Library In Bind Over Dwindling Funds WSU Struggling To Find Way To Divvy Up Budget That Would Be Fair To Arts, Science Departments
A Washington State University subcommittee has for now abandoned a controversial proposal for doling out the shrinking state library budget.
After a series of spirited faculty exchanges, the formula subcommittee voted instead to act as an advisory board for the director of libraries during the budget process.
“I understand the anger of some of my faculty. This is an affront,” said Lewis Carter, College of Liberal Arts associate dean.
WSU Interim Provost Geoff Gamble had requested the committee come up with a formula to more equitably divide the library’s multimillion-dollar budget. The formula currently used, which dates to 1979, is considered outdated because so many programs have come and gone over the last two decades.
Libraries Director Nancy Baker makes final budget decisions, but without a fair method of distribution, Baker becomes an easy target for departments that feel their needs aren’t being addressed.
“If we don’t have a formula I’m more than willing to divvy up the pie,” said Baker. “But I’ll last about six months.”
Departments’ library budgets are dwindling with the inflation of journal costs, particularly in the science fields where European for-profit publishers have cornered the market.
At its last meeting, the committee produced a new formula that more heavily weighted the number of graduate students and the amount of research and grants a department attracts.
The result would have cut the humanities library budget in half and dropped the social sciences library budget from 23 percent to 16 percent, while doubling the pharmacy and veterinary medicine library budgets.
“Anybody who puts together a spreadsheet that proposes to cut in half the library funding for humanities - that’s simply assassination, and it can’t be expected to be taken seriously,” English professor Paul Brians said.
Committee members agreed WSU’s central administration must address the critical library budget, which has suffered at the hands of outreach, diversity and other administrative initiatives.
With new provost Gretchen Bataille arriving in July, committee chair Jeremy Evans agreed that acting as an advisory board was a better approach than trying to develop new distribution formulas right away.
, DataTimes