President’s Town Hall
Mark  Emmert
March 3, 2009

I've never before been able to quiet a crowd by pouring water, that 
worked great. .Good afternoon, I'm Mark Emmert, of course, and I 
am very pleased we have such a great crowd here
This is a bigger crowd than I get for my annual address.
We have a good number of folks up in the balcony as well and when.
we  get to questions, we will have microphones here and someone in 
the balcony with microphones as well.
One introduction is the chairman of the board of regents, Craig Cole, 
is here.
Would you stand up and take a bow, please?
Thank you for joining us.
[APPLAUSE]
And I also want to warn you that I'm, like many of you, just getting 
over a cold.
So if my voice starts to fade, please be patient with me.
Well, I want to have this meeting and then others to follow up with it 
as this academic year carries on, both here and then also in the 
Tacoma and Bothell campuses.
To talk about what's on everyone's mind, and of course, that's the 
budget crisis that the state and even the nation of course, finds itself 
in right now, and the implications that it has for the university and 
how we're going to address all of these issues together.
The University of Washington, of course, has survived through many 
different budget cuts and has had lots of different ups and downs in 
its many storied years of course.
In its earliest years, it was even closed on a number of occasions 
because of budgetary constraints.
And since then, of course, we've become this wonderful mature 
university that has national and international standing and has really 
achieved things that I know everyone in this audience is incredibly 
proud of.
But there's no doubt that what we're faced with now is a very, very 
trying time.
And I thought what I would do is just give you a sense of where I 
think we are in the budgetary process, because there's still a lot of 
unknowns in this process.
So it's still ongoing.
We don't know where our budget's really going to wind up. I’ll
talk a little bit also then about the processes by which we're starting 
to address all of this.
And then about 40, 45 people had asked questions on my blog.
I just grouped some of those together for, you know, for convenience 
sake, and I'll address some of those, and then we can just begin taking 
questions if that works for everyone.
And I don't know how long we'll be here.
I'll stay for a good while.
Someone said, well, there's a basketball game at 8:00, could we 
please be done by then?
So we'll try very hard to be done by then.
So here's where I think we are right now with the budget process.
And I'm underscoring the word "think," because we don't really 
know quite yet.
When the Governor put together her budget way back in December, 
which now seems like years ago, the assumptions that she used to put 
together a biennial budget was that the state deficit would be less 
than $6 billion, which remarkably now seems like a quaint idea.
When it was said, we thought, my goodness, that's a pretty big 
two-year deficit.
And now, of course, everyone's assuming that the state deficit is 
more like $8 billion.
Now, when the state talks budget numbers, of course, they're talking 
biennial math, I always hate it when they do that, but that's $8 billion 
for the two years, so on average, $4 billion per year.
But the actual number that the legislature will have to balance a 
budget against will be based on revenue estimates that are coming 
out on March 19th.
It will surely not be less than $8 billion, and there’s some people that 
think it could be as high as 8-1/2, but right now, that's just sheer 
speculation.
The truth is we don't know.
Since the last, I guess, best guess came out a week or two ago, 
nothing's improved in the economy.
So it's exceedingly unlikely that it would get better.
The Governor's budget also assumed that there would be at least a 
billion dollars coming from the federal government, and the 
assumption was having no stimulus bill at that time, that a billion 
dollars would probably be forthcoming in Medicare, Medicaid cuts 
that could be replaced or supplant other dollars, and so that there 
would be help in the form of the stimulus package.
And that, of course, has changed significantly also.
The total amount that the stimulus package will provide to the state 
of Washington is still a little bit uncertain because the stimulus 
package came with lots of different strings and requirements 
attached to it.
And it's going to be dependent to a certain extent on a variety of 
different things that happen over the coming weeks and months.
but  it will probably be between $2 and $3 billion.
So if you look at the Governor's budget, the deficit grew by $2 billion, 
but the state also got some more stimulus money to supplant some of 
that cut, and so it mitigates at least part of it, but only part of it.
and we still have a very, very significant budget cut.
The Governor's budget proposes, I think everyone here knows, that 
in the four-year universities in the state of Washington would receive 
13% budget cuts in the state general fund money.
Now, there's a lot of confusion about what that really means, is that 
13% of the whole university budget?
What piece of that is that really and what does it represent?
Well, when I'm explaining the faculty -- the budget to faculty and 
student and staff groups, and bigger audiences, I like to think of the 
U.W. budget, it's a very large enterprise, of course, that we all have 
here, it's about $3.5 billion all tolled, and if you split it into thirds, it 
starts to make a little bit better sense.
About a third, roughly more than that, but around a third of it is our 
hospitals and our medical clinics.
Basically, the medical clinical enterprise, so that's U.W. Medical 
Center and Harborview and our clinics around King County and 
associated parts of the medical side.
Another third, around a billion dollars, is of course our research side, 
that all of our faculty and students go on and win every year in 
national competitions and even internationally, and that's the part 
that we always love to brag about as being number 1 or number 2 in 
the United States.
We attract more research funding than any public university in the 
country, and when we look at the data, we're second only to johns 
Hopkins and we're very pleased with that.
And then the last third is sort of the education in the general part of 
the budget, that's mostly what you think about when you say the 
university, mostly when you say the University of Washington, 
they're thinking about the educational enterprise, the faculty, staff, 
and students, that work in that part of it.
And that's about another third of it.
The state general fund budget is applied to that, that we're talking 
about, is applied to that third of the budget.
So while the budget cut against the whole $3.5 billion, it doesn't seem 
like a very large piece, it is a very significant piece out of that third 
and of course, that's against the portion of our budget that's the most 
flexible.
The other pieces of the budget are, of course, if you're just looking at 
that third, are of course tuition and fee revenues, a small portion 
comes from earnings off our endowment and gifts that we receive, 
some portions of it from ancillary business activities, and a handful of 
other odd and end sort of things that get fitted into that entire 
budget.
So the budget cuts that are being proposed right now, that 13% that 
the Governor had, and the significantly larger pieces that the 
legislature is talking about now, for the most part, address that piece 
of the budget that everyone here is most concerned about.
There are also, of course, significant challenges to the budget and 
funding and support for the clinical medical side that we're not going 
to address today, but you need to be aware that those are out there 
too.
So changes in the Medicare reimbursement, changes in the payer mix 
of our clients, the patients that come into our hospitals and our 
clinics, all have a very significant impact.
So we've got lots of issues over there as well that we need to work 
on.
The third piece in the middle there, the research component, 
continues to be pretty robust.
And the good news is that the federal funding agencies that we most 
turn to for research support in the stimulus bill, got very significant 
increases in their funding. So NIH, NSF and NST
and energy and commerce and those funding agencies all have 
appreciably greater budgets, and we're hopeful that we'll be able to 
be successful in attracting some of those dollars to the university.
So the legislature now will start in worrying about that third of our 
budget over here, that the 13% Governor's budget is against.
And we've been asked by, we were asked by the state Senate to 
model what a 20% budget decrease would look like.
And we did that.
So we put together some models and we looked at the impacts it 
would have, whether it was the 13% or the 20% or even worse.
And so many of you, I'm sure, read in the newspapers and some of 
the e-mails that I've been sending out, that the best estimate that 
we've made across those two sets of budget cuts would be in terms of 
personnel impacts, because more than 80% of our budget is in 
personnel costs.
So one of the only ways that you can manage some of this is by 
reducing personnel costs and all of their different guises and 
something we can talk about in a minute.
I agree, I think it's an awful thing to reduce personnel costs but that 
happens to be the kind of enterprise we're in.
We're not a factory, we're a human intensive enterprise.
So the only way you can reduce costs is by reducing human costs, 
unfortunately.
So the first estimate that we had, we thought we would have to 
eliminate somewhere around 600 positions, not 600 lay-offs, but 
around 600 positions through a variety of mechanisms, and those 
could range up to 800 positions.
We also think that budget cuts of the magnitude that are being 
considered would also, if you had to take out that many positions 
from the entire university enterprise, you would similarly have to 
reduce the number of students coming into the University of 
Washington, if we were going to meet our commitments to the 
students that are here.
So the students that are here, we have an obligation to allow them to 
continue to work their way through the institution, to be able to get 
access to the courses that they want, when they need them, and that 
we have to be able to fulfill our commitments to them, and so we've 
estimated that under those two scenarios, with no other mitigation, 
that we would have to reduce the total enrollment in the coming 
years during the biennium by 250, excuse me, Paul, help me, I think it 
was 850 to 2200 students, that was our estimate of that range
which we also don't want to do.
Indeed, this is about the worst time that you can imagine to reduce 
funding for higher education.
The fact of the matter is that right now, the demographic peak of 
students coming out of high school, who are going to be seeking 
higher education is right now.
Last year and this year, there is more demand for access to higher 
education in the state of Washington than at any other year.
Similarly, whenever you have an economic downswing, you 
obviously get many people who want to come back to school.
