By Steve Babcock
After sparring over space and academics, the roadmap for the upcoming academic year was presented last Wednesday to faculty and students.
And after months of debating, academics came out on top.
This year’s budget proposal does include funding for the construction of West Campus F, and the funding for the operation of West Campus G and H. However, such buildings do not make up the “physical footprint,” that Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance Larry Mucciolo originally pushed to improve in the fall.
“Building on our existing campus property with building G, H and F doesn’t expand the campus footprint. It does lots of good things, such as adding badly needed academic spaces, and providing additional on campus student housing,” Mucciolo said.
He said, however, the 2004-05 budget does provide for Northeastern’s immediate needs and goals, focusing on the academic side of the university Provost Ahmed Abdelal and a large part of the faculty pushed for.
The $8 million being pumped into the academic budget this year includes a major increase in library funding and money to hire and pay the salaries of 20 new “star” professors.
“I believe that the key element of the investment plan, namely, adding faculty who are effective teachers and strong scholars and researchers, is essential to any long term strategy to increase our standing among private universities,” Provost Abdelal said.
The College of Arts and Sciences was one of the areas targeted to receive a large portion of the $2 million budget allotted to the colleges. The college is currently operating on a $1.2 million deficit.
“We are so pleased to see this plan rolling onto the university,” said College of Arts and Sciences Dean James Stellar. “This is absolutely the right direction to take in terms of financial planning. We must deliver to our students, and even to our faculty, the highest level of academic programming possible, and this is a step in the right direction.”
The Academic Investment Plan would, among other things, set aside money to hire 100 new tenure-track professors over the next five years.
The university hopes to accommodate for the additions by hiring new professors with research grants in hand that will provide instant payback to the university because of their meaningful work in their fields.
“We’re doing pretty well, but we’re not doing well enough to support this academic investment plan,” President Richard Freeland told the Faculty Senate last week. “The money is not currently in the bank to support this.”
To put that money in the bank, the president said there would need to be a large increase in graduate enrollment and research programs to produce more revenue, as well as a better namesake for the university.
The proposed plan lays out a range for the amount of money it will bring in as a result of the increases. When asked if the plan could be achieved, the provost said it was “very doable.”
That achievement, though, would require an increase in research dollars equal to what the president said was gained over the last 10 years.
Along with the announcement of the plan, Freeland said there was an inherent challenge to make the university better in the plan.
“We’re really going to need to step up our game in a number of areas,” he said.
At the end of the Faculty Senate meeting where the plan was unveiled, Harvey Burstein, a lecturer in the College of Criminal Justice, said Northeastern was setting in place the achievement of its long-term goal breaking into US News and World Report’s top 100 univerisities and colleges.
“This is a very exciting day,” Burstein said. “Students are stronger, new buildings are going up seemingly everyday, and now we have this exciting plan to strengthen academics.”
