When administrators at Bradley University announced in July 2023 that the institution faced a $13-million budget hole, a committee of faculty members took on a daunting — and in many ways unfamiliar — challenge: finding $10 million in cuts from academic operations.
The professors pored over a stack of statistics — tuition revenue, enrollment and completion numbers, information on course sizes and credit hours — to make a set of recommendations that they hoped would sway Bradley’s administration.
Their peers at other institutions might soon find themselves in a similar situation. As financial pressures increase, enrollments stagnate, and pandemic-era-funding stopgaps ebb, administrators across the nation are contemplating major cuts and restructuring at their institutions. Faculty members are increasingly looking to reassert their role in shared governance and to resist centralized administrative control by digging into their institutions’ finances and proposing alternative visions for making cuts. Sometimes they argue that the budget shortfalls aren’t as dire as administrators say they are. Often, they hope not only to save jobs but also to articulate an alternate vision for their college.
But their efforts have met with mixed results, reflecting a web of tensions in the sector — like the growing complexity of higher-education institutions and their budgets, and the lack of faculty insight into and influence over the needs of the whole organization.
At Bradley, that work fell to the University Senate’s executive committee, whose six members were assigned by the entire body to evaluate possible program eliminations; Bradley’s faculty handbook provides that those cuts are to be based “solely on educational considerations, as determined primarily by the faculty.”
It was a daunting task, said Eden S. Blair, a professor of entrepreneurship who served on the committee. She and her colleagues were effectively being asked to undergo a crash course in institutional finance, with high stakes: They would need to justify, or place on the chopping block, their jobs and their co-workers’.
In November, the committee produced a 12-page report proposing nearly $10 million in cuts, including $4.5 million in instructional costs. “We found the least painful way, the best worst-case scenario, I guess, that we felt could be justified,” Blair said, “and it was ignored for a much worse worst-case scenario.”
Under that more drastic plan, announced in December by Bradley’s president, Stephen Standifird, 15 of Bradley’s academic programs are to be phased out. Twenty-three faculty jobs will be culled through attrition, and 38 more — including Blair’s — through layoffs. Standifird’s plan did not take up any of the faculty committee’s recommendations, Blair said, despite what she and her colleagues understood as a commitment from the president to honor their suggestions. “It seems like a complete co-optation,” she said; faculty members’ distrust in administration throughout the fall culminated in votes of no confidence in Standifird and the provost even before the cuts were made final.
In making his decisions, Standifird considered recommendations from the faculty committee, provost, and deans, said Libby Derry, Bradley’s spokesperson, in a statement to The Chronicle. “After a detailed assessment of all recommendations,” she said, “the president announced the plan he feels best meets the needs and interests of today’s students, while creating a strong foundation for the university moving forward.”
From Blair’s perspective, the outcome at Bradley — hundreds of hours of faculty education and expertise seemingly ignored, and a lasting sense of conflict with the administration — may well represent the worst of what can happen when faculty members get involved with institutional finance.
But that, she said, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t still try.
Some faculty budget activism has met with success. Take the Johns Hopkins University, which in 2020 announced it would deal with a projected $375-million pandemic-induced deficit by freezing hiring, canceling all raises, and suspending for one year contributions to its employees’ retirement accounts. That news, particularly the pension pauses, drew sharp criticism from many faculty members. In Zoom town halls and public petitions, they questioned why the university was enacting such drastic measures, especially given its endowment — which then sat at more than $6 billion — and its cachet as a premier public-health institution in the throes of a global pandemic.
To help answer those questions, they recruited Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University and former chair of the American Association of University Professors’ Collective Bargaining Congress who has in recent years become known for his analyses of institutions’ publicly available financial statements. Bunsis’s work tends to paint a very different picture than the one offered by administrators, who often contest his findings.
Faculty are starting to understand that if we don’t also participate in budgetary issues, ultimately faculty governance is meaningless.