This is a good time to come back and get a graduate degree or to 
come back and retool or to do whatever it is you need to do during 
hard economic times, you also see a blip in those enrollments.
So right now, demand to be part of the University of Washington is at 
an all-time high.
I just heard from Phil Ballinger, who's sitting here somewhere, that it 
looks like right now, we've got around 21,000 freshman applicants 
for next fall, which is a record for the university.
We've never had that many students want to join our freshman class.
This last year, this current year, we were able to increase the size of 
our freshman class significantly, and we would love to be able to 
maintain that growth because of the demand and the number of 
students that want to come to the university.
But our capacity to do that is completely contingent upon having 
faculty, having staff to work with those students.
So we've been talking about these issues with the legislature.
We've been trying to explain the magnitude of the impact, that these 
are obviously very severe impacts on the university.
That universities are especially place like ours, is an incredibly fragile 
enterprise, that it takes many, many years to get the right people in 
the right positions and doing the right things, and it can be damaged 
very shortly, in a very short period of time.
And that it is exactly counter cyclical to what we should be doing for 
the state's economy.
That in a time like this, this is exactly when you should be investing in 
education.
Because it's the University of Washington and the rest of higher 
education that's going to lead the state out of its economic problems.
It's an educated work force.
The research and energy that comes out of our research enterprise, 
and all of the economic engine that is the University of Washington, 
that will in fact lead the state to a better and more prosperous future.
That isn't falling on deaf ears but the reality, of course, is that the 
legislature is struggling with right now a very big budget hole.
We don't know exactly where they're going to go, going forward, 
except that we know that they're going to struggle in every way you 
can imagine to try and make this all fit.
There is some discussion now, although it's fairly quiet, at raising new 
revenue although there aren't any firm proposals.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some package at least be introduced in 
the legislative session and we'll see where that goes.
They're trying to make decisions about how to allocate the stimulus 
money.
And how that will come out, we don't really know yet.
Some of the stimulus money is earmarked for education, meaning 
K-12 and higher education, but there is a variety of different 
qualifications that surround that.
So they, the legislature, and the Governor's office, are working on it.
And we're trying to influence those conversations as much as we can 
to make sure that the university is damaged as little as humanly 
possible.
It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that we will come out of this 
without budget cuts, I think that's a given.
We will have some level of budget reductions and we will have to 
figure out how we manage that, and the priorities that we set.
And I want to talk to you in a minute, excuse me, in a minute about 
the process by which we need to go about all of this.
But the hard reality today is, a part that we'll talk about, why I want 
to have another several of these meetings, is that there's a lot of 
unknowns.
The fact is, the legislature, the Governor, and none of us know where 
the bottom is right now.
They don't know how deep the cuts will be in the state, they don't 
know what the revenue's really going to look like.
They have ideas, but they don't really know.
And each day is bringing more compelling arguments that it's getting 
worse instead of better.
And the other part of it, of course, is we don't know the length of this, 
we don't know what kind of a recession we're in right now which is 
an extraordinarily difficult thing for all of us to manage.
You know, you can look at the sign waves of economic change, and 
you can say, okay, here was, I don't know, late 2007, sometime in 
2008, we'll use the Dow Jones just as a crude measure, when the 
Dow was at 14,000, it's hard to imagine when the Dow was at 14,000 
but that was about 18 months ago or something like that, maybe less 
than that.
Someone could probably tell us.
And then it slides way down to where it is now.
but we don't know whether it's still here or it's here yet, but it swung 
way down here.
So we've seen this huge radical decline in the assets of Americans and 
corporate profits, and a variety of other things.
What we don't know is whether we're in the midst of regression to 
the mean, where the mean is.
Is the mean up here where the Dow was at 14,000?
Is the mean down here where the Dow is at 6500?
Is it at 10,000?
Where is it going to be when we go back to something like normal, 
organic growth?
Today, there's nobody that knows that.
And that's one of the huge challenges.
So what we're trying to do at the university obviously is prepare for a 
variety of contingencies, not knowing what's likely to occur and how 
fast this is going to recover is a very interesting challenge for us.
I haven't bumped into anybody that thinks that in 24 months, we're 
going to be back to a Dow 14,000.
I haven't heard anybody that thinks that this recession looks like 
1980, the 1980s, or 2000.
But this is a different critter, there's a lot of structural change going 
on in the economy, and this is going to be a little more protracted and 
obviously it's deeper, it's already deeper than anything any of us have 
lived through.
So that's the other piece of this challenge.
So what's a university to do?
Well, what we're doing right now, of course, is we've asked all of the 
administrative units, the academic units and the nonacademic units, 
to start to model a variety of different cuts, simply because we need 
to start looking at different potential scenarios, different ways to start 
managing this.
And as I think most people here probably know, we've asked people 
to model 8, 10, and 12% budget reductions, and work with the 
provost, to start to say, all right, what would that look like and how 
would we manage that?
What would that entail and how would we have to deal with it?
Well, obviously, those are all bad scenarios.
They all involve cutting back operating costs in every way that we 
can, deferring whatever expenses we can, minimizing any new 
commitments that we have to make, and of course, it involves 
reductions in positions at the university, and that's already begun 
with the freezing of hiring and the elimination of a variety of open 
positions.
And unfortunately, in the case of just yesterday, it's also involved 
lay-offs.
Within the university advancement, which includes development and 
marketing and alumni relations.
And I would love to say that we don't expect any more of those, but I 
can't tell you that, I'm not going to tell you things that I don't know 
whether they're true or not.
If those budget cuts roll in, then we will in fact have to find ways to 
eliminated more vacant positions but of course, vacant positions 
don't occur where you want them to occur, they occur where they 
occur.
They're not random, but they're something approaching quasi 
random.
And there are in fact positions that have to get filled throughout all of 
this.
And we have to make those decisions.
There are in fact positions that we can leave vacant for extended 
periods of time, and there are positions that we can eliminate for the 
time being and perhaps go back and address later.
The central notion for me at least is to say, let's look at the academic 
core of the university, what's the most important components of 
what we are as a great university.
And while it's an easy thing to say and a hard thing to define, the 
question I keep asking is if we make that change, whatever it is that's 
being considered, are we still a great university, are we still the 
University of Washington?
If the answer is no, then I say, well, then we can't do that.
So then you start working your way out, away from core functions 
and out to other parts of the university, and unfortunately, there's 
many things around that, that we value highly, filled full of people 
that we care a great deal about, but that we know that if we stop 
doing that now, or if we did less of it right now, or if we slowed the 
pace of that right now, we would be able to get through this period 
and then come out the other side still as a great university, and 
protecting the things that are most important to who we are and 
what we're asked to do by the state of Washington.
That's the hard part, of course, is making those decisions.
But unfortunately, that may well be where we wind up.
Now, we're also working very hard with the legislature to try and do 
everything we can to make the case for the University of Washington 
and higher education.
We spend an enormous amount of time and energy lobbying the 
legislature and the Governor's office, trying to make them 
understand that this is the worst time to cut higher education.
Regent Cole and a number of the other regents have been very, very 
active with us down there.
There are people who can gain access to people that are very 
influential in this process.
We've had lots of great partnership and support from the faculty 
Senate, from student leaders, and from a lot of our friends and 
supporters in business and industry in the alumni associations as well.
Are we done?
No.
We've hardly begun in that process.
So we have much, much more work to do to try and mitigate all of 
this.
but it is a process that we're going to have to go through.
We're going to have to continue the discussions as the target moves 
with our colleagues and faculty Senate, and with the staff, to make 
sure that people know what we're talking about and we're getting the 
best ideas on the table.
We are not taking ideas off the table.
I noticed in some of the questions on the blog, people were saying, I 
don't know why people have taken this issue off the table or that 
issue off the table.
We haven't taken any issues off the table.
We're going to look at everything we possibly can.
We also don’t think we, meaning the administrative leadership, don't 
think we have complete wisdom on this.
We need everybodys thoughts and ideas to help us figure out the best  
and most effective ways to work our way through all of this.
It is a very complex environment, it is a very difficult set of issues, and 
we're gonna have to find ways to talk about very hard things, things 
that make us frustrated and angry and disappointed.
but we are going to have to work our way through those things as a 
community.
It is easy to say, oh, this is so and so's fault, or so and so's fault, that 
isn't going to get us anyplace.
That's not going to allow us to continue to be the university that we 
are right now.
We have to deal with these things as an institution, institutional 
community, as a university community.
That's the most important part for us to do.
So if I may, what I thought I would do is I'd run down a list of some 
categories of questions that you all had, and I'll speak about them in 
some generalities, and then I'm sure you'll have specific questions 
about them.
So as I looked at the list of questions on the blog, there were lots of 
them, they were all good, interesting questions.
but I categorize most of them into just a few categories, and I 
apologize if I don't expressly answer the question you might have 
asked.
So first is this decision process, how are we going to make these 
decisions.
>> Well, again, the provost is working very closely with the board of 
deans, with the Senate planning and budget committee, with all of 
the administrative leadership in each of the units, they in turn are 
working with the people inside, inside their units, to try and get as 
much information flowing back and forth as we can.
