The Faculty Association of UBC raised some key concerns this week over the University’s budget. Key concerns include UBC’s:
- overuse of discretionary revenue on capital expenditures: “diversion of operating surpluses to capital”
- “massive administrative bloat in its complement of management and professional staff”
- 2:1 staff-to-faculty ratio
- deprioritizing of academic funding
- polemic “from senior management that salary increases from the recent arbitration were ‘unanticipated'”
- refusal to provide a general wage increase above 0-2%
We need to be measured with any sympathy for Faculties or units running up deficits for admin bloat, non-union labour, etc. and turning around to ask for more.
UBC’s unit budgets are notoriously opaque at the Faculty, School, Department, Office, and Centre levels. Faculty, staff, and students are perennially left begging for details or forced to resort to Freedom of Information requests. For instance, on 11-12 January, UBC’s VP Finance hosted a Budget Retreat for the Deans to present their status and plans. The rest of us were not given access.
So here are the UBC Vancouver Budget Retreat January 11/12 2016 records, accessed through a FoI request.
Table of Contents
- Retreat Agenda 1
- University Budget 5
- Law 12
- Applied Science 42
- Arts 105
- Dentistry 135
- Education 167
- Forestry 180
- Land & Food 193
- Medicine 208
- Pharmaceutical Sciences 228
- Sauder 257
- Science 274
- Graduate & Postdoc Studies 289