Brown is currently facing two deficits: one of accounting and the other of accountability. While many are preoccupied with the current crisis about whether Brown will sign the compact presented by the Trump administration, we must not lose sight of the ongoing crisis of the University budget. In their Sept. 22 letter, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20, Provost Francis Doyle, and Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Sarah Latham presented a plan aimed at closing a $30 million budget gap that included substantial layoffs of staff. At the Oct. 7 faculty meeting, University officials then laid out significant reductions and pauses of graduate programs.
While current deficits have undoubtedly been exacerbated by recent federal actions, we reject the narrative that they are inevitable. In recent communications, the deficit has been presented as a simple matter of fact rather than as the result of major financial decisions made behind closed doors over years by a small number of University administrators. Due to this profound lack of transparency, the executive committee of the Brown University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors has no confidence that the cuts the Brown community is being asked to bear are necessary or well conceived.
Brown faculty have long been asking questions about the University’s budgets, with the Brown chapter of the AAUP going so far as to commission an outside analysis of the University’s finances in 2023 that was largely dismissed by University leadership. According to the Sept. 22 letter, $15 million in budget cuts are to be decided at the “discretion” of academic units, while the University will target the remaining $15 million deficit via “central actions,” which entail a 9.5% increase to employee contributions to health care premiums and a pause on plans that would keep Brown moving toward net-zero emissions, among other strategies. We question the opaque processes by which current deficits were incurred and through which budget cuts were decided.
The roots of the current growth model can be traced as far back as the 1970s, when Brown expanded beyond its longstanding identity as a “university-college” by opening a medical school. This growth continued as the University founded semi-autonomous schools, including the School of Public Health, the School of Professional Studies and the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. In the early 2000s, the University announced an ambitious agenda to become a competitive research and graduate-training university.
But now Brown is reversing course by drastically cutting many graduate programs. Since we have only recently reached a competitive position in relation to peer PhD-granting institutions, the unraveling of these programs will prove all the more difficult to reverse when we move past these financial difficulties. At the same time, cuts to staff positions threaten the future of entire departments. Given the costs of the University’s move into health care and the ambition of its recent and ongoing building projects, it seems unlikely that staff or graduate students are the biggest drain on the University’s finances. With each new School, Institute and Center comes more well-paid deans, directors and other higher administrators, adding to a national trend that has, not coincidentally, been accompanied by increasing tuition fees. Figures on administrative growth trends by salary grade or division at Brown are not, alas, made public, but expanding bureaucracies are prone to lose sight of the actual purpose of their institutions, which in the case of universities should be teaching and research.
Notwithstanding Doyle’s claims to the contrary, the lack of transparency and shared governance extends beyond finances to the everyday management of the University. Rather than host meetings to productively discuss proposed cuts, the University administration has released details piecemeal to various constituents, often simply meeting with department chairs to inform them of decisions that had already been made and the actions chairs will have to take to realize the University’s plans. To many, this lack of collective process suggests a divide-and-conquer strategy in which the University takes a zero-sum approach to spending while obscuring these actions’ effects from those who it most closely impacts. The lack of transparency in all of these decisions makes it nearly impossible to weigh priorities or grasp the criteria by which decisions are made.
In a steeply hierarchical institution like Brown, where the Brown Corporation delegates authority to the president and the provost, one must ask what “faculty governance” can look like. Faculty currently have little formal decision-making power within the University and often experience service on committees as frustrating or futile, leading to a reluctance to serve. Bodies such as the Faculty Executive Committee, the University Resources Committee and the Academic Priorities Committee give the appearance of faculty participation when in fact they have little power to affect policy, with any substantial actions coming out of these committees requiring the Corporation’s approval.
Brown has provided so little information that it is impossible to determine whether budget deficits stem from sound financial planning or from miscalculation. The Brown Chapter of the AAUP therefore calls for an increase in financial transparency and for greater faculty participation in meaningful and concrete University governance.
Brian Lander, associate professor of history and a fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environmental and Society, and Denise Davis MA’97 PhD’11, an associate teaching professor of gender and sexuality studies, are the secretary and vice president of the Brown University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, respectively. Lander can be reached at brian_lander@brown.edu and Davis can be reached at denise_davis@brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