We're going to have to take a lot of time to talk about these things, 
we're going to take as much collaboration as we can build into the 
process.
We do at the end of the day, assuming the legislature finally act, we 
are going to have to make decisions.
So we can't, you know, we can't debate it and discuss it forever.
But in a relatively short period of time, we need to get as much 
information in as possible.
I noticed there were a lot, not a lot, but a few comments about 
transparency, saying, gee, the process isn't transparent, I'm not 
getting enough information.
If you aren't finding the information on the office of planning and 
budgeting's website, for example, and you want more information 
about something in our budget, please send me or Paul Jenny or 
anybody in the senior administration an e-mail asking for it, and we'll 
get it to you.
It's all public information.
We're not, we want everybody to know what's out there.
And the more people looking at it, the better, this is not something 
that anybody's trying to decide behind closed doors or without full 
knowledge.
We've been trying with the faculty Senate, for example, to get as 
much data and information in front of people as we possibly can.
And we will continue to do that.
The other thing about the decision process that I think we will all find 
annoying is it's probably gonna be an iterative process, again, 
because we don't exactly know where the bottom is.
It's sort of like watching the president of the United States and the 
stimulus package.
I don't know and he doesn't know whether or not the stimulus 
package they just did is enough or if it's just a beginning.
And I suspect we'll see them go back again and again and again to 
address that issue as they correlate it with what's going on in the 
economy.
We will probably have to do some of those things as well.
What we don't want to do is do irreversible decisions if we think that 
there may be things that we might not want to do downstream.
So we're going to have to be careful and thoughtful about it, but it 
will require some patience.
Athletics.
Everybody's  favorite subject.
So we hired a football coach and he fired some coaches and football 
coaches make ridiculously large salaries these days.
And I don't think there's anybody here that would disagree with that.
But the reality is, is that our athletic program is one of only about 15 
in the United States that is honest to God, books open, no hidden 
trick budgeting, self-sufficient.
It covers all of its own costs.
There's a few, and literally a few, you can count them on one hand, 
who actually, athletic departments who actually generate money.
So I was at LSU, I took $2 million off the top of the athletic budget and 
gave it to the provost every year, Phyllis would love me to do this, 
and gave it to the provost every year.
But their athletic budget was almost twice the size of the University of 
Washington's because they generated so much money around sports.
At the University of Washington, my goal, just my financial goal for 
athletics is to always make sure that athletics never takes money from 
the rest of the university.
That it is a self-contained budgetary entity.
There are very, very few universities that can honestly say that.
WSU can't say it.
Oregon and Oregon State can't say it.
Best estimates I've seen is that Berkeley is moving about $8 million 
out of the academic enterprise into athletics.
We don't do that here.
The single most important thing about it is we have that as a 
completely self-sufficient budgetary entity, doesn't get tuition dollars, 
doesn't get state dollars, doesn't get academic dollars, it's a 
self-supporting auxiliary enterprise.
The only way it can be that is because of football.
Now, I know this all sounds silly, but that's the fact of the matter is.
Football, because of stadiums and TV rights and all of that, generates 
about 85% of the athletic budget.
If you like the women's gymnastics program, you need to buy football 
tickets.
If you like crew, buy football tickets.
If you loved our women's cross country national champions, buy 
football tickets.
Because that's how we pay for all those other sports, from the 
revenue that's spun off of football and to a lesser extent, men's 
basketball.
Everything else costs money, it loses money.
So if you're going to have an athletic program that doesn't detract 
financially from the rest of the university, you got to have a successful 
football program.
It's the only way you can do it.
To do that, you got to have a successful coach.
So we pay ridiculous salaries for football coaches everywhere in the 
United States.
I'm never going to sit here and defend what football coaches make, 
they make what they make.
And that's just the reality of it.
So I don't like spending that kind of money on a football coach, I think 
it's silly.
But being successful in football is the only way that we can make sure 
that our athletic program is successful, financially as well as 
otherwise.
[INAUDIBLE] that's why we have a new coach.
[LAUGHTER]
Who's that?
Oh, so the stadium?
Yeah.
So the stadium is, in my opinion, an absolutely no-brainer as a policy 
question.
Who asked the question?
You weren't offending me.
No?
You're not going to identify yourself.
Up there.
So let me answer that.
So the stadium question is a public policy question is a no-brainer, as 
a public relations question, is a huge challenge.
So let's talk about the public policy part of it first.
So Husky stadium is owned by the state of Washington, like all of our 
buildings are, and it is now about 90 years old.
It is the original bowl is about 90 years old.
It's an old concrete reinforced on-grade building that is, as I like to 
say, returning to a state of nature.
It is falling apart and the university, through its athletic department, 
will probably have to spend, estimates are $10 million a year over the 
next 10 years to maintain it and continue it as a safe facility.
There's no president in the United States, including this one, who 
wants to mess with a football stadium.
They are public relations losers.
There's no getting around it.
But here's the deal.
The stadium's going to need to be repaired sooner or later.
There is a stream of revenue that was created in King County a long 
time ago to support tourism-related activities.
It's been -- it's a tax on hotels, motels, restaurants, and rental cars, in 
other words mostly tourists.
And it has had the, it's been the revenue stream that helped build the 
convention center, and it also has now built Qwest field and Safeco 
field.
In other words, we were comfortable as a community taxing 
ourselves to -- for the agrandizement of professional athletics.
(INAUDIBLE)
The -- I didn't put the tax in place.
You can yell at me if you want to, but I had nothing to do with that.
I didn't even live here, all right?
So the tax is in place.
The revenue is now going to pay off two other sports facilities.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the state budget or the state 
budget deficit except in a positive way.
Rebuilding the stadium will produce between 5,000 and 7,000 jobs 
right now.
5,000 and 7,000 jobs right now.
The revenue stream that would pay for it would begin in 2014 and 
2021.
I hope by then our economy has improved.
So we can create 7,000 jobs today, not have any impact on the state 
budget, not touch any revenue streams until 2014 and 2021, and use 
taxpayer money for a state facility instead of taxpayer money for two 
private facilities owned by very rich people.
Now, as a public policy decision, I find that appealing.
If I thought for a minute that Husky stadium was going to get in the 
way of any project that dealt with any academic issue at the 
University of Washington, I'd pull the plug on it that second.
If it required state capital dollars that could be used for any other 
academic purpose, I would never allow that.
If we could convince people to redirect that tax stream to build 
buildings on this campus other than athletic facilities, I would do that.
None of those things are possible.
So here's a revenue stream that's gonna go somewhere, we have a 
stadium that drives economic development through tourism, more 
effectively than Safeco field does or wherever they play football, the 
Seahawks play, because the Husky game is a bigger economic impact 
on the city than the Seahawks game does.
So to me, it makes perfectly good sense.
And I know there's people that disagree with that, but I happen to 
think as a policy question, it makes great sense.
Here's the hard part.
It's a really bad public relations question.
Because you've got all of these issues we're talking about here today, 
and then people say, and you're building this football stadium, what 
are you, nuts?
I understand that.
I understand why those two things look like they don't fit together at 
all.
They're completely unrelated, and in fact, building the football 
stadium now would help with the budget, because it would employ a 
bunch of people.
but I also -- and it would pay a lot of sales tax by the way.
but I also understand why it's a public relations problem and why it 
drives people crazy.
So we are trying very hard to keep those two things separate.
If we can't, the football stadium will lose.
It's that simple.
[INAUDIBLE] I'll repeat the question.
The question is how do we avoid or outcompete the convention 
center downtown?
Anytime there's a revenue stream, everybody wants some of it.
So there's probably 10 people after every one dollar of that revenue 
stream.
The piece that the university is asking permission, all we're asking for 
is permission to ask the county for permission, right?
So the legislature doesn't have, this is not legislative dollars, these are 
county dollars, so we would go to the county and say, okay, so you 
want to do stuff in the county, we'd like you to consider helping us 
rebuild Husky stadium.
Half of it would be rebuilt with athletic dollars and athletic donor 
dollars, and the other half with this revenue stream.
The slice that we're looking at is a slice that is essentially, when they 
set up the revenue stream to pay off Safeco and Qwest, they 
underestimated what the revenue would be, and so we're just asking 
for the piece that would pay off that debt in the time they expected it 
to pay off those other professional stadiums.
There's actually a lot of money in that pool.
It could, in fact, do lots and lots of things.
There's lots of people in the arts that want it.
I think that's great.
This is a big revenue pool, there's revenue for that.
There's revenue in that pool for a lot of things.
Capital construction that's shovel-ready right now would be a great 
thing for the economy, and we're the project that's ready for that.
The convention center is not, at least not that I'm aware of.
Can I move past athletics for just a moment?
Okay.
I've had a lot of questions about, loosely lump into, you know, 
managing the budget through permanent cuts, in my language, not 
yours, permanent cuts versus temporary cuts.
