photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod is pictured on Nov. 7, 2023.

Faculty and staff leaders were expected on Wednesday to release the totals of an informal vote on whether KU community members have confidence in Chancellor Doug Girod amid rising labor tensions.

No such vote results emerged on Wednesday. Instead, Faculty Senate President Misty Heggeness — one of two organizers of the vote — said a decision was made to keep the online voting open until next week.

“Multiple stakeholder groups asked us to keep it open until next week to allow everyone a chance to respond given the grassroots nature in which the survey was sent out,” Heggeness told the Journal-World via email.

Heggeness didn’t provide any update on vote totals to date in the confidence/no confidence vote.

As the Journal-World reported on Monday, Heggeness and University Senate President Poppy DeltaDawn created an online ballot asking faculty members, staff members, students and others who are part of the university community to answer a question regarding whether they have confidence in the chancellor and University of Kansas chief financial officer Jeff DeWitt.

The unusual vote — it is the first in recent memory where the university community has been asked to express its confidence or lack thereof in the chancellor — comes as labor negotiations between the KU administration and its faculty labor union have largely stalled.

KU leadership last week rejected a wage proposal from the union and delivered the university’s “last, best and final offer” on wages. That proposal from KU could leave some faculty members receiving a wage increase as little as 1%, though KU leaders contend many faculty members will receive a greater increase — more than 10% in some cases — if their positions are deemed to be at wage levels that are below prevailing wages in the region for similar positions.

But the proposal from KU leaders did not provide a dollar amount that KU expected to provided in wage increases, and the proposal was only for one year. The union had been seeking at least a three-year agreement on wages.

The call for university community members to vote on Girod and DeWitt came in the days following news of KU’s final rejection of the labor union’s wage proposal.

In an email to their colleagues, Heggeness and DeltaDawn said they decided to create the online survey after hearing concerns from university employees questioning whether the amount of money KU is spending on athletic endeavors is hindering KU’s ability to provide larger wage increases.

“These concerns stem from ongoing arrangements regarding the new football stadium and related development, national policies driving unanticipated changes to the pay structure of student athletes and programs, and a general understanding that the KU academic system has, over the past five years, dug itself out of insolvency only to now be, once again, dealing with major deficits driven by athletics that are negatively impacting academic programs and faculty,” Heggeness and DeltaDawn wrote.

“All this uncertainty begs for the need of an external audit of KU finances and a university-wide vote to identify whether the university community still has confidence in leadership given these recent events,” the pair further stated.

Kansas Athletics is largely structured in a manner that separates its revenues and expenses from that of the general university. Most of Kansas Athletics’ expenses, for example, are funded by media rights payments, ticket sales and athletic department donors.

However, as the Journal-World has reported, there are areas of financial overlap between Kansas Athletics and the university’s general budget. In June, the Journal-World reported that Girod believed it was likely that Kansas Athletics would no longer be able to reimburse KU’s general operating budget for several million dollars worth of expenses.

Historically, Kansas Athletics would transfer athletic funds to the university’s general budget to compensate for items such as tuition, housing and dining plans for its student-athletes. In fiscal year 2023, Kansas Athletics paid the university approximately $10.3 million for those items. Additionally, it made another $9 million in payments to the general university for expenses such as utility bills and building maintenance expenses.

“The reality is they are not going to be able to keep doing that,” Girod told the Journal-World in June, citing new financial pressures stemming from an NCAA lawsuit settlement that gives universities the option of paying student athletes. While the settlement doesn’t require such student-athlete payments, the college athletic world has largely adopted the position that such payments must be made if their programs are to remain competitive.

In September, as the Journal-World reported, DeWitt further clarified that KU’s budget now assumed that $10 million of annual payments that KU historically received from the athletics department would now be forgiven in an effort to help Kansas Athletics shore up its budget.

Heggeness did not release an exact date when voting in the confidence/no confidence survey is expected to end. Originally, Heggeness and DeltaDawn said they intended to deliver survey results to the KU administration and the Kansas Board of Regents, which oversees operations at KU, on Wednesday.

Heggeness told the Journal-World the decision to extend the voting was made to ensure that there was more time for members of the university community to be invited to vote in the survey. The pair initially sent information to the survey only to fellow senators on the Faculty and University Senates. They in turn asked those senators to send information about how to partake in the survey to their colleagues.