photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

Members of the Kansas Board of Regents receive a tour of Allen Fieldhouse on Oct. 22, 2021. The tour included a stop in the men's basketball locker room, including a meet-and-greet with KU Coach Bill Self and several players.

KU Provost Barbara Bichelmeyer had been on the Lawrence campus for a grand total of nine days before she started working to shut it down.

It was the beginning of the pandemic, of course, and it won’t be a time any university administrator soon forgets. But when Bichelmeyer looks back at that time, there is another event a few weeks later that often stands out. It was a conversation with a Kansas City friend who understands business and shifting currents pretty well as one of the top venture capitalists in the region.

“It was late March and he said, ‘So, Provost, what are you going to do now that the entire economic sector for higher ed is broken?” Bichelmeyer recalled as she told the story last week to the Kansas Board of Regents, who were on the KU campus for a tour.

“Thanks for pointing that out,” Bichelmeyer continued. “But it is true. But I do think we are a little quicker to realize that than most.”

Perhaps quicker, but not happier.

The Kansas Board of Regents was on the University of Kansas’ Lawrence campus for the better part of two days last week. The group, which oversees the state university system, heard plenty of positive stories about research and student success and even got a behind-the-scenes tour of Allen Fieldhouse, punctuated with a meet-and-greet with Bill Self and players in the locker room.

But Regents also got an earful from faculty and staff members who were given nearly two hours to talk to the Regents without any of KU’s top administrators in the room.

“It really was a pretty big downer today listening to all of that, in terms of needs for people and investment,” Regent Allen Schmidt said at one point during the tour.

Bichelmeyer had forecast that the Regents likely would hear some discord. One of the Regents had asked her earlier in the tour how she had successfully gotten buy-in for the large number of changes — financial and otherwise — her office has been pushing.

“I’m not sure I’m successful yet,” she said. “I’ve gotten a lot of scars.”

But Bichelmeyer said she and new CFO Jeff DeWitt are committed to a new budgeting model that gets away from past practices where departments usually could count on getting the same amount of funds they always received, and if cuts had to be made they basically were made across the board.

Now, everything is more targeted, and deans and other leaders are being asked to make a more formal business case related to projects and operations.

“We are talking about return on investment now,” Bichelmeyer said. “That was kind of a shock to our deans going in. We had not budgeted for some basic items like inflation. We hadn’t budgeted for the increase in utilities. We hadn’t budgeted for raises.

“We have some great people who are pretty demoralized at this point in time.”

Staff and faculty concerns

The line Regents heard in their meeting with faculty and staff members was almost identical to the one Bichelmeyer had conveyed less than an hour earlier.

“There are a lot of great people at KU,” said Rémy Lequesne, faculty senate president. “But morale is low, pay is low, and people are leaving.”

KU leaders, of course, believe new budgeting practices and a greater emphasis on efficiency ultimately will help with all of that. It might, unless those changes also foul up some of the fundamentals that bring students to KU in the first place.

One of those fundamentals is the amount of time professors can spend with students. Regents heard concerns that a greater emphasis on how many credit hours a professor can teach over the course of a semester has led to a reduction in the amount of time professors can spend getting really involved with students — being a mentor for research, an active adviser on projects or any number of other opportunities that many students find critical.

“Those opportunities are the reason people come here,” said Nate Brunsell, a member of the faculty senate.

Equally concerning, some faculty members said, the greater emphasis on teaching more and more students with fewer faculty means that the research productivity of faculty members will suffer.

“The workload policy really emphasizes that it is instructional workload that matters,” said Corey Maley, another member of the faculty senate. “It would be nice to know the other half of our job — research — is valued.”

On that point, though, administrators and faculty are experiencing some sort of disconnect, as Bichelmeyer and Chancellor Douglas Girod spent a good amount of time talking about the importance of research to KU’s future, especially given that demographics in the U.S. — and particularly Kansas — show there will be fewer high school graduates in future decades.

Bichelmeyer said it became evident to her early on that protecting the hundred of millions of dollars KU receives in research funding was a critical task. KU leaders also alluded to the fact that research funding and productivity are key metrics behind KU’s inclusion in the Association of American Universities, the club of just 66 North American universities recognized for research excellence.

