Faculty members at two of the nation’s largest flagship universities pushed back on Monday against “shared services” proposals that administrators say will save millions of dollars but that opponents charge will be costly boondoggles.
At the University of Texas at Austin, two professors introduced a resolution to the Faculty Council calling for administrators to suspend plans to move toward shared services until they can provide more details about anticipated upfront costs and realistic estimates of savings.
At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where more than 1,100 faculty members had earlier signed a letter opposing shared services, the faculty’s Senate Assembly and the faculty of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts voted to request, respectively, a suspension and a two-year moratorium on the plan.
Administrators at Michigan have apologized for how the plan was rolled out, but so far they have promised only that staff moves would be “delayed beyond April.”
Martha E. Pollack, Michigan’s provost, said in a statement, “We have slowed down the process of creating a shared-services center to bring in more faculty voices and to help evaluate the timeline and structure of the project.”
Both Texas and Michigan are getting advice from the consulting giant Accenture LLP, a company that some faculty members have criticized as ill suited to academic culture. Michigan is paying Accenture $11.7-million for its advice. But Kevin P. Hegarty, chief financial officer at Texas, emphasized in an interview that his institution was in “the draft discussion phase” of its project and that it had spent less than $1-million on the effort.
Looking for Efficiencies
Several universities have embraced shared services as a way to reduce labor costs and find other efficiencies by identifying staff redundancies in academic departments and recombining the tasks so that they can be completed by fewer employees, usually in a central location.
Mr. Hegarty said Texas had 12,000 administrative staff members, and it was hoping to save $30-million to $40-million annually by cutting 500 of them through attrition—not layoffs—over four to five years.
After working out a plan with faculty and staff members, he said, the university will test it through pilot plans involving departments that agree to the changes. Mr. Hegarty, who spoke at Monday’s Faculty Council meeting, insisted that faculty members would not be burdened with more tasks and that staff members would see their jobs improved.
He said that he had held more than 30 meetings since January in an effort to gain the opinions of faculty and staff members—a process that he contrasted with Michigan’s, where many of the details of the plan had been decided before it was unveiled.
But Dana L. Cloud, an associate professor in the department of communication studies at Texas and a co-sponsor of the resolution against the shared-services proposal, characterized Mr. Hegarty’s meetings as more of a “sales job” than a collaboration. She did not ask the Faculty Council to vote on the measure that was introduced on Monday.
“It’s a matter of starting a conversation and giving notice to the administration that we are watching,” she said.
Hillary Hart, chair of the Faculty Council at Texas, agreed with Mr. Hegarty that Austin’s situation was much different from Ann Arbor’s. “We’re all trying to work toward a more productive resolution,” she said, one that won’t stop the exploration of shared services in its preliminary stages.
“What we want is real information from these pilots,” she said. “We want to survey not just the chairs but faculty and staff in the trenches.”