You're eliminating positions, why couldn't you do furloughs, for 
example, is the most often raised issue.
And the question, and that's a question that we're still wrestling with 
you need to know that someone said, well, furloughs are off the 
table.
That's not true, we're looking at them right now and trying to see 
whether or not they would make any sense in our particular context.
It's not as simple as simply saying, okay, everybody's going to take 
five days off next week and we're done with it.
The problems are complex because of, first of all, on the faculty side, 
because of the nature of the faculty code, which as I read it, requires 
a declaration of financial exigency or financial emergency that's 
approved.
We have to figure out how we manage that.
We do not want to declare a financial emergency, it is an indicator to 
the rest of the nation and beyond that we have reached a point of 
irreparable harm and we will have a great deal of trouble recruiting 
faculty and doing a variety of other things if we do that.
We don't want to do that.
But, on the other hand, we may want to try and explore at least the 
whole notion of lay-offs.
We have, of course, a number of staff that are in different collective 
bargaining units.
They in turn have different rules that we would have to consider.
And then, of course, the professional staff are the easiest ones to deal 
with.
And then it's complicated in other words.
So we want to look at it and see if there's ways in which we can make 
that work and whether or not it makes sense.
But bear in mind the challenge with furloughs or any other temporary 
savings are just that.
They're temporary.
So let's imagine for a minute as we work our way through the budget 
that the legislature decides to cut higher education deeper than the 
Governor's budget, and back fills some of it with stimulus money.
Well, that's a good thing for 24 months.
At the end of 24 or 36 months, depending, that money goes away.
So now, we're right back in the same mess.
But imagine we balance the budget in the meantime with furloughs or 
other temporary issues.
Those come off at the same time.
Now, we've got a double  whammy of revenue falling off and having 
not made any decisions to reduce our expenditures over the long run.
We need to find the right balance between them.
And we'll look at all of those things.
We can't take things off the table.
We have to leave them on the table and work our way through them.
Everybody wants to talk about my pay.
I say there's even signs back here.
Everybody wants to talk about my pay and executive pay, I 
understand that.
And you need to know, as I said, everything's on the table.
We're going to look at that as we move along, I'll look at my own 
situation, we have to look at all of our costs.
And a variety of things like that.
We're simply going to have to DO that.
You're not going to decide whether or not to cut my pay, no.
I wanted to answer that clearly.
[INAUDIBLE].
My salary is decided by the board of regents, not by me.
No, I don't think so.
I don't think we want to put up --
[INAUDIBLE].
I don't remember a democracy that votes for faculty pay.
So would a professor like to stand up and have us vote on your pay 
right now?
No.
That's not how we operate.
And I appreciate your view, but that's not how any organization 
operates.
So obviously, we'll have to look at executive compensation, mine in 
particular, I understand all of that.
And we will do that as this all plays out and we think it through.
As I said, I'm not taking anything off the table, including that.
So those are the general issues that I had coming off of the blog.
So now, we've got microphones here.
We've got microphones up there if there's anybody in the top that 
wants to ask questions.
You can either walk up to a microphone or call for one up on the top, 
and I'll take whatever questions you have on those or other subjects.
Are you guys with the microphones ready?
By the way, this is being broadcast over UWTV on our website, and so 
we have to make sure we get the audio stuff working right.
Are we okay?
We are ready.
Go ahead.
Could you please tell us who you are and what your role at the 
university is.
>> Okay.
My name is Timmy and I work for the University of Washington, 
health sciences building.
>> Okay.
>> Now, my question to you, Mr. President, this is the only university 
that I know where we hire new administrators --
>> I'm sorry.
>> This is the only university that I know they hire lot of 
administrators, or other high-paying management on a regular basis, 
especially when this university hire four or more of these high-paying 
management in one department.
I work for the university and do not even earn, in over two years of 
service, what these administrators and other management staff 
earned.
If you really mean what you are saying, sacrifice, why aren't you 
consider 50% pay reduction across the board to help minimize 
lay-offs and keep more staff in their jobs, and it is a reasonable option 
to be considered.
Why are we not more vigorously pursuing the notion of furloughs, 
and if furloughs are viable, what about moving all faculty and staff to 
short term appointments.
Why are only some staff being asked to make a sacrifice?
Everyone is going to suffer with these budget cuts.
Why can't we -- why cannot this burden be borne more equitably.
 To streamline those Dean offices and everybody for hiring these new 
high paying people?
>> So the first thing that always comes to mind whenever you have 
budget issues, of course, is eliminating administrative costs.
Everywhere, every organization, probably anywhere in the world, 
but certainly in the United States.
And I understand that.
And it's been reflected in the decisions we've made so far.
And we'll continue to be as we start to deal with all of this more 
broadly going into the next biennium.
This current fiscal year, the year we're in right now, we had a budget 
cut already because the state revenues are off this year, and the first 
thing that we started to get that tone right is we took twice as much 
in those reductions out of administrative costs as any other part of 
the institution.
The other thing that you can do, and I would encourage you all to 
look at data, it's widely available, and we can even make it available if 
you want, on our website, that look at administrative costs.
So you try and bench mark yourself against other universities, you're 
talking about comparing us to other universities.
And when you look at what the University of Washington spends on 
administrative costs, and I followed this significantly, we had a big 
study of it just a couple of years ago, three years ago I guess it was.
We find that the total amount that we spend on administration is 
significantly lower than any university that we looked at that's one of 
our peers.
And so that doesn't mean we're not going to continue to push that 
down.
But the fact is, is that our administrative overhead and our 
administrative costs are very, very low relative to other research 
intensive universities.
Having worked at a number of them, I know that's true relative to the 
places that I've worked.
So I can't speak to, you know, the unit you're talking about that hired 
four administrators, I don't know what that was about.
If you want to send me a note, I'll look into it.
Fine, send me an e-mail note about it.
And I'll certainly look into it.
But the reality is that our administrative overhead at the University of 
Washington is not high.
Indeed, it's the opposite, it's quite low.
Doesn't mean we can't and won't continue to look at shaving that 
down.
When we put together our model for the Governor's budget and 
talked about eliminating personnel, we assumed that we would take 
twice as many people out of administrative positions as out of 
academic positions.
That was our very first take on it.
Now, that's really easy and it sounds like, oh, that makes perfectly 
good sense, except when you stop and ask yourself, what does that 
really mean?
What's a "administrator"?
In legislative parlance, there's basically three kinds of people, there's 
professors, there's administrators, and there's clerical workers.
And that's it.
And you say, oh, let's get rid of all the administrative costs.
That's student counseling, that's UWTV that's broadcasting this, that's 
the people that were laid-off yesterday.
That's, and we can go right down the list.
Those aren't services that we'll happily get rid of.
We might have to reduce a lot of things in those categories, but 
people think that by doing that, we'll just get rid of fat, I think you'll 
be very disappointed in the outcomes.
None of these personnel reductions, whether it's eliminating 
vacancies or otherwise, are things that people will enjoy.
This is not a fat university.
So we will go after it as fast as we can in terms of, as aggressively as 
we can in terms of administrative costs.
but it's not just as simple as cutting Mark Emmert's salary.
Yes.
>> My name is Steve Lee, I work in the school of public health, and 
I'm in the service employees international union here.
I think if we look at this budget, we find that there's going to be, some 
people are going to suffer.
And I would prefer that the people who already have a lot are the 
ones who suffer, rather than the people who don't.
And I know you've already addressed this, I'll make this very brief.
We could take half of your salary and save 10 jobs.
There's no reason that that should not be done.
And that's only one thing.
Also, other things that are going on around the country are many 
universities are actually dipping into their endowments now to make 
sure that they do not have to cut, and they do not have to lay people 
off and stop programs.
I think that's something that the University of Washington should 
seriously consider doing.
It's a lot better to do that than lay-off 600 or 800 people.
And finally, in the state legislature, we have the most regressive tax 
structure in the whole United States.
And that needs to change.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Well, you'll certainly get no argument from me on our tax 
structure.
I think our tax structure is just as you described.
You know, the issue on the endowment, let's talk about that for a 
minute.
So our endowment right now has declined.
I often hear from people outside the university mostly that, well, you 
just raised $2.5 billion, how can you not have any money?
Well, first of all, that endowment has fallen 25% since we ended the 
campaign.
But first of all, let's talk about what that money really is.
When we get an endowment from someone, we make a permanent 
lifetime promise to that person.
And they say, okay, here's a chunk of money, now, I want you to put 
that in an endowment and I want you to support students in the 
English department.
That's it.
And we say, okay, that's what we'll do.
It is literally a breach of contract and against the law for us to do 
otherwise with that money.
We can't say, you know, what we really want to do with that is we 
want to do this.
We've made a legally binding commitment to that person that that's 
what we're going to do.
And if we wanted to do something else, we could go back to them 
and say, you know, I know you gave it for English scholarships, but 
we really need it for chemistry scholarships.
And maybe that person will say, okay, fine, or maybe he or she won't.
but it's not like that's just a bank account with $2.5 billion in it.