Bichelmeyer left no doubt to the Regents about the importance of keeping that designation.

“It is priceless that we are an AAU institution,” Bichelmeyer told the Regents.

But the Regents also picked up on how there could be a disconnect. The Regents received a presentation from KU Endowment and KU Innovation Park about their efforts to build a new development on KU’s West Campus that will attract businesses that want to be around high-tech lab space and KU research talent. One estimate projects the development northwest of 23rd and Iowa streets may involve $400 million of mostly private, endowment and grant funds over the next 15 years.

The Regents all were very excited about the project, and even expressed hope that it could be a model for other universities in the state.

But the Regents also recognized how such a project can be hard to watch if you are working on the main campus and feeling underpaid and undervalued.

“I’m wondering how do we translate something like this,” Schmidt said of the Innovation Park project, “into a better experience for … faculty and staff?”

Faculty and staff members at the Regents meeting said they would like KU to consider a policy used by a few other schools that frees up more money from their endowment funds. Stanford was used as an example of a school that has a policy that all gifts given to its endowment association have a percentage taken off the top that is transferred to the general university to be used for any operational purpose deemed necessary by the university. That’s a policy aimed at addressing the trend that more and more donors are giving gifts to endowments that come with restrictions on how they can be used, most often specifying that they must be used for a particular project or department.

But that would take a significant change in policy that the independent KU Endowment Association would have to agree to, and the organization has long expressed the importance of honoring donors’ wishes when they give to the university. It also has stressed in the past year that it does have the flexibility, even without such a policy, to respond to emergencies when they arise at the university. The Endowment Association has given $30 million of unplanned assistance to the university during the course of the pandemic, Regents were told.

Sometimes the problems, and solutions, are simpler to understand. Tim Spencer, president of KU’s staff senate, said it has been years since KU has undertaken a full compensation study for the variety of staff positions the university employs. He asked the Regents to direct KU to conduct a compensation study that looks at what other universities pay their staff positions, and also what the private sector pays similar workers.

Spencer said the signs of problems are evident. The university recently had extreme difficulty hiring HVAC technicians to service air conditioners and other equipment on campus. The starting wage for those positions had to be increased because the university simply couldn’t attract candidates at the previous rates. But KU did not provide increases to existing employees in those same positions, Spencer said, leading to more morale problems.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

Kansas Board of Regents member Jon Rolph checks out a lounge area of the men’s basketball locker room at Allen Fieldhouse during a tour on Oct. 22, 2021.

‘Right track’

The Regents took note of several of the concerns expressed by faculty and staff during their tour, but they also offered an endorsement of leadership’s approach to revamping KU’s operations and finances.

Regent Jon Rolph, who runs a Wichita-based business that operates multiple restaurant franchises, told Bichelmeyer that he liked her mindset that KU can’t return to pre-pandemic routines.

He said successful businesses are realizing that there is no “playbook you can pick up and go back to February 2020.” Bichelmeyer said that is the case for KU too.

“We don’t think there is a ‘normal’ that is past-oriented,” she said.

Regents Chair Cheryl Harrison-Lee also said she’s confident KU leaders are taking the right approach, even though it comes with difficulties.

“It is a transition,” Harrison-Lee, a former city manager and public administrator, said. “The economy is coming out of COVID. There was an economic crisis both local and global. I think we are in a position now where we have to rebuild, we have to reposition, we have to re-engineer higher ed.”

Harrison-Lee, who most recently served as the executive director of the state entity that distributed more than $1 billion in CARES Act money in Kansas, said Girod and Bichelmeyer have a sound strategy for the rebuild.

“What we heard from the chancellor and the provost is they are aligning their strategic planning with their financial model,” she said. “That is very important to tie that together so they can move forward. So, they’re on the right track.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World photo

Kansas Board of Regents Chair Cheryl Harrison-Lee, center, is pictured on Oct. 22, 2021 as part of a tour of Allen Fieldhouse at the University of Kansas.