“Faculty do not know what’s going on, and they’re not being told what’s going on, and all they hear about is, ‘The world is coming to an end. We have to cut faculty,’” Bunsis said. “In almost every case this is just not necessary, not true. The university’s got huge reserves, huge cash flows, and does not need to be making any of the cuts that they’re making.”
That, he said, was the case at Hopkins; Bunsis’s estimate of the university’s budget shortfall was much smaller than the one administrators cited, and could, he told faculty members in his presentation, easily be covered by unrestricted reserves. His presentation galvanized the faculty further, said François Furstenberg, a professor of history at Hopkins, who wrote in The Chronicle rebuking the pension freezes and calling for greater financial clarity. “That reality check was just incredibly effective and incredibly empowering in allowing people to challenge what we were being told, or to question what we were being told,” Furstenberg said.
The faculty members’ advocacy got results: Soon after the initial backlash, administrators began holding town-hall sessions to explain various aspects of the budget. To Furstenberg’s knowledge, that had never been done before. “Asking these kinds of questions did push them into responding with some more transparency.”
Transparency wasn’t the only result: Within months, the university’s pension freeze had essentially been undone. (Explaining the policy reversal, Ronald J. Daniels, Hopkins’s president, credited “the good fortune of some one-time occurrences, including tremendous philanthropic support,” which put the institution in a stronger-than-expected position.)
To Furstenberg, the episode is more than a single success story for faculty activism. It’s fuel for what he hopes is a broader effort by faculty members to educate themselves on institutional finance, which he sees as inextricable from academic matters.
“Faculty are starting — certainly belatedly, and maybe too late, who knows — to understand that if we don’t also participate in budgetary issues, ultimately faculty governance is meaningless,” he said. “If it’s not too late, this may be the last stand for being able to have some meaningful participation in the direction of universities.”
Most faculty members are not likely to become finance experts, Furstenberg said, nor should they be involved in every aspect of the college’s budgeting. But if a critical mass of scholars doesn’t develop a critical mass of financial literacy? “Then,” he thinks, “we’re kind of doomed.”
A critical mass may be developing, said a dozen scholars with whom The Chronicle spoke. It’s not just at private institutions, like Bradley and Johns Hopkins, where the conditions for faculty activism seem ripe. Financial squeezes are starting to affect state flagships, too: West Virginia University announced in the fall that it would cut 28 academic programs and 143 faculty jobs amid a 10-percent enrollment decline that left it $45 million in the red. The University of Connecticut is weighing a 15-percent cut in each of its units’ operating budgets over five years. Pennsylvania State University’s trustees will soon vote on a plan to cut $94 million from its budget. And at the University of Arizona, administrators admitted to inaccurate budget forecasting and financial mismanagement that added up to a $177-million deficit.
Some faculty members have taken their concerns public. For example, a trio of scholars at West Virginia published an open letter critical of cuts there, and Clifford Ando, a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, wrote a detailed financial analysis saying his institution had “forced itself … to act poor.”
Meanwhile, those at the beginning of the academic pipeline have shown an increasing appetite for activism and advocacy. Graduate-student union pushes have been described as being at an “extraordinary and historic” high by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Thirty new student-worker unions won recognition in an 18-month period across 2022 and 2023, led by strikes in the University of California system and at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia Universities.
Such strikes are “clear evidence of activism on the part of, essentially, people in pre-faculty roles,” said Sondra N. Barringer, an associate professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University. Other factors are piquing faculty interest in financial matters, she added: athletic-conference realignment, the release of salary data, and even the simple realization that one’s salary isn’t keeping up with inflation.
But becoming conversant in institutional finance takes some getting used to. It has its own vocabulary. When a faculty member tries to take in a budget presentation, she might find herself on a “very different linguistic playing field” than an administrator, said Jennifer M. Miller, an associate professor of history at Dartmouth College.
“They’ll just throw things out like, ‘We used to be based on an incremental model, but now we’re going to do this, this, and this.’ If you’re not primed to flag ‘incremental’ as a key word that is actually a window into this whole world of how budgets might work,” Miller said, “it can fly right over your head.”
