4: Expenses

UNL AAUP

This is part of a series on the financial analysis of the NU System. Go to the previous post or the next post.

Welcome to Part 4 of our analysis of the AAUP budget report. You have made it to the halfway point!

We don’t know what it’s like in your building, but many of us now take on duties such as taking out our own trash on top of our teaching, research, and service, because the university has cut custodial services to the bone. Many of us have long had to use our personal cell phones as business phones, pay to mail our own business mail, and pay for our own printing. Physics professors tell us they don’t have funds in their department to buy new work laptops, you know, like for people to work on. Despite offloading basic costs onto faculty, expenses are still up–possibly due to inflation, though faculty salaries are not higher to account for inflation. But also possibly because spending on administrators is up. Without finer-grained information from the administration, we cannot confirm what Mike Zelney said on his way out of Dodge, that increased costs are being driven by liability and health care insurance premiums.

In fact, expenditures on instruction have decreased over the past nine years. What has gone up is auxiliary enterprises, which include athletics at UNL, and administrator pay, which is included in that instructional support line. “Instructional support” sounds like it might mean the Writing Center or similar resources, but the category includes a lot more, and from what we have heard and seen on campus, the money is not going to the people that actually provide what most of us would think of when we hear “instructional support.” We’ll dig more into the instruction piece in the next post. 

We do note that research expenditures are up through the hard work of faculty members in applying to and securing federal grants.

Check out the rest of this series: