Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Budget and Resources Advisory Committee

Biography

The Budget and Resources Advisory Committee (BRAC) was created by a resolution on the Northwestern University Senate on May 21, 1970. It was intended to provide advice on budgetary matters to the university administration and to improve communication between the faculty and administration on such matters. The seven committee members were to be chosen by the General Faculty Committee and to serve for three year overlapping terms.

Through the charge of the Committee has remained the same since 1970, its method of deliberation has changed considerably and its influence has increased commensurately. For the first several years of its existence (1970 to 1976), BRAC was hampered by a lack of technical advice and by the unavailability of data crucial to budget deliberations. In 1976, a "BRAC adviser" from the Graduate School of Management was appointed to serve as technical consultant to both the Committee and the administration. In the same year BRAC gained access to the budget requests of the University deans and to the administration's "budget (computer) tapes" which permitted the Committee to begin genuine budget forecasting with the same data used by the University administration. Since that time, the BRAC reports have provided increasingly sophisticated critiques of the University Budgets and budget planning procedures.

In 1978, BRAC produced "Faculty Compensation at Northwestern," known as the "black and blue" report, which pointed to Northwestern University's slippage from seventh to fifteenth in the period 1971/1972 to 1976/1977 in national rankings of faculty compensation at major universities. The Committee recommended and in subsequent years continued to urge aggressive measures to return Northwestern to its former position.

BRAC was involved in the budget-making process during a time of financial crisis for Northwestern University, in the years 1977/78 through 1981/82, when for the first time since the Depression the university experienced budget deficits. These deficits grew from $1.4 million in 1977/78 to $9.5 million in 1981/82. As the result in part of stringent budget cutting measures, Northwestern emerged from the crisis in 1982/83, with a budget surplus of $1.4 million, and has since maintained a balanced budget.

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