Senate recommends deficit budget

A budget that will see UW spend more than it takes in during 2008-09 got the okay from the university senate last night, and will go to the board of governors for final approval next week.

The negative bottom line, calculated at $2.9 million, is possible partly because UW won’t have a deficit in the current year, as originally expected, but a razor-thin surplus.

Spending for the coming year — on faculty and staff salaries, utilities, library materials, office supplies, insurance and computers — is proposed at a record $406.5 million, including millions for the cost of new or expanded programs. Income is forecast at $403.5 million, chiefly from government grants ($187 million) and tuition fees ($175 million).

Keeping the deficit from being closer to $8 million is an “expenditure reduction” of 2.0 per cent, levied on most spending across the university. It’s the latest in an annual series of such cuts, which require UW’s departments to drop activities, keep vacant positions open or find other ways of saving money. For the record, previous reductions have been 2 per cent in 2007-08, 1.5 per cent in 2006-07, 1 per cent in 2005-06, 2 per cent in 2004-05, 2 per cent in 2003-04, 2 per cent in 2002-03 and 3.5 per cent in 2001-02

Provost Amit Chakma, the key figure in preparing UW’s operating budget, has been describing the likely outlines of this budget, including the expenditure cut, for some time, but the actual document wasn’t available until yesterday. “Senate Finance Committee, just before this meeting, received the budget and is recommending that senate recommend the 2008-09 operating budget as presented,” said Chakma at last night’s meeting in the board and senate room of Needles Hall.

Approval by the senate — which came unanimously — is a recommendation that the board of governors, which is in charge of UW’s finances, give “favourable consideration” to the operating budget, according to UW procedure, he explained.

Chakma provided some background and context for the budget, noting that UW is carrying “a structural deficit” although in other respects the budget is balanced.

Explanation: an increase of 5 per cent in tuition fee levels — the most that the provincial government will allow — means an increase of about 2.1 per cent in UW’s total funding. Government grants aren’t expected to go up at all this year, although academic leaders will be listening keenly to what’s said in today’s Ontario budget in case there’s some kind of news for university operations across the province.

Set against the income increase is an estimated 5.5 per cent annual rise in UW’s costs, largely for salaries — both scale increases and the cost of individuals’ progress through the salary ranks. Subtract 2.1 per cent from 5.5 per cent, and UW is falling behind at a rate of more than $12 million a year.

In the past, enrolment growth has helped to bridge that gap — because more students have meant more fee revenue and, sometimes, more grants. But “we are in an environment where the ground rules have changed,” Chakma said last night. “There is no [financial] incentive for us to take any more domestic undergraduate students — the only reason we continue to take them is that they add to our quality.” Some faculties have already reached their maximum potential for taking in international students in greater numbers, he observed.

There was a bit of discussion at the close of the budget presentation, focusing on how or whether UW is doing better than the University of Toronto (the authority there is engineering dean Adel Sedra, formerly U of T’s provost), and on how UW’s decentralization may make across-the-board cuts more palatable.

One senate member observed that repeated spending cuts may in fact result in an unofficial hiring freeze, despite the provost’s assurance that no such freeze is in place. Another reflected on how graduate student tuition is set centrally but grads’ funding is determined at the departmental level, resulting in some students suffering income cuts.

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Highlights of the past two weeks

Life at the university definitely didn’t stand still during the two weeks that I’ve been away. My thanks to colleague Pat Bow for putting out Daily Bulletins that told the campus (and me) about some important developments, including the election of Craig Sloss (left) as the next president of the Graduate Student Association, the awards given to a star from each of the six faculties as UW’s Co-op Students of the Year, and approval by the Ontario ministry of the environment that brings three proposed playing fields in UW’s north campus “environmental reserve” one step closer to reality.

Thursday’s Daily Bulletin included a news release about research by the Geoff Fong team in UW’s department of psychology, described as “one of the first to show that smoking in a car poses a potentially serious health hazard to occupants — particularly children — and that common methods of ventilation do not eliminate the hazard”. I knew that story was coming, and was expected to catch some public attention for Waterloo’s smoking research. Michael Strickland, the university’s director of media relations, tells me it was immediately reported in the Globe and Mail and covered on CTV’s “Canada AM”, and more coverage is to be expected.

