JOPLIN, Mo. — Missouri Southern State University administrators during a meeting Thursday with faculty members took a different approach when they provided a glimpse of next year’s potential budget and simulations of a “worst-case scenario” financially for the years immediately beyond.

Communication — or lack thereof — about the university’s finances had been one of the criticisms leveled against MSSU President Bruce Speck by faculty members leading up to a no-confidence vote last fall. The inclusion of depreciation — a non-cash expense — as an operating expense in the university budget also was questioned by faculty members during listening sessions put on by Speck not long before that vote.

Thursday’s presentation on finances, which was largely delivered by Rob Yust, MSSU’s vice president for business affairs, and Brad Kleindl, interim vice president for academic affairs, marked a departure.

Depreciation was omitted from the financial information presented. Instead, Yust said he presented the faculty with “strictly a cash budget.”

Direct briefing

Additionally, the university’s financial team briefed the faculty directly. In the past, information traveled from committees to the faculty senate and then to the faculty, according to Roger Chelf, a physics professor and the outgoing president of Southern’s faculty senate.

Chelf said he thought Thursday’s presentation, which he had asked the financial team to make directly to the faculty, “let people see that they were trying to be more transparent.” It also gave faculty members a long-term outlook that they could “hear from the front row,” Chelf said.

Stephen Schiavo, a professor of computer sciences, said after the meeting that he thought both the presentation and the new approach would inspire confidence in the university’s financial team. He said some people previously thought depreciation had been used as a “smokescreen.”

“The result of this will be good,” he said of Thursday’s presentation.

Speck was present during the meeting but spoke only briefly to the faculty, mostly referring to actions in the state Legislature. Efforts to reach him for comment after the meeting were unsuccessful late Thursday afternoon.

Preliminary budget

Yust presented the faculty with an overview of a preliminary budget for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1.

The university is projecting revenues of more than $71.4 million and expenditures of almost $71.32 million. The university is projected to start the year with about $12 million in cash reserves and end it with more than $12.6 million after factoring in funding through the state’s Caring for Missourians initiative. The program provides funding to colleges to train students in health care fields.

Yust cautioned that next year’s budget is only preliminary, citing both the state’s fluid financial picture, and the fact that the budget still has to be presented to, reviewed and approved by Southern’s Board of Governors.

But the financial outlook beyond next year dims.

Yust said the university has received reports that for the 2012 fiscal year, which will start July 1, 2011, higher education could face up to a 30 percent reduction in state funding. It is projected to receive more than $23.53 million in state funding for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. Yust also presented a scenario in which state funding for the 2013 fiscal year, which starts July 1, 2012, would remain the same as that for the 2012 fiscal year.

“This is worst-case scenario,” Yust told the faculty.

Speck said he has already asked departments to look at ways they can increase revenue and cut costs in the future.

Other details

Thursday’s presentation did not go without questioning from some faculty members about subjects that included class sizes and hiring adjunct professors versus tenure track professors. The latter had emerged as a key issue during Speck’s listening sessions with the faculty last year.

Chelf told the Globe after the meeting that those concerns underscored how little has changed in the relations between Speck and the faculty since the no-confidence vote in early November.

“There is still a lot of unhappiness on campus,” Chelf said, characterizing morale as “pretty low.”

A number of the concerns remain the same as before, he said. Fresh concerns include class sizes and the failure of a planned partnership to bring a medical school to the campus, specifically what university officials knew about the project and when.





By the numbers



In November, the faculty gave a vote of no confidence in President Bruce Speck’s leadership by a margin of 140-44. Almost 78 percent of the university’s faculty of 237 participated in the vote.