The new budget model will move one step closer to full implementation when it hits the desk of ISU President Gregory Geoffroy sometime on Monday, albeit with some trepidation from ISU faculty.

Ellen Rasmussen, associate vice president for budget and planning and Budget Model Review and Implementation Committee member, said the committee will meet one more time Monday morning before turning a revised version of the fourth report – the most recent document delineating the university’s new plan for allocating money between colleges and departments – over to the president and his cabinet.

According to the budget model’s Web site, the president will then decide to reject the report, ask the committee for further revisions or accept the report as is and pass it along to the Faculty Senate and other campus groups for their formal recommendations. The committee expects his decision early in the week.

Douglas Epperson, chairman of the committee and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said he could not yet comment on how the fourth report has changed.

“What I can tell you is the committee has worked extremely hard to engage the campus community in a dialogue about the proposed budget model and we received excellent comments and feedback from across campus,” Epperson said. “That feedback has been thoroughly considered.”

Epperson said some of the faculty’s comments will be directly reflected in changes to the model and the rest will be directly addressed in other parts of the report.

This may be good news for faculty members still apprehensive about how certain aspects of the model will work.

Frank Montabon, associate professor of logistics operations and management information systems, said he thinks the committee’s plan to have students’ tuition dollars more directly tied to the colleges they take classes from is a reasonable principle, but not without its potential downfalls.

“I think the idea that resources should go where they’re needed is a good idea,” he said, “but it may create some unfortunate side effects.”

The “unfortunate side effects” referred to by Montabon have been collectively termed “gaming the system” by more than one of the budget model’s faculty critics.

“Anytime you set up a particular system, people learn how to game the system,” Montabon said. “Once [it’s] in place, people will use the system to maximize their own advantage.”

Carl Mize, associate professor of natural resource ecology and management, echoed Montabon’s sentiments.

“There’s a concern that home departments would try to start teaching required courses that are usually taught by other colleges,” Mize said.

He named English courses as an example.

For instance, the College of Business requires its students to take English 302, “Business Communications.” Under the new budget model, this would call for the College of Business to share a portion of its students’ tuition with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to help cover the cost of the class. However, if the College of Business wanted to “game the system,” it might decide to start offering that English class itself, which would keep more tuition dollars in the students’ home college.

Robert Hollinger, professor of philosophy and religious studies, also commented on the potential “gamesmanship,” but expressed more concern about what the new budget model might do to the arts and humanities programs.

He said the new budget model could be little more than an excuse to downsize the arts and humanities, areas of Iowa State that have smaller enrollment numbers and generate little revenue from research.

“What concerns me most is that the university is becoming first and foremost a business corporation and not an institution of higher learning,” Hollinger said. “The whole idea behind the budget model is based upon economic profitability as opposed to whether or not people are getting an education.”

Rasmussen said the committee was taking faculty comments such as these seriously in its revision of the fourth report.

“We definitely acknowledged the questions about ‘is this going to cause more competition and put up walls between departments and programs,'” Rasmussen said.

Although she could not say specifically how the budget model has been changed, Rasmussen estimated that about 10 to 15 pages had been added to the report as a result of the questions raised by the campus community.

Geoffroy agreed that feedback on the new budget model has been excellent and said he expects to see it reflected in the revision of the fourth report.