February 6, 2009

University Senate hears reports on e-mail systems, budget transparency

Senate chair Ray DeCarlo updated the Senate on the progress of a working group that is discussing the challenges and future of Purdue's e-mail systems. DeCarlo listed several current challenges, including management of more than 20 e-mail servers on campus, centralized archival e-mail storage, maintaining the capability for secure and reliable document transfers, and filtering of externally and internally generated spam.

"We want to reduce the amount of time faculty and staff spend sorting through irrelevant e-mails," DeCarlo said.

The group has discussed ways to regulate the e-mail environment in order to address these issues. Examples of regulation include placing long-term archival e-mail storage on local/user computers, enforcing minimum performance standards for all Purdue e-mail servers to maintain security and to reduce internal and external spam, and developing guidelines for distribution of seminar announcements.

A full report on the committee's findings will be presented to the Senate at a later time.

DeCarlo also discussed the Senate's successful efforts, led by Senate vice chair Howard Zelaznik, to improve communication between the OnePurdue team and end-users. He highlighted areas that still need to be worked on such as establishing benchmarks for the system. DeCarlo will be looking into setting up a Web site forum, as was suggested by Wei Cui, associated professor of physics.

DeCarlo briefly touched on the Banner student systems. He said that 99 percent of all grades were turned in on time through Banner.

Charlene Sullivan, associate professor of management, presented a report from the Senate's ad hoc committee on budget transparency. The committee was charged with illustrating how the overall budget is split among academic and nonacademic units, determining the rationale of those decisions, assessing trends, and determining the administration's objectives and encouraging dialogue with the Senate.

Using published data, the committee analyzed the University's general fund for the West Lafayette campus over the period of fiscal 2002 to fiscal 2009.

The committee's strategic observations include:

-- The general fund declined slightly as a percent of overall West Lafayette campus budget as gifts, grants and contracts contributed more to the total budget. This trend will continue as Purdue seeks to grow its research funding from about $300 million to $550 million per year.

-- The incremental general fund budget allocation to schools is not correlated with growth in students in the short term.

-- General fund allocation to unavoidables has grown, reflecting external issues such as rising fuel and health care costs. Unavoidables are faculty and staff benefits, fee remissions, debt service, fuel, utilities, regulatory and insurance.

-- An absolute or relative decline in state appropriations in the face of rapidly increasing unavoidables presents a threat for the University.

The full report will be available with the meeting minutes at the University Senate Web site, www.purdue.edu/usenate.