Budget and Priorities Committee
Purpose: Shall help ensure that the university’s budget reflects its priority of high-quality academics. Logically, this includes ensuring that the faculty are paid competitive salaries and that faculty hiring keeps pace with enrollments.
Shall every year produce a report card to be presented to the Senate, posted on the Senate’s website, and sent to all faculty. The report card should summarize pertinent data including faculty salaries compared to CUPA averages and medians. The report card should note recent and long-run trends with respect to ranked and unranked faculty and staff salaries. The report card should also summarize the number of equity adjustments given in the previous year, by count and by total value, for faculty, staff and administrators, respectively. The data for the report card should reflect data published by the administration in, for example, budgets and budget requests, Human Resources’ salary surveys, and the Key Performance Indicators. The presentation to the Faculty Senate should occur in the fall, preferably during the October meeting.
Shall every year oversee the update of the Institutional Research personnel database to maintain consistency with the previous years’ format. Annually, an abbreviated report of personnel proportions will be presented to the Faculty Senate, preferably during the March meeting. This abbreviated report will identify and describe the student-personnel ratios for the most recent update to the Institutional Research personnel database.
Every fifth year, beginning in 2020-21, a comprehensive report of personnel hiring trends across the Missouri State University system will be presented before the Faculty Senate during the April meeting. This comprehensive report will follow the format of the 2017-18 ad hoc Committee on Personnel Hiring Trends including data analysis which identifies and describes the absolute and relative growth/decline in personnel categories, the current and historic proportions of the personnel categories within the entire personnel of the university, and the trends in student-personnel ratios for the personnel categories used in the database.
Should assist appropriate university bodies in identifying and articulating Faculty Senate concerns about budgeting and planning priorities, and should help with monitoring and reporting progress, or the lack of progress, towards goals reflecting these priorities.
Shall every year report on student credit hour (SCH) production and ranked and unranked faculty utilization, as reflected in review the Faculty Descriptors and Productivity Comparison Summary. The committee’s report should summarize recent and long-run trends. The university report is completed in late fall, thus, the presentation to the Faculty Senate should occur in the early spring, preferably January.
Shall examine all proposals for intercollegiate programs, general education courses or other major initiatives with possible budgetary implications before the Faculty Senate and report to the Chair of the Faculty Senate the examination results prior to the proposals being voted on.
Membership: The Committee on University Budget & Priorities of the Faculty Senate shall consist of representatives from each college and additional representatives as defined in http://www.missouristate.edu/facultysenate/entities.htm. A ranked faculty member shall be elected by his or her respective college councils, based on a nomination from each academic department within that college, at the earliest possible session of the college council in the spring semester, and serve a three-year term. A committee member may be elected to more than one three-year term. Membership shall be staggered. Any unforeseen vacancy on the committee shall be filled by the same election process; such election shall occur at the earliest possible session of the appropriate council following the vacancy. In addition to faculty members, one institutional research staff member and the university chief financial officer (CFO) will be ex officio members of the committee to help provide technical support and advice to help the committee produce the Hiring Trend report. The Chair-Elect of the Faculty Senate shall call the organizational session of the committee within seven (7) school days after the first Fall Faculty Senate session and preside until the membership has elected a chair who shall serve a one-year term and may be reelected for succeeding terms.
Chair: Michael Suttmoeller, CR, RCASH
Bill Agnew, ?, COE, 2027
Quinton Phelps (rplc Albert Barreda, HL), BI, CNAS, 2026
Rachel Besara, LI, 2027
Monika Khan, FR, COB, 2027
Mike Suttmoeller, CR, RCASH, 2026
Tim Daugherty, PY, MCHHS, 2026
Jim Hutter, DCOA, 2027
Mike Foster, ex officio, Faculty Senate Chair-Elect 2025
Updated September 17, 2024