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January 13, 2003
To: The Campus Community
From: EVC/Campus Provost John Simpson
Re: Responding to the budget challenges
As all of us now know, the State of California is facing one of the most significant financial challenges in its history. On Friday, the Governor released his plan for dealing with the current budget crisis, which calls for the state to reduce annual spending by $21 billion, increase revenues by $8 billion, and realign programs to address a projected shortfall of $34 billion in the state’s budget. While both the Governor and the State’s Legislature have historically provided strong support for higher education, the simple fact of the matter is that all agencies and programs currently supported by the State will be affected. The University of California, including UC Santa Cruz, will not be shielded from the State’s current financial situation. The extent or impact of reduced funding to our campus is not yet known. We must, however, be prudent in our assessment of the situation and prepare ourselves for a potentially wide and varied set of reduced funding scenarios.
In anticipation of these events, we have engaged the Academic Senate, the Committee on Planning and Budget and other campus leaders in a series of discussions designed to capture our best thinking about how to approach these challenges. Our response must be principled, strategic and decisive. Moreover, this undertaking will set the foundation for the future of the campus. In all of our deliberations there has been strong consensus that our efforts must address both our long and short-term objectives – ensuring the access of Californians to higher education, while building and extending the excellence of our academic programs. It is imperative that we adopt a strategic approach to cost management that generates near-term savings while at the same time builds a more efficient and better integrated operating model over the long term. In doing so, the campus must pursue a strategy for budget reductions that critically considers an evaluation of its programs, policies, and practices. In fact, the budget crisis affords us the opportunity to examine carefully all that we do, and how we do it.
For all of these reasons, we have established an Executive Budget Committee (EBC) to serve as an overall advisory body to Chancellor Greenwood and me on budget issues and priorities, and provide oversight and coordination for the development and implementation of campus budget strategies. As Chancellor Greenwood noted in her December 5 Budget Update letter to the campus, I will chair the EBC. The members are Vice Chancellors Tom Vani and Meredith Michaels, Dean David Kliger, Professor George Blumenthal, Professor Michael Cowan, and Chancellor Greenwood. The EBC has already established three working committees to formulate action plans for responding to the budget challenge. The Committees, their chairs and memberships, and their primary areas of focus are as follows:
1. Policies, Procedures and Practices Committee – Members: Vice Chancellor Vani (chair), Vice Chancellor Hernandez, Dean Godzich, and Campus IT Consultant Merkley. Focus: Examine critically present campus policies, practices and procedures and recommend ways in which these can be improved to gain budgetary savings and operational efficiencies.
2. Academic Instruction and Research Committee – Members: Dean Kliger (chair), Vice Provost Brown, Dean Chemers, Dean Godzich, Vice Provost and Dean Goff, Dean Houghton, Dean Kang, Vice Provost and Dean Talamantes. Focus: Examine all state-supported Instruction and Research activities and programs, and academic administrative structure, with recommendations for ways in which these can be improved to gain budgetary savings and operational efficiencies.
3. Revenue Generation Committee – Members: Vice Chancellor Michaels (chair), Dean Chemers, Associate Vice Chancellor Heit, Vice Chancellor Miller, Associate Vice Chancellor Prokop, and Dean Sandeen. Focus: Consider carefully and recommend opportunities for increasing campus revenue resources through new mechanisms, and evaluate the options available for reprioritization and redirection of existing fund sources.
Each of these Committees will be supported by Project Teams that will engage in a variety of activities - fact-finding and analysis, interviews, benchmarking, and assessment of best practices - to identify and evaluate the best opportunities available to us as a campus. The Committees and their supporting Project Teams will commence their activities within the next week and will work in a coordinated fashion over the course of the next few months. Additionally, we have engaged the services of a highly regarded professional services firm, AVCOR Consulting, to help guide and direct our efforts over the coming weeks. AVCOR has already this year been working with the Physical Plant and Staff Human Resources units on campus, and has done an exceptional job in helping these organizations improve their operations.
It is important that all of you understand that we cannot proceed with a "business-as-usual" attitude. The challenges before us are large, and will require great effort, creativity and dedication to overcome in a way that guarantees UCSC’s bright future. The initiative outlined above is meant to be a campuswide response to our situation, and it will transcend academic and academic support divisions. Clearly we must consider this effort to be the most important and critical campus activity for the next few months.
Finally, this effort will require all of our participation and effort and we must now all recognize our role as campus citizens. We need ideas, thoughts and suggestions from every part of our organization. The Chancellor and I have instructed the Working Committees and their Project Teams to consult widely and solicit the input of all members of the campus – the students, the staff and the faculty. When you are asked to support these efforts, I ask that you do so willingly and without hesitation. In turn, my colleagues and I are committed to keep the campus informed of our efforts over the coming weeks as we more clearly define our response to the challenges before us.
Thank you for your commitment to UC Santa Cruz.
Sincerely yours,
John B. Simpson
Campus Provost and
Executive Vice Chancellor
cc: Chancellor Greenwood
Maintained by:pioweb@ucsc.edu