That’s why Miller served as a guest editor of a 2022 special issue of the AAUP’s Academe magazine, focusing on “Revolutionizing Higher Education Budget and Finance,” alongside Aimee Loiselle, an assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. Loiselle and Miller, both members of the executive board of the group Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, also teamed up on a resource guide for the special issue that offers both a glossary of key financial terms and a set of steps faculty members might use to organize around budget concerns.
Educating oneself, though, can be a time-consuming endeavor, said Karley A. Riffe, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Cincinnati who studies shared governance. Much budget-advocacy work winds up as the sort of invisible labor that can’t be worked into a line item on a CV and could become a damper on one’s productivity en route to promotion or tenure. “What’s being lost by these faculty spending their time on these financial issues when they could be meeting with students, when they could be grading assignments, when they could be contributing to research?” she asked.
Something that looks on paper like a bad business decision might in fact be a reflection of the many layers of red tape underneath.
Non-tenure-track and adjunct faculty members are even less likely to have time to devote to this work, Riffe points out, and those scholars rarely hold positions on faculty senates or financial committees, Loiselle and Miller added.
Still, Bunsis, the Eastern Michigan professor, said faculty awareness of financial matters has intensified in the last few years. When he gives a talk on a Friday afternoon, 50 or 100 faculty members might attend. “If a high percentage of the faculty shows up to hear someone talk about counting numbers and balance sheets and income statements, well, it tells me they’re pretty engaged as to what’s going on,” he said.
That may be because his message often reinforces the assumptions faculty members have about their institution’s finances. “What I show them explicitly is things that they already knew implicitly,” Bunsis said.
As professors dig into their institutions’ finances, many are finding that their impressions often account for only part of the picture.
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego who studies higher-ed budget models, put it simply: “Sometimes the problem is that budgets are really boring. They’re the driest and most boring instruments of governance in higher education,” he said. “When you start talking about the details, it becomes very geeky, and you lose interest very fast.”
And there are so many details, Pardo-Guerra added. Because colleges serve multiple functions — educating students, facilitating research, performing public service — a simple comparison of revenues and expenses is reductive. “There is this assumption that the budget is all about instruction, because that’s the mission of the university. But nowadays, that mission is accomplished through all these other things, and all those things are encoded in the budget in very specific ways,” Pardo-Guerra said — ways that are rarely clear from looking at publicly available data, much of which tends not to be detailed. Something that looks on paper like a bad business decision might in fact be a reflection of the many layers of red tape underneath.
“Even though there’s always some leeway and slack in the budget, there’s a saying that every dollar that is promised in higher education is a dollar that has already been spent, and that’s a good reflection of what happens. Even though there seems to be money floating there, that money is already promised for something” or is subject to any number of restrictions on its use, Pardo-Guerra said. “Faculty doesn’t tend to see this because we have, I think at least collectively, this relatively simplistic idea of how the university budget works.” (In a recent Chronicle survey, conducted in partnership with Huron Consulting Group and the American Council on Education, administrators agreed: 63 percent said faculty members don’t understand resource allocation.)
That leads to some tempting but reductive conclusions, said Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher education at Michigan State University. “That contradiction of, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of money sloshing around,’ and also, ‘We don’t have any money to give you a raise that even keeps up with inflation,’ is one that is hard to wrap your head around,” he said. To point to the football coach’s sky-high salary, or to the oft-lamented phenomenon of “administrative bloat” as a rationale for low faculty salaries is to misunderstand the way money in higher education works.
It may even be impossible for the average faculty member to come to a complete understanding of their institution’s balance sheet. Budgets are so decentralized and complex, Cantwell pointed out, that there might not be “a complete understanding by anybody at the university exactly what it costs to produce something and exactly where the revenue comes to support that cost.”
