Oklahoma higher education: The budget, the faculty, the mission

Abstract

The following reflections are based on a personal experience, which has just come to an end. I was appointed to a three-year term on the University of Oklahoma (0U) Budget Council (Norman campus) in the spring of1996 and served during the final year of the appointment as Chair. The Budget Council is one of numerous committees deriving from or allied with the Faculty and Staff Senates. These committees represent a nod in the direction of self-governance, although we are obviously in an age when most modem universities have become enormously complex organizations run for the most part by professional administrators. Like most of the other faculty and staff who serve on this particular body, I was an amateur in fiscal matters. Though lacking in specific budgeting ··expertise." I nevertheless brought to the experience a certain longstanding conviction that self-government ought to be as close to a reality in the university as we could make it, and that it was a bad thing for any kind of profession to fall into a condition where it was subject to decisions it could not understand and had no hand in making. I was from the beginning also interested to see what an amateur could learn about the budget issues at the University of Oklahoma, partly because of my concern for the institution and partly because I wanted some insight into the conditions affecting higher education more generally as we approach the end of a century of unparalleled expansion.