Transparency issues relating to athletics and financial expenditure reporting were among the most heated points of discussion at the first University Senate session of the year.
In addition to University President Richard Lariviere’s “State of the University” address and the nomination of professor of music composition and theory Robert Kyr as the Senate’s next vice president, the legislative assembly dealt largely with combating athletic department revenue shortfalls, and the creation of a more accountable and accessible budget reporting system. During the Senate’s open discussion, Executive Senior Associate Athletic Director for Finance and Administration Jamie Moffitt assumed the floor and presented the athletic department’s 2010-11 operating budget, delineating how its most recent revenue projections have not held true. Moffitt answered questions regarding the department’s struggling budget optimistically, contending that short-term, lucrative investment and the containing of expenses will allow athletics to resist dipping into the University’s General Fund.
“(We are) containing expenses and reducing expenses where we can … and investing in those areas of the program (that provide) revenue,” Moffitt said. “We can never put ourselves in a position where we have to go to the University and ask for General Fund money.”
The Senate also attempted to breathe new life into a May 2009 motion requesting that University Administration establish a detailed, publicly accessible online database of financial expenditure information collected from all departments. In response to the 2009 Oregon Legislative Assembly House Bill 2500, which states that “taxpayers should be able to easily access the details on how the state is spending their tax dollars and what performance results are achieved for those expenditures,” the Senate is again pushing the creation of an interactive website detailing the location, purpose and results of tax-related expenditures. With the creation of this new database, according to the motion’s background provided by the Senate, it would be possible to reveal how much “the Biology Department spen(t) on frog dissections” or what the “monthly fax charges accrued by the Romance Languages Department” amounted to.
Senate president Nathan Tublitz presented the congregation with a brief history of the database’s tumultuous beginning.
“This motion was passed in May 2009 and it’s hit a bunch of roadblocks and potholes,” Tublitz said. “We are now at the point of trying to make it work.”
One impedance to moving forward with the information bank, the Senate president said, involves its possible conflict with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Though financial information relating to students is strictly off-limits to the public, the University still needs clarification from the Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ) about which types of faculty financial records can be released. There is no timeline for when, if the DOJ allows it, a database will be created.
“We cannot move forward with the filtering of that database until we hear back from the DOJ,” the Senate president said.
The University’s vice president for finance and administration Frances Dyke spoke to this end, saying that the school is still hesitant to test the waters about what personal information can be released.
“As you know, the financial system contains a great amount of personal information,” Dyke said. “A product with more detail has been developed, and is in the testing environment.”
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