On Thursday, Feb. 25, the Board of Trustees held their winter meeting for the year. The committees that met were the Audit and Compliance Committee, the Education, Research and Service Committee and the Finance and Administration Committee.
During the Finance and Administration Committee’s time, Spanish and Portuguese lecturer Jae Resendes spoke about the need to increase the salary of UT’s non-tenure track faculty members. She said that these faculty members have helped the university run as smoothly as it could. Resendes also mentioned how they have been there for students and have seen first hand how COVID fatigue is real and how it is affects their students.
“It’s time that our contributions matter,” Resendes said, followed with her expressing her love for teaching.
The rest of the meeting covered how their budget has been spent, as well as how the university’s revenue is slowly building back up after 2020. Much of the planned spending for the rest of this fiscal year, as well as the budgeting, is going toward students. This comes in part, as many of the members have said, because running the university is about educating its students and having the means to do so.
Ron Loewen, the budgeting director, asked about the campus returning to more normalcy next fall and spoke about how his daughter, as well as many students, have had and are having a hard time adjusting to all the changes on campus. Many students do not even have any in-person classes or only go occasionally through hybrid instruction.
“Students are hungry to go back to what it (UT) has been in the past,” Loewen said.
The committee members agreed that students and faculty are ready to get back to normal at UT.
Chancellor Plowman also spoke about spending in regards to the funding behind housing and events on campus in the fall.
Housing was limited during the 2020-21 academic year due to COVID-19 which resulted in lost housing revenue. However, housing availability is expected to increase at the start of fall 2021, as they will be opening up more housing than what was seen in the fall of 2020.
For events on campus, such as sporting events and concerts, there are still some uncertainties as to what can be held in-person and how many people will be allowed to attend.
“Some parts of our auxiliary will come right back. One of the reasons our revenue was down was because we decreased the capacity of housing. We just let some students out of their contracts. But concerts and entertainment probably won’t be back until 2022,” Plowman said.
This also could apply to athletics, as new COVID-19 regulations are affecting intercollegiate sports as well.
The university is unsure about their willingness to hold these types of in-person events, and they do not yet know how many people would be willing to purchase tickets if COVID-19 is still a prominent issue in the 2021-22 school year. Despite this, they do plan on having a more extensive update when they discuss the operating budget for the next school year in June.
The rest of the meeting included the passing of tuition reductions for certain programs, such as doctor of medicine and forensic dentistry. They also discussed increases for some materials, as well as a policy on parental leave — which would allow parents to have six weeks of paid leave after adoption or birth in addition to the unpaid twelve weeks of leave. This will go into effect July 1, 2021.
Lastly, it was announced that two UT residence halls will be renamed after Theotis Robinson and Rita Sanders Geier, described as “two African American trailblazers whose fight for equity and social justice transformed the state’s higher education system and the university.”
This article has been updated to add additional information.
