The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Faculty Senate didn’t know that the UH Board of Regents (BOR) declared that the university is in a state of fiscal exigency because at a July 23, 2009 BOR meeting the decision was made in executive session and there is nothing about it in the minutes for the meeting.
“We didn’t expect to be facing this this month,” said UHM Faculty Senate President David Ross at a UH Faculty Congress meeting last Wednesday. “To be honest, this caught a lot of us by surprise.”
Ross said that he learned about the decision when BOR Chair Howard Karr announced at the last BOR meeting on Oct. 15 that the BOR declared a state of fiscal exigency, or that the University doesn’t have enough revenue to cover expenditures.
The American Association for University Professors (AAUP), which Ross said most major universities use for guidance, define fiscal exigency as “an imminent financial crisis that threatens the survival of the institution as a whole.”
AAUP also states that before retrenchment should occur, a state of fiscal exigency should exist.
Ross said in a follow-up e-mail that a representative from the UH Faculty Senate is at every BOR meeting and reads the agendas and meeting minutes. He said that he and other faculty senators were at the July 23 meeting “and we never saw any suggestion that this would be discussed, or had been discussed, in a BOR meeting, either in the open or closed sessions. That is why we were blindsided when BOR Chair Karr made the statement he made last Thursday.”
Presley Pang, interim executive administrator and secretary of the Board of Regents, directed questions to Carolyn Tanaka, UH associate vice president of external affairs and university relations.
Tanaka said that the BOR authorized former UH President David McClain to make the announcement in a statement, which he did on July 28, three days before his term as UH president ended.
The BOR agreed and approved of McClain’s statement, said Tanaka.
“The declaration was very public,” Tanaka said, adding, “It was not done in secret or anything like that. We were open about it.”
McClain said in the July 28 statement, “For the foreseeable future, there is an imbalance between projected general funds revenues and planned general funds expenditures that cannot be addressed solely by increased efficiencies, or by drawing on the university’s reserves or alternative revenue flows, such as tuition or research funding.”
But for a state of fiscal exigency to exist it must be cleared by the BOR, which the statement by McClain didn’t acknowledge.
Ross said that there was some language confusion between whether the BOR actually declared fiscal exigency or if they just authorized McClain to do so.
“If we are really in a state of exigency, then we shouldn’t be spending any money on anything which isn’t urgently required, since exigency means that the money doesn’t exist,” Ross said in the e-mail. “The declaration might also affect extramural funding and overhead rates, as well as our bond rating (which I thought was still rather good). If we are not in one but declare that we are, that is an obvious problem in and of itself.”
Be the first to comment on this article!