The Committee on Budget and Fiscal Affairs presented a report to Syracuse University faculty and administrators during Wednesday’s University Senate meeting in Maxwell Auditorium.

Sinéad Mac Namara, the chair of the budget committee, gave a brief presentation of the report and answered questions from faculty Wednesday. The report noted funding concerns at the Slutzker Center for International Services.

Here are three other key takeaways from the report.

Research funding

Vice President for Research Zhanjiang “John” Liu has met with the Senate’s budget committee to outline the university’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of research, according to the report.

Overall, Liu found that SU has strong basic and applied research, but needs to improve its translational research, according to the report.

Liu told the committee the university should expand its funding portfolio. According to the report, SU receives about $6 million in foundation and industry support grants each year. That’s a low level, per the report. SU also receives fewer grants from mission-oriented funding agencies than its peer institutions.

While SU’s Research 1 designation is “very positive,” and will allow for the recruitment and retention of quality faculty, per the report, the university is vulnerable in its ranking.

“Continued growth of the research enterprise must be achieved,” the report states.

The budget committee also noted a concern that the vice president for research has historically been “very modestly funded.” The committee in the report recommended SU ensure the office of the vice president for research is adequately staffed and resourced.

“Retention of R1 status is a critical goal that will be difficult to achieve without the appropriate research infrastructure,” the report stated.

Veterans affairs

The Institute for Veterans and Military Families, which serves tens of thousands of veterans, has “grown very rapidly in recent years,” per the report.

The committee recommended that Mike Haynie, vice chancellor of strategic initiatives and innovation, address the Senate or hold an open forum to share more information about the IVMF with the SU community. Haynie is the IVMF’s executive director.

When the IVMF launched in 2011, it had a staff of four with two student employees, expenditures of $3.9 million and revenues of $5.2 million, according to the report. Now, seven years later, the institute has 89 full- and part-time staff members in nine different states, in addition to 12 research fellows, 33 student employees and seven pro-bono partnerships. Its annual operating budget is $16 million, and its external revenue is $26 million, according to the report.

The IVMF operates entirely on soft money, or contributions, and in the last three budget years it has received a collective total of more than $49 million. The IVMF has received more external gifts than any individual school or college at SU in the last three budget years, per the report.

The Office of Veteran and Military Affairs serves about 2,000 current SU students who are active duty service members, military veterans and military connected, according to the report. The OVMA has a total budget of $1.1 million for 2018. Of this total, $225,000 is offset by facilities and administration overhead recovery from sponsored research awarded to the IVMF, per the report.

DPS budget

The committee also included information in its report regarding the Department of Public Safety’s budget.

The report found a 3.1 percent annual increase of the DPS budget in the last five years. Overall, the DPS budget makes up about 0.8 percent of the total university budget, according to the report.

Tom Sherman, a professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts who originally requested the DPS data, said during Wednesday’s meeting that the information in the report did not answer the questions he had.

Sherman said he has noticed an increased DPS presence on SU’s campus, and in the surrounding neighborhoods, namely through surveillance cameras and vehicles. Sherman said he wanted to know more about the department’s budget. He added that he was not satisfied with the budgetary picture provided in the report.

Mac Namara, who was presenting the report, said she could not give him a line-by-line breakdown at the time, and that was the information given to the committee from DPS.

The Senate Committee on Budget and Fiscal Affairs will report to the Senate again in April.

Published on February 21, 2018 at 10:12 pm

Contact Sara: smswann@syr.edu | @saramswann