First of all, it's like $1.6 billion now.
But all of that money is designated for specific endowments that were 
commitments we made to individual donors all throughout the 
campaign, the money is not fungible money, you can't just dole it out.
I don't know what universities are dipping into their endowment but, 
you know, the fact is is that most universities I know are borrowing 
money to cover the costs that they can't cover with their 
endowment.
So Harvard, in the past month or so, borrowed $1.5 billion, went out 
in the market, issue $1.5 billion worth of bonds, to cover their 
operating costs because their endowment is so under water, it's not 
generating any revenue.
That's like paying your rent with a credit card.
And so we, unfortunately, we're not getting much cushion from our 
endowment right now.
Last year, our endowment produced about $94 million I think it was, 
is that right, Paul?
$94 million in total revenue to go out to all of those original accounts, 
you know, that we had out there.
But this year, it's going to be appreciably less because obviously, it's 
not returning anything, it's most of those endowments are lower than 
when we started the year, and they're not turning out, not spinning 
off anything, they're going down.
So while we won't use the -- we will use the funds that we've raised as 
creatively as we can, the flexibility that we have in that arena is very, 
very limited.
Yes, ma'am.
>> I thank you, president Emmert, for taking my question.
My name is Janelle Taylor, I teach in anthropology.
And like a lot of people probably in the room, I followed a link that 
came around on e-mail, and watched a televised interview by Austin 
Jenkins with two members of the AGC.
And I know that you and a lot of other people have been working 
very hard to, as you said, explain to legislators what it is that we do, 
and why it's valuable, and why it needs support, especially during 
tough times.
but I came away from watching that interview very concerned that 
there's a lot more work to be done on that front, that at least those 
two members of the AGC seemed not to really understand or value 
research or liberal arts education, as I know them.
They were talking about reconsidering tenure, they were talking 
about moving us toward online courses primarily.
I worry, first of all, I worry that they have not been brought around 
to understand what we do to want to support it, but second, I worry 
that people who do not like or support the University of Washington 
or universities in general might take this budget crisis as an 
opportunity to push through changes that will be irrevocable.
>> Well... 
[APPLAUSE]
I'm curious.
How many of you saw that interview or saw the blog of it or read 
anything about it?
Yeah.
I completely agree with all of your sentiments.
I was deeply disappointed by that, the opinions that were expressed 
there.
They were many things that were fundamentally factually in error by 
enormous proportion.
And there was a deep lack of understanding of what this university in 
particular is about.
And what higher education at a baccalaureate, let alone at a graduate 
level, intends to do.
I think there's a strong tendency in many quarters these days to focus 
on education as vocational preparation only.
I think it's a national, it's probably an international trend, but it's 
certainly a national trend.
There's people that think that, you know, there's no reason not to get 
a bachelor's degree in three years.
I keep reminding them that the body of knowledge that exists in the 
world hasn't shrunk by 25%.
There's a lot of that critique going on out there right now.
I and Randy Hodgins and Regent Cole, and any number of people 
have met with both of those individuals, and talked at great length 
about these issues, so that was a particularly disappointing set of 
conversations, and it I think points out some of the challenges that we 
have to overcome.
And that we're working very, very hard to get the facts in front of 
them.
Anything up there?
Yes, we're going up to the rafters, Mr. Technician.
>> Hi, I'm a sophomore here in the econ department, and I recently 
registered for classes.
And I'm just kind of concerned with the size of the classes have been 
lately, and I was told by the counselor one of the main reasons that 
class sizes are so large is because so many areas on campus are under 
construction, such as savory hall, and then Takar hall.
And you mentioned earlier in your address that there's a lot of 
shovel-ready projects going on.
I was just wondering if departments  or projects are finished or if 
more are going to start, and class sizes are going to stay the same, if 
there's some relief in the future.
>> Yeah, great observation.
We are doing a number of things right now with capital construction.
So one is, of course, we're continuing what we call restore the core, 
which is the renovation of the buildings, the old historic buildings on 
campus.
So savory hall, for example, right now has been emptied out, and all 
of those faculty, sociology, and their colleagues, are over on Condon 
hall, my least favorite building on campus, sorry to say.
I always know that faculty are ready to have their building redone 
when they volunteer to move to Condon.
but we are hopeful that we'll have a chance to continue both restore 
the core and to do some new buildings.
For example, we want to do the continuation of the project for the 
Foster School of Business, we want to do a project for engineering, 
the molecular engineering building, we have a number of other 
renovations to go forward.
Et cetera, et cetera, I won't bore you with the whole laundry list.
We have projects in Tacoma and elsewhere that we want to move 
forward.
We don't know right now what's going to happen with the capital 
budget.
I haven't talked about the state's capital budget except that there are 
many, many people right now that want to, want to pursue capital 
budget projects.
At the same time, there's an interest in using some of the capital 
budget resources to help deal with the operating budget shortfalls.
So that's a very long-winded way of saying we're not sure right now, 
we want to, we have them on the drawing board, we're lobbying 
aggressively for them, but we'll have to see what happens next.
And we do have a significant shortage, the provost and I have talked 
about this, and Dean Cowsey and others, that we have a significant 
shortfall of classroom space, especially large classroom space on 
campus.
Anything else from upstairs?
No.
Yes, Gail.
>> Gail Steigel, English faculty member.
This is a two-part transparency question.
I've just come off six years of being on the Senate committee on 
planning and budgeting.
And I've never seen a report on administrative costs.
Could you make that report available?
>> Yeah, sure, happy too.
>> To the university community.
>> Excuse me, Gail.
It came out of Weldon's office a few years ago, would you dig that up 
please?
Okay.
Thank you.
>> The second part, and I think this is a concern to a large contingent 
of both faculty and staff, we understand that you're not in a position 
yet to make a decision about how the cuts will be taken.
but we really don't have any information about what if furloughs 
were to pass, are we talking about 10% cuts, are we talking about 
20% cuts?
Are we talking about where are these 600 to 800 people going to 
come from?
I understand that some positions are maybe open and then not filled.
But people are getting really nervous about where these things are 
going to happen.
More information, and I think that's what people understand is 
transparency, even if it's information that you're still deciding about, 
would help calm a number of people who are worried about what's 
going on.
>> Yeah.
I understand what you're saying.
And we'll work hard to do that.
And we'll continue to get as much information out through the 
Senate planning and budgeting and every other forum like this as we 
can.
The obvious problem is, is that we don't want to say, okay, if we have 
to eliminate 800 jobs, here's where they'll come from, these units.
When we don't know what the depth of the reduction is going to be.
I don't know that that would alleviate anxiety.
I know for 800 people, it would increase it pretty dramatically.
The other piece of it, of course, is that if we wind up having to 
eliminate positions, we want to do as much of it through attrition and 
vacancies as possible, so as we don't -- so that we don't have to 
displace real people in real jobs.
And some of that's likely to occur over the course of the biennium.
We don't know right now which faculty are going to retire, which 
staff are going to leave, what transition is going to occur.
So as those occur, you have to, as I said, you have to take vacancies 
where they occur, unless you want to just go in and be pretty 
Machiavellian about it.
And we don't want to do that, we want to be as respectful of our 
people as we can. So saying that they are going to come out of 
programs or departments is not something we can do at this stage.
So saying that we want to take more of them out of administrative 
arenas than academic arenas and some generalization of it.
That we can do and that's what we're trying to do.
but we're probably weeks and months away, months maybe.
Maybe weeks.
Away from where we can say, look, we know what the magnitude, 
Randy, when will we likely see a real budget?
March 26th, we'll see a real budget finally coming out of the 
legislature.
So we're weeks away from having any real clarity about what we're 
really going to have to deal with.
>> One last comment.
Even things like knowing attrition rates across colleges would begin to 
give people some idea of how much is going to come from things that 
aren't going to harm people versus things that are.
>> Okay, that's a good question.
We can start to gather that kind of data.
Good point.
>> Hi, president Emmert.
My name is Melvin and I'm an undergraduate student here, and I'm 
preparing to go out into the world outside of undergraduate 
education.
And I like to think that regardless of whether I come back to the 
University of Washington for graduate education or to work, that I 
have a vested interest in the future of the university.
And so when you look at these possibilities, and I know that there's a 
lot, that it's basically unknown at this point, and your priorities are 
maintaining a great university, as you said.
How do you, how are you prioritizing what the face of the 
undergraduate education will look like at the university?
Because it's already clear that there are going to be some distinct 
changes to what possibilities are going to be for undergraduate 
students and whatnot.
And how is that going to affect recruiting the next generation of 
students and faculty at the university?
>> Yeah.
Good, really great question.
Thank you.
Well, the -- probably the most important thing that we do is that we 
strive through all of this.
To minimize the impacts on the nature of the university itself and the 
quality of the educational experience for our students as well as our 
research prowess, the decision for example to say that if you cut our 
budget X amount,  we will have to take fewer students is one to 
address , exactly what you're talking about.
There are people who believe we should have our budget go down 
and take more students.
To which I say, sure, we can teach introductory classes in Hec Ed, and 
have a student to faculty ratio of 1 to 5,000, and it would be cheap, 
and they'd get a class.
But of course, the reality is that would be an awful education 
experience.
Well, when we fill up this arena, or the venue next door, we're getting 
pretty big student faculty ratios, and we've made a lot of progress in 
the past 10, 15 years, on improving the quality of the educational 
experience here.
I really don't want us to back away from it, it's something that we 
value highly here and it's something that our students enjoy.
And so as we talk about what's the right amount of funding and 
support for, on a per-student basis for the institution, we have to 
really make sure that we don't have more students than our faculty 
and our support staff can take care of.
The last thing that we want to have happen is for the value of a 
University of Washington degree to go down.
We want it to continue to go up.
The other piece of it is, is that the economic problems that we have 
right now aren't, we hope, you know, aren't permanent.
They may last for sometime, but sometime out in the future, we're 
going to be in a different position than we are right now.
We have to make sure that as we're working our way through this, 
we don't damage our ability to respond to changes out there and 
opportunities that are out there, that we're not just looking 24 
months ahead, but two decades ahead.
That we're asking ourselves, what do we want the University of 
Washington to be, not just today and tomorrow but in five and 10 
years, and as we make decisions now, are we impacting our ability to 
do that?
To operationallize on those goals and objectives for an institution?
And one of those clearly has to be the quality of the educational 
experience, that's got to be front and center in all of the decisions that 
we make.
Now, that doesn't mean that we won't have to have some temporary 
things that we don't like, that we might have to make it harder to get 
a class, or we might have to make the student/faculty ratio in some 
classes goes up temporarily.
but we have to do that knowingly and then move it back down to 
where we want it to be as quickly as we possibly can.
Yes.
I beg your pardon.
>> I'm also an undergraduate student and my question arrives right 
on the wave of the last question.
You spoke briefly earlier about this national trend regarding the 
nature and the purpose of education.
And then prior to that, you also talked about what is the core of the 
University of Washington, looking at that, if you make a change and 
you say, okay, if I take this away, is this still University of Washington?
So I know this is kind of a big question, but at its core, and in most 
clear terms possible, can you tell me what is University of 
Washington?
Because it looks different from a student's point of view, you know, if 
you take away something from a professor, that is a big part of what 
the University of Washington is to that person.
So I guess my question is, what is the University of Washington?
And who is making those decisions and setting those priorities?
>> Yeah, sure.
Well, the University of Washington in the driest, most, least 
glamorous description is a large comprehensive, research-intensive 
world class university, which doesn't tell you much of anything.
Except that the comprehensiveness becomes very important.
And as we think about who we are and what we do, comprehensive 
doesn't mean that we do everything, because we don't, in terms of 
intellectual activity, but it does mean that we have a full breadth and 
depth of academic, scholarly, and instructional activities going on at 
the university.
We're not cal tech, we're not a, you know, some people would like to 
see us having a much
more  vocational bent that's just a boutique kind of institution.
We're big and we're broad and we're comprehensive.
We're an institution that in more colorful language, I like to describe 
as an elite institution that's not elitist.
And what I mean by that is we provide educational opportunities and 
we provide research and scholarship and medical care that's at the 
very highest levels of competitiveness in the world.
All right.
That that we provide educational experiences, our faculty and staff 
and students do research and scholarship, and art, at the very highest 
cutting edge levels, and that when you are part of our medical clinics, 
you're getting as good as medical care as you can get, period.
But the part that's not elitist is we then make that elite performance 
available, if you will, available to people regardless of where they 
come from, regardless of who their mama was, regardless of what 
their economic background is.
And the U.W. has done that extraordinarily well.
We have among our students, especially our undergraduates 
remarkable economic diversity.
It's something that we should be very, very proud of.
There's only a few institutions like us of our caliber that have that 
level of economic diversity.
We have in fact, of course, great breadth in our programs, but we 
also have to make sure that all of those programs are very, very 
strong.
It's not that we have just a few great programs, but we're strong and 
great in everything that we do.
No matter what you come to us for, you will find world class 
excellence in everything  that we do.
Doesn't matter.
That's what the University of Washington does for me.
Yes.
>> I'm Gordon Watts, a faculty member in the physics department.
My question touches on these topics that the last three people have 
been asking.
But the core I think for me at least is transparency.
We have a whole process in place, you know, strategic planning, 
things like that, and we go through these efforts, and I think all 
universities do, and we always plan for 2 or 3% growth, and we have 
a nice strategic plan that's all set up for those situations.
But of course, there's no strategic plan for a 10% cut, I don't know of 
any university that draws that sort of thing up.
So the result is when we get into a situation like this, nobody really 
knows what's going to happen.
And everybody is kind of at sea.
So, for example, when you had to put together, or you and the 
everybody at the university had to put together these mock budgets 
for what was it, the 8--.
>> 8, 10, and 12.
>> The 8, 10, and 12% cuts.
My impression is what happened is you talked to the various 
administrative units, they talk to their subunits, et cetera, in effect 
what you get is an across the board cut, almost a flat cut, which isn't 
very strategic, it's just everybody gets cut equally.
There's certainly, I know from the faculty side, there is things like the 
budget and planning committee, which are meant, at least from the 
faculty point of view to talk about some of these strategic issues as 
opposed to doing an across the board cut.
I assume there's similar committees or groups in place for the student 
side and also for the staff.
And of course, I'm not familiar with those.
So talking to one or two members on the faculty version of this 
committee, it sounds to me like basically, there are a lot of numbers 
going around, but there's very little discussion of strategy for the cuts.
Now, I understand these mocks that you had to give are just that, 
they're not the real cuts, and the real cuts are coming, those have to 
be decided soon, but are you going to, is there going to be any time to 
have a discussion where the faculty, the staff, the students, all the 
administration, all the various interested parties are going to really be 
able to weigh in with the strategic approach to this as opposed to just 
an across the board cut, which I think as you've said, is not the most 
optimal way to deal with these budget cuts.
>> Well, certainly, it's not.
And I don't have any intention of just doing across the board peanut 
butter kind of cuts.
But the real operationallization of all of that occurs at various levels in 
the university.
So you don't want the president of the university walking into the 
physics department and telling you how to take a cut.
You want, if the physics department has to take a cut, you and 
physics want to say, okay, so if we got to take X thousand dollars out 
of our budget, here's some ways we can do it, so you figure out how 
that works.
Dean Cowsey doesn't want me strolling in and saying, here's how arts 
and sciences needs to take this cut.
What we need to do is set parameters at each of those levels, with a 
lot of conversation, that says, okay, at the grossest level here, we 
want to maximize the negative impact, assuming we have all these 
things going, you want to maximize the negative impacts by taking as 
much of this as we can out of nonacademic programming, okay?
Administrative support, all that kind of stuff.
We want to minimize the impact on the classroom experience.
So you start setting parameters like that, instead of saying everybody 
is going to take 8% or whatever the number is.
And then you set it at that level.
And then the provost sits down with a dean and says, okay, so inside 
your unit, let's start talking about how we're going to manage that.
So the cuts start to work their way down.
The other piece though is you can't have complete degrees, all 
degrees of freedom at every level because you just wind up 
squeezing the balloon into another part of the balloon, and it bulges 
into another.
I was at the Mechanical Engineering department today, any M.E. guys 
here?
A couple.
And we were talking about this very issue around a course that they 
offer in, what was it in?
I forgot.
It was in some design.
Yeah, computer aided design, that they provide for the whole campus 
pretty much.
So an easy thing for them to say is we quit, we're not doing that 
anymore.
Well, all right, that's how you take your budget cut.
But then, of course, it has implications for the whole institution.
If the physics department decided, we're not going to teach intro to 
physics anymore, that would probably have some impact on 
engineering.
So you can't have complete freedom of that decision making, you've 
got to put it in some kind of parameters.
>> I completely agree with everything you said, and the point is you 
talked about those various axes of what along you want to optimize.
Where does a discussion occur about where those axes are, and does 
that involve the faculty, the students, the staff?
>> Well, it certainly needs to involve the Senate planning and 
budgeting committee, it certainly needs to involve the board of 
deans.
The deans need to be working with their faculty and their department 
heads and faculty, so that, again, it occurs at a variety of different 
levels.
There's not going to be, and there really can't be a meeting like this of 
everybody, and we start going through the list.
So it's got to occur in as orderly and Spritely a fashion as we can.
And that's going to require that it happen inside each of the colleges 
and each of the departments in like fashion.
Each of the colleges have different cultures and different approaches 
to these things, the way the business school operates is different than 
the way engineering and arts and sciences and, you know, pharmacy 
operates.
Did I answer your question?
Okay.
You sat down looking like you were mostly just tired instead of 
satisfied.
Yes, sir.
>> Yeah.
Steve Houchka, biochemistry faculty.
I want to put some real numbers on some of these modeling 
situations that you're proposing.