And, of course, some scholars would prefer to stay far away from college finance, said Furstenberg, of Johns Hopkins. “Without a doubt, there are lots of people who would take that position: ‘I’m not here to discuss budgets. I’m here to teach and do my research, and that’s what I’m interested in. If I was interested in being a budget person, I could become a dean, or I could have gone to Wall Street.’”
For those who do want to look deeply into their institution’s finances, it can be difficult to procure information, particularly from private colleges. Getting hold of the right financial data is often remarkably time-consuming, resulting in what Pardo-Guerra described as an “operational bottleneck” on the part of staff members. That is, of course, if a college’s administrators provide data that allow everyone to work from a common frame of reference. Blair, the Bradley University professor, said she had faced that problem: Data points like total revenue and instructional costs per course were “flawed in several ways that affect department ratings significantly and disproportionately,” and qualitative data was entirely missing, according to the Bradley executive committee’s report. (Derry, the Bradley spokesperson, said the university provided five years of data on each program, using six metrics, among them total net tuition, tuition minus instructional cost, and average enrollment and completion.)
At the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, too, faculty members complained that inaccurate data, including misreported numbers of students in certain majors and minors, had been used in administrators’ decision to cut 20 academic programs. “I was on the college committee that reviewed these programs,” said the president of the campus’s AAUP chapter, according to NC Newsline. “If I can’t tell how they got to some of these decisions, that’s a problem.”
If faculty members are going to try to weigh in more on financial matters, there are a few steps they might consider taking, experts said.
One is via formal structures for getting involved, like collegewide finance committees or a faculty spot on the board of trustees, said Barringer, of Southern Methodist University. These positions are limited, of course, and effective only if they’re endowed with some power — if administrators take seriously the budget committee’s recommendations, for instance, or if the faculty board representative is elected rather than handpicked by administrators. But they provide a quantifiable form of service and, in theory, a direct line of communication with administrators.
Less formal modes of expertise and advocacy are emerging, too. Barringer encourages scholars to call on their colleagues — scholars like her who study higher-education policy, or who work in accounting or finance — as in-house sources of knowledge. They’re likely to understand institutional context that might not be readily apparent from a more-general crash course, and to have a personal stake in whatever the numbers reveal.
Faculty members who do develop financial expertise can share that knowledge with colleagues, even in informal conversations in the hallway or at a faculty meeting. Just as every department has one or two professors known for their mentorship or grant-writing skills, Pardo-Guerra suggested, “we should have something similar for budget models within our institutions, people who understand the admin processes within them, are able to communicate them to colleagues and then to get ideas from them.”
Much of faculty members’ advocacy on budgetary matters is reactive. When an administration announces that it’s eliminating programs or jobs, scholars spring into action; they’re too engrossed in absorbing the crisis of the moment, hoping to reverse or reduce its impact, to consider the bigger-picture implications.
But Cantwell, at Michigan State, said that to have lasting effects, the work must be less reactive and more sustained; ultimately, faculty members with diverging sets of interests need to arrive at a workable consensus among themselves in order to mirror the united front with which administrators often present budget cuts. He and others advocate a more proactive, day-to-day awareness of the college’s fiscal health, which they say would allow for budget discussions to unfold without the urgency and emotional valence they have when cuts are at hand. One way to get there, Riffe, at the University of Cincinnati, suggested, is to start smaller, at the department level. “In the faculty literature, we read time and time again that the department is really the home of the faculty member,” she said. “That might be where folks feel like they have the most chance for making actual change.”
“I don’t know that that many faculty members are sitting in their offices thinking about 990s and bond ratings,” she added. But they are thinking about how to ensure their doctoral advisee has funding for the fall. That more-incremental approach to college finance, she reasoned, feels much more immediate and realistic.
More faculty involvement in institutional finance is not only likely but healthy, said Barringer. But with that involvement, she cautioned, comes responsibility. “If they want to come to the table and have a voice in those decisions about program closures, then that means they may have to close programs, and that may not be something that everyone likes.”
