Muleskinner

Issue date: 4/5/07 Section: News

At the March 28 spring general faculty meeting, President Podolefsky talked about the progress and changes taking place at Central.

He said Central has to "hasten thoughtfully and see where we are and where we want to go in the future."

Podolefsky focused his discussion on two issues that will shape Central in coming years-appropriations and faculty flexibility.

"We need to have flexibility in teaching workloads and curriculum," Podolefsky said. "We are looking for both curriculum and pedagogical [teaching] quality and finding out what is it that produces excellent students."

This flexibility would mean revising the policies on judging faculty and possibly moving toward a fixed-tuition model.

"A fixed-rate model frees the student up, and in my opinion, most universities have a fixed rate," Podolefsky said. "There may be some advantage to moving away from the current credit-hour model."

He said any change to a fixed-rate model would take time and not be available for the next school year.

The decline of federal and state appropriations has raised the cost of tuition, and Podolefsky said he was "a strong advocate for a low cost to education for students that delivers a quality education."

Podolefsky illustrated how capital appropriations have drastically declined in the past 15 years. In 1995 and 1996, for example, Central received more than $12 million, but since 2001, the University has not received more than $1 million.
Another statistic presented by Podolefsky showed only $4.84 per $1,000 of personal income goes to higher education in the state of Missouri, which ranks 46th in the country.

Since the '80s, appropriations have been on a steady decline at Central, and "that makes it difficult to keep tuition low," Podolefsky said.

Students pay 51 percent of the budget whereas the state contributes 49 percent. In 1998, the state-to-student ratio was 65-to-35.

"The bottom line is that public universities are in some sense being privatized," Podolefsky said.

As the ratio continues to converge, Central and other public universities, "will look more and more like a private university," Podolefsky said.

Podolefsky said private universities have "huge endowments" and are able to go forward without much state appropriation, and comprehensive universities, like Central, have not done that yet.

The University is in the early part of the process of looking at how to increase the funding. Podolefsky said the process of cultivating friends and bringing out ideas would be a "marathon, not a sprint" toward increasing Central's endowment.

The meeting opened with Odin Jurkowski, outgoing faculty senate president, recognizing members of the faculty senate executive committee and talking about two important motions Central has made.

Jurkowski said the restructuring of the colleges "created some issues," such as how many representatives from each college were in the committee. A change to the faculty constitution set a limit on the total number of senators to 26. That helped "level out" the number of representatives from each college to between four and six.

Jurkowski also brought up the debate of pay among faculty members, and said the compensation plan was important and needs to "move forward" and eventually be "fully implemented."
Fully implementing the compensation plan, he said, has been what the University wanted to do for the past five years. The Merit Committee will present a proposal to Podolefsky on the topic of compensation to faculty members.

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