Transparency in budgeting and a greater focus on our academic mission to provide a rigorous university education to the citizens of Illinois will significantly benefit NIU and the public at large. However, the program prioritization process as currently organized constitutes continued lack of transparency at NIU.

Issues regarding program prioritization that have not been clarified include:

• How are “academic programs” and “administrative programs” defined?

• How many “academic programs” and “administrative programs” does NIU have?

• Are the reasons behind any final recommendations and decisions about “programs” going to be fully disclosed to the university community?

Information key to a well-informed, useful process that has not been provided includes the following:

• In the current budget, what percentage of funds go to academic departments and centers, to student affairs, to operations (HR, facilities, etc.) and to administration at assistant dean level and above?

• How do these percentages compare to eight years ago?

• How many tenured and tenure-track faculty, instructor-level faculty and administrators do we have compared to eight years ago?

• In other words, what are the recent trends of actual prioritization at NIU?

• Finally, how do we translate this budget information into the “academic programs” and “administrative programs” that program prioritization will assess?

The program prioritization process should be postponed and redesigned in a shared governance process founded on data about NIU’s budget, rigorous independent research on program prioritization at other universities and clear definitions of the problems to be solved and the goals to be achieved.