There was the big snowstorm on Saturday night, March 8; there was the “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” broadcast this past weekend, in which Waterloo’s Kevin Royal came third behind young politicos from Saskatoon and Ottawa; there was the broadcast of a “Best Lecturer” virtuoso performance by Robert Jan van Pelt of the UW school of architecture (results of that competition, organized by TV Ontario, aren’t in yet).

And of course there was the news of a salary settlement for UW’s staff for the next two years, subject to routine approval by the university’s board of governors next week. It’s a complicated business, but the most important point is a two-step process that will be carried out this spring and repeated in the spring of 2009. Each year, first the staff salary scales will be adjusted upwards, so that all the individual salaries will stand lower relative to the “job rate”, making everybody eligible for bigger merit increases. Then the usual increase process will happen, raising scales by 3 per cent and individual salaries by more or less than that figure depending on “job rate” position and merit rating. The result, according to the staff compensation committee, will be “an additional increase to all staff that is equitable with the market adjustment provided for in the faculty settlement” a few weeks ago.

UW president David Johnston (right) is on government service again. Prime minister Stephen Harper announced late last week that Johnston has agreed to resume his role as independent advisor to "finalize recommendations by April 4, 2008, on the mandate for a public inquiry into allegations respecting the financial dealings between Mr. Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney." Johnston has been asked to take into account his preliminary report on the matter, delivered January 9, as well as the recently completed hearings by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Says a statement from the university: “As with his first stint as special advisor, President Johnston has declined to comment at this time, or give media interviews. During his government task he will continue as UW president supported by his senior administration and staff.”

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What 7 profs are doing on sabbatical

Dozens of UW faculty members are on sabbatical leave this season, and here’s another list of some of them, with summaries of their sabbatical plans as submitted to the university’s board of governors. All the sabbaticals in this list are for six months that began January 1, 2008.

Laurent Marcoux, pure mathematics: “Over the next year I intend to focus my research in two areas of Operator Theory. First, I will continue to look into the question of which operator algebras are similar to C*-algebras, and second, I will be looking at a question regarding double commutants of subalgebras of operator algebras.”

Aimee Morrison, English: “My doctoral research and subsequent publications and teaching concern the cultural study of technology: how people integrate, or not, technologies into their everyday lives. This sabbatical will extend this work into a particular subfield, the study of the rhetorical construction of self-hood in online modes of life-writing, culminating in an article, several conference presentations, and a SSHRC Standard Research Grant proposal (with Linda Warley) in Fall 2008.”

Joan Coutu, fine arts: “My intention is to write the manuscript for a book, Whig Aesthetes and the Forming of English Taste, c. 1750. All of the primary and much of the secondary research has been completed. This is a project that was funded by a standard SSHRC grant.”

Chrysanne DiMarco, computer science: “I will be undertaking several collaborative projects: automated generation of personalized health information (collaborators: University Health Network Cancer Center; Grand River Hospital); automated classification of semantic links between documents (collaborators: Google; Professor Fraser Shein, University of Toronto (tentative). I am also transitioning into Bioinformatics, with a project in biomedical information extraction using discourse-based Computational Linguistics.

Weizhen Dong, sociology: “China is undergoing social and economic transformation. Health care system reform has been the most problematic social issue in China. My plan is to write a book on health care reform in Shanghai, China, especially the medical savings account and its equity implications.”

Diana Denton, drama and speech communication: “Using my CFI infrastructure in collaboration with colleagues at other universities in Canada and in the United States, I will be conducting research in the area of ‘Trans-traditional Spirituality: Communicating Across Differences’ to explore ways of integrating spirituality and intercultural dialogue into classroom practice and discover how students are integrating this learning experience. Results will be disseminated in journal articles and conferences.”

Pascal Poupart, computer science: “I will focus on the publication of some of my recent work on partially observable Markov decision processes and Bayesian reinforcement learning in first-rate journals, and the development of ‘intelligent walkers’ for eldercare. The intelligent walker project is a multi-disciplinary effort led by me in collaboration with the Research Institute in Aging at UW and Winston Park Retirement Homes in Kitchener. I expect to spend most of my time in Waterloo, but may occasionally travel to conferences and to visit colleagues at other universities.”

CAR

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