So I teach with colleagues and other basic science departments, a big 
biology, 200 level course with 300-plus students in it.
And an example of a modeling proposal, we were asked several 
weeks ago to come up with a scenario in which we would teach only 
one half the number of labs that we currently teach in a one-quarter 
course, as a way of saving half the money because the T.A.s that 
would be cut.
>> Yep.
>> It wasn't that difficult to sit around and say from our 10 labs, what 
would we keep for five?
We had our favorite five labs.
but that's a real effect on that course.
>> You bet it is.
>> And we, so somebody took that information, yes, the biology 
faculty thinks they might be able to prioritize their labs and here's the 
five they would keep.
What I'd like to know, and it's sort of related to the physics persons 
question, is, when does that decision that we really didn't make, we 
simply prioritized some labs, when does that come back to us as 
teaching faculty, to really deal with the consequences of that?
That has huge consequences, not just for the biology, particular 
biology course, but for the 300 level courses that these students go 
on to.
>> Sure.
>> For the medical school, for anything else.
And every other department here is in that situation.
There's no department, when you start cutting things out, doesn't 
impinge only on them, but it impinges on many other departments.
We can't really teach biology if students are getting short shrift in 
terms of their writing skills in English.
>> Right.
>> So the whole thing is a very complicated mesh work and the 
models have to be dealt with, they have to come back to the faculties, 
really see what the consequences of these models are.
If they get passed on to administrators, who understandably think, 
okay, we'll save this amount of money by doing this cut because it 
was modelled in biology, I don't think it will work well.
>> Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
First of all, let me make one point that you didn't ask about.
but I and everybody else that's involved in this process understands 
the enormity of the problem and the potential impact it has on 
departments and faculty and staff and students.
And I don't want anybody to leave here thinking that I am in any way 
diminishing the nature of the challenge that's in front of us.
This is a big, hard, painful problem.
It is not going to be fun, it is not going to be easy, and I sure as heck 
am not wishing this upon anybody.
We're dealing with what we got to deal with.
There will be departments and programs that they will have to do 
things that they would not have to do otherwise. You would not have 
that debate otherwise.
Who would want to have that debate?
It's an awful debate to have.
There will probably be some things we can do that will be interesting, 
and in retrospect, will wind up being improvements even, but most of 
them will be in the order in which you just described.
But in terms of how does that come back to you, again, I can only 
assume that department heads and deans are talking about this all 
the time.
And as we collectively learn what the budget realities are going to be 
on March 29th, is that what you said?
Whatever, sometime soon.
As we learn about this collectively, we'll be able to start to translate 
that into, okay, looks like here's what this means.
And then, you know, dean cowsey and your department heads, not 
Tom, who's the department chair these days? I forgot, oh Medical 
School
I beg your pardon.
Your department head, you know, will need to sit down and work 
with the dean, and figure out how you're going to manage that 
process.
And so, you know, we've got to have that relationship between 
departments and deans and faculty being as tight a link we can.
So that's where that conversation has to occur.
Yes.
>> My name is steve Ludwig, I'm a former student and a current 
spouse.
I enjoy really dynamite medical coverage as do my three children, 
through my wife's job in public health.
And I'd like to ask you about what a great university means in this day 
and age.
And I think both on the economic front, which you've mentioned in 
terms of how cutting back maybe isn't exactly the right thing to do for 
this university, or for state budgets across the country, it's actually 
the wrong thing to do, but also where we sit relative to climate 
change, for instance, and who in the state of Washington other than 
our greatest university is going to lead us in the next six years that we 
apparently have from the best scientific minds in the world to deal 
with this issue of global warming.
How will the university take us in the right direction there.
And I'm thinking if somehow we can redirect our community in the 
eyes of our state's population, you maybe can roll up your sleeves, 
we can redirect and become not just great in the sort of values 
neutral sense that we are now, but great in this specific time for the 
specific things we really need to do, which means pulling back from a 
war economy, a financial ship wreck, and heading into the things that 
we have to do on the environment, medical care, et cetera, et cetera, 
and I'm wondering if you can flesh out what a great university means 
in the crisis that we're in now.
>> Well, I'll answer this very, very quickly.
Because there's a whole another hour right there.
First of all, I think that the University of Washington, as you look 
forward, has to deal with a number of really critical questions that 
only great universities can address.
And that includes obviously, all things dealing with sustainability,  
global climate change, environmental issues, whatever rubric you 
want to cast that under, and the U.W. is very well-positioned to do 
that.
I think secondly, the university has to find what its niche is going to 
be, both in terms of  teaching and research and around energy, which 
is obviously closely related to global climate change, but has other 
dimensions about it that are equally critical.
We have to find ways in which we can continue to drive forward 
around the great progress we've made around global health, 
including health care cost containment, which is a fundamental 
problem that we all face.
And we have to work on those issues together.
I think that we also certainly have to work on a variety of issues in the 
information technology, that I won't bore you, and a handful of 
others.
The point is simply that the things that you're talking about, while I 
disagree completely with you that we're value neutral, I think that's 
not the case.
But the fact is, is that the university has to be looking, as I said, 
looking out there a handful of years and saying, what are the critical 
issues that our nation and our planet is going to face, and what's the 
university going to be doing in terms of teaching and research to 
address those kinds of questions going forward.
And as we deal with the problems of today, our budgetary problems 
today, how are we trying to position ourselves to be more useful to 
our state and our nation and our people?
I think you and I would probably agree on that.
Yes.
>> My name is Dwayne Storidy, I'm a faculty member in mechanical 
engineering.
And I wanted to follow up on the issue that was raised regarding 
input to strategic decision making.
So when you respond to that, you talked about getting together with 
the chairs and the deans, and I would like to encourage you, since this 
is an issue of allocation of resources, that the representatives of the 
faculty into the decision making process, should actually be through 
the college councils.
So I would encourage you to seek out input from the college councils.
>> I will encourage the deans to do that.
The deans work with the college councils, and I think that's obviously 
appropriate.
>> Okay, we have had some resistance in that regard as times.
>> Yes, ma'am.
I am a doctoral candidate in classics and I haven't really heard  you 
say anything about the T.A. cuts that are being done.
I've already found out I lost my funding next year
So what's being done about funding cuts for the graduate students, 
and especially because going out, looking for an academic job right 
now, you know, there have been a lot of hiring freezes like what 
we're doing here.
So my prospects aren't very good.
So is there anything that can be done to help with funding?
>> Sorry, I can't speak to your particular situation.
But the issue with T.A.s and a variety of related academic positions 
are one of the real problems in the midst of all this, that people who 
have T.A.-ships or temporary appointments or a variety of things like 
that, are positions that are more flexible, and so  the hard reality is, 
again, when you are reducing budgets and your trying to figure out 
how to control costs going forward because, obviously, we're talking 
about making commitments  for next year right now inside each of 
the schools and colleges.
I know they've been making very hard decisions and choices to cut 
back on T.A.s and graduate student support.
And I think that's true in virtually every department right now around 
the institution.
Anna Marie?
>> I think that...
[INAUDIBLE]
>> Can you hear her?
[INAUDIBLE] 
>> What we've done is the amount of T.A. funding that we've been 
able to guarantee the department is less than the amount of money 
that was in the T.A. budget last year, by approximately 18%.
The reason why we did that now is precisely for the reasons that 
president Emmert was talking about.
Departments are making decisions about accepting graduate 
students.
We want them to be making those decisions in light of a very real 
potential cut.
So what most departments are doing is they're accepting smaller 
classes so they can continue to fund as much as possible students that 
are already here.
I don't know what year you're in...
>> My department has had so much cut from next year, that not only 
are they accepting new students, but they can't fund current 
students.
>> What year are you in?
6th
Most departments are only guaranteeing funding through the fourth 
or fifth year, and most 6 year students are not being guaranteed 
funding.
Again, there have been no, the answer is zero, actual T.A. cuts.
What we have done is guaranteed departments less money than they 
had in the past.
There will probably be in fact be T.A. cuts but at the present moment, 
there are no T.A. cuts out there.
But you're right, sixth year students are most likely not going to be 
able to have another year of funding.
>> Thank you, Anna Marie.
So I want to take this question and I know I jokingly said we had to be 
done by 8:00, but I actually have to be somewhere else at 5:30.
So if you have questions you might want to move toward a 
microphone.
Yes, ma'am.
>> President Emmert, My name is Darcy Conseco, I work for housing 
and student services.
I understand that there's a lot of unknowns right now and that we're 
waiting in the wings to find out what's going to happen.
but I wanted to know if you could tell us some of the knowns.
I know we're going to have budget cuts, but you spoke of trying to 
come up with more funding for the university and trying to get 
money from other sources.
I'm just wondering if you can tell us some of the things that maybe 
are on the table and give us a little bit of a preview, if you're able to 
tell us at that time.
>> Sure.
There's no magic here, right?
The sources of revenue to any university are pretty limited.
Our finances are embarrassingly simple. You either try to get state 
general fund support.
