Harker asks state for $120 million for 2011

In his budget request for the 2011 fiscal year, university President Patrick Harker asked the state to eliminate earmarked funds in the school's operating budget, which would reduce the state's oversight on the university's finances. 

Earmarked funds are money designated for a specific expense. Eliminating them would give the university more discretion in spending money received from the state.

Harker requested $120 million for the 2011 budget, the same amount requested for 2010.

However, this year Harker has asked for more flexibility in the ways in which the state money is distributed within "special lines." Special lines are a sector of money given to the university to fund special programs, such as research.

Scott Douglass, executive vice president and treasurer, said collapsing the lines would allow each college to provide the goals the state wants, but without the university having a bureaucratic barrier.

"People think we want to collapse the lines so we can do what we want with the money, and that's not the case," Douglass said.

He said the state wants the university to have certain outputs, or reach certain goals, but those outputs are not defined by the state or the university. Douglass said the university wants to hear what outputs they need to produce before they decide how much to allot to that program.

"The issue is we thought that would be negotiated through the process, we didn't say, ‘Here's what we're going to do,' we said, ‘We want to provide the outputs you want, so tell us the outputs you want and let us work within that.' "

John Flaherty, a lobbyist who formerly worked for the government watchdog group Common Cause, said he thinks the university should be more transparent about what the state budget will be used for.

"I think the university, as a leader in so many different areas, should also lead in the interest of openness and transparency, when it comes to the spending of taxpayers dollars," he said. "I think there should be more openness about this then there has been."

The funds used for special lines amount to approximately $27 million. These funds currently go to initiatives for students, such as grants to help Delaware residents participate in study abroad programs. The money is also used for communities in the state, such as such as the Math and Science Education Resource Center, the Delaware Center for Teacher Education and the Milford School District Professional Development School.

The university must make public how it spends money from the state, but can decide how to spend funds from other sources in secret. Money from the state makes up 17 percent of the university's budget.

The university's new budget distribution model, Responsibility Based Budgeting, decentralizes budget responsibilities within the university's seven colleges by disbursing the responsibilities to each of the colleges, instead of having a few administrators working on it. Douglass said the RBB distributes tuition dollars and state dollars based on the amount of teaching and research the faculty does.

"This creates incentives for faculty to teach more and do better research whereas the other model was a distribution model sort of government," he said.

University spokesperson David Brond said the university thinks it is a good investment because of the multiplied effect: a dollar invested into the university turns into a revenue of seven dollars for Delaware. However, Brond said he realizes why the new budgeting model has been met with resistance from state legislators.

"While we might have our own internal bias that they should invest more in us, there are a lot of other people that are needing state support as well," he said.

Brond said not all current obligations are outlined explicitly in the budget, such as the underlying Commitment to Delawareans.

"We're the state university and they give us more than $100 million," Douglass said. "One of the things we made a commitment to was while we're educating more and more kids from out of state, we would always make sure that any kid that lived up to the requirements to get into the University of Delaware from Delaware, would be admitted."