The resolution requiring the College to publicize a report of the measures taken to close the College's $100-million budget gap since 2009, which was unanimously passed at Monday's Faculty of the Arts and Sciences meeting, has the potential to strengthen the relationship between administrators and faculty members and encourage administrative transparency, according to various professors interviewed by The Dartmouth.
Native American studies and anthropology professor Sergei Kan, who has taught at the College since 1989, said the decision marked the first time in his memory that faculty had passed a resolution with "one voice."
Religion professor Ronald Green, who proposed the resolution, said he first asked the administration for a detailed report of the distribution of the budget cuts at a Feb. 28 Faculty of the Arts and Sciences meeting. Green exchanged several emails with Executive Vice President Steven Kadish, but was provided information that was "nowhere near the level of detail" that he had hoped for, Green said.
"My efforts to get this information directly didn't produce anything," he said. "I spoke with relevant economic committees and none of them were asking about the information and I didn't want to go into the summer with my request unheeded."
Green introduced the measure at the end of Monday's faculty meeting because he had insufficient time to make the measure an official agenda item at the meeting, he said. Introducing the resolution as a non-agenda item meant that any legislation would need a two-thirds vote to pass, a technicality which Green said made him "pessimistic" about the resolution's outcome. Despite his fears, faculty members were "very supportive," he said. Green estimated that 120 to 150 faculty members attended the meeting.
"Almost everybody stood up for the yay' side," Green said. "I didn't see anyone stand on the nay' side there may have been some abstentions, but it was as close to unanimous as you can get."
Faculty members said they voted for the resolution which calls for the report's release prior to the next faculty meeting on May 23 because they believe the administration should be more open and explanatory regarding its fiscal decisions.
"The more information is available, the better faculty will be able to appreciate how hard a lot of these decisions are," government department chair John Carey said. "It might be the case that we look at [the cuts] and say we really disagree with them."
Comparative literature department chair Silvia Spitta said the release of the accounting report will provide a "sense of closure" as faculty members adjust to changes brought about by the budget reduction process.
"I think it was great that [College President Jim Yong Kim] came in saying he was going to be transparent and showing us figures in the beginning," Spitta, who also teaches in the Spanish department, women and gender studies department and Latino/Latin American and Caribbean studies department, said. "We found out through the Valley News that the budget had been balanced, and people were feeling that it would be nice to know how it would be done."
The cumulative effect of the budget cuts on individual departments was a major factor in faculty members' decisions to press for the budget report's release. Many departments have lost administrative staff members, and others have lost the resources needed to hire guest speakers or run extracurricular programs, various professors said.
The Rockefeller Center previously offered the Civic Skills Training program which trains students to be "highly effective" in their internships during the interim periods following Fall, Spring and Summer terms, Rockefeller Center Director Andrew Samwick said. Due to budget cuts, however, the Rockefeller Center had to eliminate the Fall and Spring sessions.
English professor Donald Pease said he supported the measure calling for administrative transparency because the budget cuts are an issue of "moral accountability." Although faculty members were able to submit suggestions regarding where cuts should be made through a College-created website, no information has been released regarding the criteria used to determine how the cuts would be distributed, he said.
"If the community only supplies suggestions and the decision-makers arrive at criteria and the community doesn't know the rationale of the criteria or their consequences the community is operating under the delusion that it has participated," Pease said. "That is keeping a community blind and irresponsible at the time at which it should be the most responsible."
Pease said he hopes the administration will maintain the attitude of transparency that Kim displayed at the beginning of his tenure at the College.
"This administration indicated its desire for transparency and acted upon that desire when it went into the surplus of detail concerning the rationale for the budget cuts," Pease said.
Kim and fellow administrators must now "sustain that transparency through communication all the way down the line," Pease said.
Faculty members said professors have traditionally been consulted throughout decision-making processes, and that they hope this relationship will continue in the future. Kan agreed that faculty members want to remain "in the loop" regarding administrative decision making.
"If they're going to be left in the dark, this undermines the tradition of the administration consulting with the faculty, and a majority would like to preserve that tradition," he said.
The small size of the College compared to larger, research-based universities also makes an open relationship between the faculty and administration more feasible, according to Spitta.
The release of the accounting report will be useful for future discussions regarding strategic planning and budget allocations, Green said.
"We want to know how solid the future looks," Green said. "If progress is being made on the basis of questionable assumptions, we have to know that now."
Faculty members emphasized that the current administration is not entirely responsible for the budget cuts process, citing the concurrent economic crisis that placed significant pressure on the College's endowment.
"Things kind of came together where we had both the financial squeeze and a new leadership group coming in," German professor Bruce Duncan, who was unable to attend the faculty meeting, said. "Those things together made it seem as if the normal structures were not functioning as thoroughly as they otherwise would be."
The "unprecedented" financial crisis created a difficult situation for both the administration and faculty, Samwick said.
"It's not like somebody is strategically delaying information to confuse people," he said. "We just don't know this information in real time."