We got this odd thing right now of the state stimulus package, which 
we'll work very, very hard to try and get that in to mitigate the cuts, 
so that we can get a lower level of reduction overall.
There's no question that higher tuition rates, which is everybody's 
least favorite subject is going to be on the table in the legislature.
They're already having discussions about that right now. That could 
mitigate some of this as well.
It's very unlikely that we'll see a rapid turnaround in our investment 
portfolio to drive new revenue out of our endowment, but you never 
know.
We'll have to wait and see there.
Those are really the handful of things that we've got going for us.
It's a small pool of options that's available.
Our auxiliary enterprises that you work in, of course, for the most 
part, are self-funding.
I think I would not anticipate any dramatic reductions in revenues 
that they're going to see.
Eric gottfried is here, I suspect?
No.
He had to go.
I'm sure he'd agree with me.
[LAUGHTER]
That we're not anticipating any fundamental changes there.
Indeed, over the next handful of years, as we increase student 
housing, there will probably be some increased revenues and more 
people working in that arena.
So we'll also try and do as best we can in all those auxiliary services 
and make sure that those budgets are helping.
Okay?
You're welcome.
Yes, sir.
>> My name is George Robertson, I'm an undergraduate student and 
a member of the student  labor project at U.W. 
Last summer, the Washington federation of state employees went 
through an extremely arduous process to collectively bargain an 
agreement  cover the 4,000 members at the U-Dub.
And Chris Gregoire announced that she's essentially doing a line item 
veto and cherry picking pieces out that she's not going to go ahead, 
I'm talking specifically about wage increases.
And that kind of cherry picking  fundamentally undermines the 
collective bargaining process.
And I'm wondering what your' position is on that kind of sort of line 
item stuff, and what you're going to do to guarantee that the 
collective bargaining process is respected.
>> I'm going to let the Governor be the Governor and I'm going to be 
the president of the university. That’s the Governors job.
That's what the Governor does, not the president of the university.
The Governor has a responsibility to -- we have a responsibility to 
collectively bargain in good faith.
We do that.
We turn that over collectively then to the Governor, then the 
Governor decides what to do with it.
She's under no obligation to send it forward to the legislature. She 
cose not to do so under very difficult financial conditions.
And that's her choice.
>> Do you share my concern?
>> I share concerns about the fact that the state has an $8 billion 
budget hole and doesn't know how to fill it.
>> So you don't?
>> No.
I said, I share the concern that the state has an $8 billion budget hole 
that it doesn't know how to deal with.
And at times like this, I think all of those agreements will be under 
pressure.
>> Hey, so I'm matt Reed, I'm also an undergraduate student here.
And I noticed that when you're talking about budget cuts coming 
down from the top, administration, and even upper level 
administrators for all the departments, can I get a commitment from 
you that you're going to try to involve students and workers more 
directly in this budget process?
Since we'll be the ones that will really be affected by these budget 
cuts, in some ways more directly, and it's going to hurt for us, you 
know.
I don't want to have a class in here with scan trons with something I 
should be writing essays about.
So can I get a commitment about that?
Students and workers?
>> Sure.
We will continue to work with students, we work with the elected 
student leadership.
We have student participation, in our planning and budgeting 
committees.
And we'll keep students informed as we possibly can moving forward.
Obviously, the departmental decisions that occur involving faculty, I 
think if I left you with the impression that faculty aren't going to be 
involved in the decisions, I misspoke.
Clearly, they are going to be involved in those decisions.
So this is not a top down process.
And we'll involve students in all the appropriate ways that we can.
>> Mechanical engineering, Anna.
So I'm wondering if I might make a request.
We know that the units and departments have gone through their 
paper budget cuts, and if we could also have feedbacks on what is 
perceived to be the larger impacts from each of the units to 
encourage that further discussion, I mean that was brought up 
before, that we've gone through the numbers, but we'd like to have a 
better handle on understanding system-wide what will be the 
impacts, and to the extent that a department or unit can state, this is 
what we believe will be the impacts as far as we know.
I think that would be very helpful, perhaps not necessarily for the 
legislature, but for our own understanding.
And while I do understand your desire not to declare a financial 
emergency because of the impact on bond ratings, I really would like 
for you to have that information about what we believe the impacts 
will be as far as we can tell so that you can really make an educated 
decision about whether we are in a financial emergency or not.
My suspicion is that it may very well be truly an emergency whether 
or not we're willing to admit it or not.
And the bond ratings and concern about them, you know, if we as a 
university decide that part of our mission is accumulating capital and 
it's not what we believe truly is our mission of learning and education.
That I think can lead us down a pathway that's not desirable.
So I'm saying, yes, we understand that endowments have strings 
attached, but the question has been rightly posed, is it really the 
university's, is it really something that we should do to try to acquire 
capital and preserve that, and use the interest rather than, again, 
focusing on our mission and saying, look, this is a very, very 
uncommon time.
And it may require uncommon and out of the box actions.
So...
>> Well, gosh,  the notion that I'm opposed to a declaration of 
financial emergency because of concern of our bond ratings is in 
error.
If I said that, I didn't, I was speaking in error, I don't remember saying 
it.
But my concern about a declaration of financial emergency isn't 
because of its impact on bond ratings.
It's precisely because of our mission.
It's precisely because of the impact it would have on our ability to 
excuse our mission and fulfill it.
It winds up, there are virtually no universities of our stature or any 
significant universities that have ever done a declaration of financial 
Exigency, it is sort of an admission of a death sentence.
Well, I don't believe we're on the verge of dying.
I believe we're on the verge of dealing with some very difficult stuff.
but I have no reason to believe that the University of Washington is 
not going to continue to be a very very important and successful 
university in the future.
I think we're going to have some tough things to deal with, but you're 
not going to persuade me that we're on the verge of death.
And when you declare financial Exigency, it would so damage our 
ability to recruit students and faculty for the foreseeable future, that 
it would have a profound impact on us.
I don't know about accumulating capital, I wasn't quite following you 
there.
Our mission is most assuredly not to accumulate capital.
If it is, we're really awful at it.
>> Well, I think the University of Washington has done a great job.
And to the extent that it is possible to talk to previous donors and 
suggest that we are in a situation that we really do need to, ah, 
request that we have the flexibility to do something with this, I think it 
might be helpful.
And I'm not trying to suggest that we are in a state of on our way to 
death.
But if we don't understand the impacts, if it's just numbers at this 
point that are fed back to the administration, without some attempt 
to understand and assess the impacts, then it's really very difficult to 
determine.
>> Of that, you and I completely agree.
I thought that was a good suggestion and thank you.
I agree completely with you.
Unless there's some real objection.
I'm going to make this the last question.
Sorry, the one up there will be the last question.
Sir, up there.
We'll go up there.
>> Hello.
I'm curious how, what measures you're taking to make sure that this 
doesn't happen in the future.
I mean to have education contingent on market forces, when it's 
obvious that education is needed when the market is down, is there 
anything that you're doing or that the administration is seeking at a 
political level to make sure this doesn't happen in the future.
>> Yeah.
I get the gist of your question.
I mean obviously, I wish I could control economic conditions, but 
what we can do is we can in fact work much more collaboratively, I 
think, around raising the awareness of the role of higher education in 
society.
And the University of Washington in particular.
We do a pretty darn good job of it.
And the fact that our budget is being cut isn't a reflection of people 
not caring for us.
Indeed, most state agencies have significantly greater budget cuts 
than we did.
Randy Hodgins here would tell you that after the Governor's budget 
came out, he mostly got beat up around the state capitol because 
everybody was saying, how did you escape so lightly?
Now, it doesn't feel like it to us, of course, but we needed to, all of us, 
as a society, need to do a better job of valuing education.
On that, you and I agree.
And we need to continue to beat that drum loudly, as loudly as 
possible.
Yes, sir.
You get the last question.
>> All right, thank you, excellent.
Well, first, I'd like to thank you for allowing us this forum to discuss 
these issues.
And also, commend you, because I think that you've done excellent, 
outstanding things for the University of Washington, and I think we 
need to recognize that.
And I recognize the need and current higher education to pay 
competitive private sector salaries to university administration.
but I guess this issue is obviously coming up because it's important to 
students.
And so I guess my point would be that I would not argue that we 
should be voting on your salary by any means.
But the way you're responding to these questions sort of minimizes 
the agency you have in determining what your compensation is from 
the University of Washington.
So I'd just remind you, you face a personal decision here on how 
much you accept from the university.
And so I just would ask you to consider the students and the faculty's 
needs in that regard.
>> That's a perfectly fair comment.
I accept that.
I would modify it only slightly at the risk of sounding defensive, 
nobody in the private sector running a $3.5 billion organization 
makes my pay.
They make 10 times or 20 times what I make.
but that's neither here nor there.
Well, let me thank you all for being here.
I appreciate your candor.
We will do this again.
We'll do this as many times as we need to, to make sure that we all 
have the same information.
Thank you all for being here.
[APPLAUSE]