Senate passes resolution, seeks to raise participation

To ease frustrations about existing and potential state-directed budget cuts, the Senate of College Councils passed a resolution to increase student and faculty involvement in the budget-cutting process at the group’s meeting Thursday night.

The resolution creates an initiative called College Tuition and Budget Advisory Committees, groups composed of undergraduate and graduate students and faculty to meet with deans and administrators in all but two — the Graduate School and the Division of Continuing Education — colleges and schools.

The CTBAC resolution follows a previous pledge by the group to increase the student voice in the budget-cutting process. That resolution came as a response to the cut of the Vietnamese language program in the spring.

The initiative is an effort to help increase communication between administrators and students in each college so that decisions and information can move from the bottom up, rather than the top down, said Senate President Chelsea Adler.

“If you have structures that are high up, there is a lot of distrust because it feels like even if there is a student on a committee, you don’t know them,” Adler said. “We’ve tried to take everything into account to provide accountability and communication.”

The resolution requires every college council to create a structure and appoint students and faculty for its CTBAC within six weeks. Adler said she hopes the CTBAC for the College of Liberal Arts will be installed by Oct. 1.

Liberal Arts spokesman Gary Susswein said the office of Dean Randy Diehl was not prepared to publicly support any particular proposal for student involvement in the budget-cutting process but did support increasing that voice in some way.

“Students’ voices need to be heard as we make difficult choices about cutting costs,” Diehl said in a statement.

UT President William Powers Jr. also said in an interview earlier this month that he supports increased student involvement in the budget-cutting process at the college level in an interview.

The first draft of the initiative came from an idea by former Senate President Stephen Myers, who served between 2007-08, and Reid Long, the Senate policy director during that time. The two were concerned with the many cuts facing the University and began to explore ways to put students into the conversation.

After state officials announced the possibility of a 10-percent budget cut to go into effect in August 2012, Long and Myers took the initiative to Senate, Student Government and Graduate Student Assembly leaders to develop a more thorough and concrete proposal.

“The 10-percent cut came out and it became much more obvious that we needed to develop the budgeting aspects of this to try and create a committee that would look at the issues within the budget and outline priorities,” Long said.

As each college determines its own method of involving the most appropriate students and faculty in its committee, Adler said she expects to face challenges from some colleges and schools but that she firmly believes each college and school will benefit from the increased student voice CTBAC will allow.

“Every dean knows about the proposal and is open to working with their college council about what is going to work,” Adler said.

All college councils voted in favor of the proposal except the Communication Council. Ashley Jennings, the council’s president, said she is worried the proposal might conflict with an existing program in the College of Communications called the Student Issues Advisory Council, which works with deans and department chairs on a regular basis to advise on student matters, including budgetary concerns.

“Communication Council is fully supportive of this proposal as far as budgets and transparency goes, but there are a lot of logistics that are kind of vague,” Jennings said. “It’s a proposal to create a proposal from your specific council.”

However, Adler said the vagueness is intended to make it possible for each college to design a CTBAC that best serves the needs and structure of that college.

“Not every college is the same, so they get to decide what works for them and what is going to empower them the most,” Adler said. “We will work with Communication Council and every council to make sure it meets their needs.”

A video of the Senate meeting will be available on the UT Senate of College Council’s YouTube channel by Saturday night.