President Shepard sends budget update to campus

Western Washington University President Bruce Shepard sent the following message to Western faculty and staff on Thursday, Aug. 14:

Colleagues:

Hope you are having a great summer, finding time to relax and recharge. Cyndie and I certainly have done so. And, we are excited about the year ahead.

Looking to that year ahead, it is time for a budget update.

Our Board of Trustees, as is standard practice at their August meeting, will be adopting a state budget request. You may well have been involved, earlier in the year, as, bottom up, proposals were widely and critically scrutinized, improved, and selected. Now, it is time for our Trustees to decide.

Today, they receive for their consideration my recommendations on our 2015-17 biennial budget request. After their action next Thursday, the resulting budget request goes to the Governor. The Governor will send his 2015-17 biennial budget proposal to the Legislature in December.

That is all standard operating practice. What follows is not.

In the proposal that will go down to the Governor, we were asked by the Office of Financial Management (OFM) to start with the assumption of 85% funding and then propose, piecemeal and in priority order, what we would, if allowed, add back.

That approach we will not do, we cannot do. Two reasons are paramount:

• First, to engage in hypothetical exercises like this would cause damage lasting decades even if no cuts were ever made. This is simply because, when programs are identified as possibly being eliminated, our excellent faculty, staff, and students associated with the identified programs, understandably, seek opportunities elsewhere, doing so whether or not cuts actually are eventually made. Further, we will be unable to attract strong faculty, staff, and students to such a program if it has appeared on a hypothetical “hit list” even if no “hit” ended up being made.
• Second, any decisions of such impact can only be made following our established transparent, widely participative, accountable, data informed, and strategic budgeting processes. Those are the processes by which we build an operating budget. They begin in December (and not mid-summer in the absence of so many critical to a well-informed and strategic decision-making process).

So, I will be recommending to our Trustees that Western`s budget request have these features:

• We will not propose specific reductions under the 15% cut scenario. And please believe me on this: we have no such list. Instead, we will talk about broad consequences of such cuts should they be foolishly entertained.
• We will not propose any prioritized “add backs” to take us from 85% to 100%. We will simply propose a lump sum add back to 100%.

The continuing excellence of Washington`s other public higher education institutions is similarly at risk here. In recommending the preceding approach to OFM`s 15% cut instructions, I am joined by the presidents of Washington`s other five public baccalaureate institutions. We are together on this matter.

The recommendations that I will bring to our Trustees on our budget request also have these features:

• Given our commitment to apply our considerable strengths to the needs of Washington, our foremost obligation is to protect those strengths. Consequently, competitive compensation remains our top legislative priority.
• The recommended budget request includes decision packages that deliver on our commitment to apply Western`s strengths to critical state needs. These you likely have seen many times before as they were developed bottom up through a rigorous process of wide scrutiny and extensive selectivity.

My memorandum to Trustees presenting all the 2015-17 Budget Request Recommendations is available here.

Please understand this, though. The 15% cut request is in response to very real and very serious budget challenges facing our state. Likely more severe than any in recent memory. We have come through previous tough times because we stayed on message, stayed together, and stayed engaged. This, we – all of us – are clearly going to be called upon to once again do.

I continue to be so proud to be part of an institution defined by the excellence of its people and willing to fight to sustain that excellence,

Bruce