A resolution
came out of the breakout calling for a paper on
the subject. The Educational Policies Committee
has now begun work on that paper. We need your
input, hence the topic of this version of "Notes"
and the attached survey on your college’s planning
and budget processes.
Title
5 is quite clear about the appropriateness of
senate involvement in planning and budgeting:
section 53200(c)(10) declares "processes
for institutional planning and budget development"
to be academic and professional matters requiring
collegial consultation between governing boards
and academic senates. A key clarification of this
mandate is contained in the Academic Senate/Community
College League document, "Participating Effectively
in District and College Governance." There,
in response to the question, "Does the senate
have decision making authority with respect to
the budgets and plans themselves, or only to the
processes by which they are developed?" the
guideline states "The senate's authority
is in the area of budget and planning processes
only, and not in the area of the actual plans
and budgets." (The ASCCC/CCLC Participating
Effectively document is available on the Senate
Web site, http://www.asccc.org.)
Let me say a few words about what this means and,
without writing the whole P&B paper right
here, let me also just articulate a few basic
principles regarding faculty involvement in these
processes.
First,
it's obvious why "planning and budgeting"
are enunciated in the same breath, and why they
are uttered in that order. Everything you spend
money on ought to further your district or institutional
master plan (I am assuming that your plans and
budgets are developed in accordance with processes
defined through mutual consultation with the academic
senate), and planning should always drive budgeting,
and never the reverse. Although obvious, it is
clear that these principles are not always observed.
In chronically underfunded institutions, all of
us, faculty included, have tended to lower our
expectations and to act as if budget is the final
arbiter of what is possible and desirable.
The
key to effective budgeting and planning is that
both must be "bottom up" processes.
That is, they must begin by having the folks in
the trenches—both faculty and classified staff—identify
what it is they need to do their jobs. The budget
processes, in particular, must be of a nature
to encourage an honest assessment of needs. At
my own college, departments had become so used
to having their requests for substantial budget
augmentations turned down, that they had begun
asking only for funding for small projects and
needs, on the ground that these were more likely
to be funded. In other words, the departments
were letting budgets drive planning. They weren't
stepping up and saying what they—and their students—really
needed; they were asking instead for what they
thought they could get.
When
the academic senate gave a colleague and me the
assignment of drafting a revision of our college's
planning and budget policies, we tried to restructure
things so that "big ticket" needs had
an equal chance for funding (although, possibly
over a multi-year period). We argued that institutions
cannot function at their best if people are "shading
their bets" and not honestly coming forward
with real needs.
An
important point to note here is that at no time
did we feel our hands were tied by the claim in
the ASCCC/CCLC document that the faculty, as represented
by the academic senate, have no authority over
specific budget expenditures. If the academic
senate is actively engaged in determining constructive
and equitable planning and budget processes, then
specific expenditures will flow from those processes
in constructive and equitable ways.
Another
important point is that, in our restructured system,
all budget requests had to be justified in reference
to institutional and departmental Master Plans;
and these, in turn, were guided by the values
of educational quality and student success. Thus,
local senates have a large responsibility: to
ensure that sound educational policies and judgements
inform planning and, in turn, drive budget decisions.
I
observed earlier that our work on a Planning and
Budgeting paper was driven, in part, by frequent
complaints that faculty are locked out of these
processes. In an article I wrote for the Rostrum
last year, I looked at a concrete example of an
administrative attempt to limit senate involvement,
and presented the rationale behind the Title 5
Regulations that make this a matter for collegial
consultation with the academic senate. That article
is in the October
1999 issue, its title is "Planning and
Budget: The Wisdom of Title 5,".
Attached,
also, you'll find the questionnaire on your college's
planning and budget processes. The questionnaire
does not distinguish between "college"
and "district" processes; and in multi-college
districts, this distinction can, of course, be
critical. In those cases, you may want to fill
out the questionnaire twice, once for the college
and once for the district. If you do this, first,
thank you for taking the time and, second, please
write "College" or "District"
at the top so we’ll be able to distinguish them
appropriately. You can email your digitized copy
of the completed questionnaire(s) directly to
me: hoke.simpson@gcccd.net. (Don’t worry about
messing up the format or expanding onto more than
one page, so long as we can make out your answers.)
Or send a hard copy to the Academic Senate for
California Community Colleges, 910 K St., Ste.
300, Sacramento, CA 95814.
Please
fill out and return the attached
questionnaire, and then—and only then—go off
and have a wonderful holiday season!
