Opinion: A budget that only a University of Minnesota administrator could love

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Gregg Goldman, the University of Minnesota’s executive vice president for finance and operations, got it right in a recent interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune: We’re witnessing “a once-in-a-lifetime assault” on higher education, he said.

Yet while Goldman is undoubtedly correct about the authoritarian onslaught from Donald Trump and the anti-intellectual movement, the U’s problems are not confined to federal attacks and flat funding from the state. There’s also the university itself.

Apparently impervious to years of legitimate grumbling about administrative bloat and the appalling arms race in administrative salaries, Goldman, in an email informing faculty and staff that programs are being cut and tuition raised, offered up this precious gem: “administrative areas … have suffered from underinvestment for some time” and will now be one of the university’s “spending priorities.”

Wait, what? We don’t spend enough on administration?

Only an administrator could pen such nonsense, and it takes a special talent — one apparently possessed only by administrators — to genuinely believe it.

So what will this new investment look like? We don’t fully know, but the administration’s proposed budget — which the Board of Regents is scheduled to review later this week — offers some clues.

At a time when faculty and staff are losing their jobs, with “more uncomfortable and likely unpopular changes” perhaps on the way, the administration, we learn, is funding yet another new vice president position, this one for “elevating University-wide strategic initiatives.” That would make 12 VPs.

Moreover, new money will be devoted to “expanding government relations.” This actually makes sense, as it will take unusually skilled professionals to convince legislators and state officials that gutting academic programs while fattening the administration is a wise use of public funds.

And then there’s this: a new “Twin Cities Enrollment Management Office.” For those unfamiliar with the jargon, “strategic enrollment management” has become a buzzy thing in higher education in recent years. We hired an administrator to handle “SEM” at the Duluth campus two years ago. Evidently no self-respecting institution should be without one.

The Twin Cities has not historically had a problem attracting students, but with the administration’s proposed 6.5% tuition increase pushing public higher education even farther out of Minnesotans’ reach, this “enrollment management office” is a brilliant stroke. With more state residents unable to afford the U, it will allow the campus to reach those “potential students across the nation” who would pay higher, nonresidential tuition rates on which the administration appears to be betting.

The carrot in all this — at least for those faculty and staff who don’t lose their jobs — is a more-or-less inflationary salary increase, which is in fact an improvement over the often subinflationary raises we’ve seen for everyone but top administrators and coaches in recent years.

There will also be an additional 1% committed to a “market adjustment pool.” For those of us in Duluth, this is rich. We’ve been begging for funds to address our absurdly low salaries for years. It’s apparently only when the administration erroneously thinks it can buy off the Twin Cities faculty that money starts to flow.

Maybe I’m not being fair. The system did finally throw the Duluth faculty a bone last year. When the union threatened to strike, the administration ponied up $200,000 over two years for such “market adjustments.” Yet this pittance is more an insult than serious gesture.

To put it in perspective, the $200,000 for some 500 faculty at UMD is less than 10% of the salary and supplemental retirement contributions over that same period of just one administrator, President Rebecca Cunningham. In fact, $200,000 over two years is far below the $329,000 the university spent in merely searching for its new president, and it’s considerably less than the $273,000 the university spent in a single day on the president’s inauguration last September.

So, yes, the executive vice president is right. Higher education is under assault. But the U’s current administration, which has behaved shamefully in trying to appease the authoritarians while gratuitously providing ammunition to the institution’s critics in planning for further bloat, is clearly part of the problem.

Scott Laderman teaches history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and is a former president of its faculty union.