Dec. 9, 2020
Dear Faculty and Staff,
Over the last year, our campus community has weathered unprecedented challenges with heartening resolve and innovation. The pandemic impacts our staff, faculty and students, along with each and every aspect of the university’s mission and day-to-day operations. Together, we have faced a higher education landscape unlike anything seen in a century.
As we adjust to this reality and look toward a rapidly changing future, it is incumbent on us to ensure that our fiscal models and practices are aligned in support of our mission. It is in this context that I announce the launch of a redesign of the current campus budget model.
To be clear: This is not a budget cut. This is a comprehensive rethinking of how we allocate our budget. We seek to collaboratively design a campus budget model that will provide enhanced incentives to support and reward growth in key areas, ensure transparency and accountability for the use and allocation of funding, and better align with our mission as a comprehensive public teaching and research institution.
The goal is to create a model that will:
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Reflect and execute the university’s mission and priorities;
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Be understandable, easy to manage and transparent;
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Promote and reward performance, success and innovation;
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Enable the campus budget to respond to changes in revenue and enrollment;
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Foster trust and responsibility around decision-making; and
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Provide predictable funding to support our ability to be strategic in our planning.
The creation of the new budget model will be guided by a strategic alignment committee and a design committee representing campus constituencies and charged by the executive sponsorship group. These committees will be formed in the coming weeks and will receive diagnostic, benchmarking, and project management support from an external advisor. This ensures that we can make data-informed decisions on how the new model might allocate resources within an ambitious timeline. Our goal is to have a new budget model in place by fiscal year 2023.
Before the onset of the pandemic, our campus was already examining how we could improve this fiscal alignment:
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In 2018 the Academic Futures Report highlighted the role of the budget as “a tool for accomplishing our mission as a public institution of higher education” and recommended the design of a budget model that “flexibly enables and supports the creative efforts of the campus.”
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In 2018 we also launched Financial Futures, an initiative designed to capture cost savings and unlock new revenue streams with a focus on aligning our resources to our mission.
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In 2019 interviews with 36 campus deans, finance leaders, and administrators, clear concerns emerged regarding our incremental budget model, the bulk of which rolls forward unchanged from year to year on the basis of allocations determined years or even decades ago, and with only incremental increases and marginal room for strategic investment.
While our current budget model has provided stability for the campus, especially pre-COVID, it provides little flexibility for new or evolving priorities or for responding to opportunities or crises that arise. As detailed in the recent CU Boulder Today article, COVID-specific budgetary impacts have increased fiscal pressures across the campus and reinforced the need for a more flexible budget.
Our strong emergence from this challenging time drives the importance of engaging in this work now, even as we continue to respond to and learn from our changing circumstances. Through a budget redesign, we unlock the ability to strengthen our fiscal resilience, enable strategic investments in our people, programs and outcomes and strengthen our role and reputation as Colorado’s leading national public research university.
In the coming weeks, we will have more information about how to become engaged in the budget model redesign process.
The work of budget model redesign is simultaneously vital and ambitious. In order to be successful, this work must also be transparent and inclusive. We commit to a budget model redesign that serves the mission of CU and its people, and extend our full support to all those who will be involved in this important undertaking.
Sincerely,
Phil DiStefano
Chancellor