A question was raised to CFR late this week about why the cut to our campus amounted to 9.8% when the state cut to WSU was only a little over 1%. One clue, as one CFR member suggests, may lie in the comments made at the recent Board of Regents meeting. As the CFR member wrote:
On this topic: If folks are interested and have an hour to spare, you might want to check out the 6.6.23 Board of Regents meeting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwMHNMBx4QA) from the 2:50-3:40 minutes range.
In this meeting, Brunelli discusses the budget with some input from both the President (on a strategic pillars framework) and the Provost (on cut histories and the return to merit raises for faculty). In particular, at around the 3:20 minute, the Provost comments on what he suggests is a pattern of historic cuts that have hit Pullman more so than branch campuses (he calls out TC and Vanco specifically with a history of 0-2% cuts). What is not included here is the historical context of these cuts—at least from the Vancouver context/perspective, from what I remember.
In any case, the argument established here, which we can see raised/explored, too, in the 5.26.25 Board of Regents meeting, is that we have not been paying our fair share percentage-wise.
As such, I suspect these observations are a primary rationale behind the TC and Vanco percentage cuts. I think we can definitely expect a higher “franchise fee” rate down the road, too—unless we end up with an entirely different budget model based on what the President has described as a “purposeful realignment of WSU’s financial model” that will be worked out over the next year from what I gather from this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzIUusBigj8) and our discussion last week with Interim Chancellor Haynes.