Transparency needed in university spending

November 11, 2009
By John Tienken
Columnist

We live in an age of instantaneous information overload. I can find out the exact direction and velocity of the wind in Dubai in less than five seconds. In the time you spend reading this column, you could have learned about the distinctive features of Dutch architecture in the western Caribbean and how it differed from other styles throughout the world. But something that you could not decipher nor figure out without hours of research and countless phone calls is exactly how your money is being spent at UIS.

Across the country in many states, laws and initiatives have been proposed and passed to bring about widespread transparency to state governments. In fact in 2005, then Sen. Barack Obama cosponsored legislation at the federal level to create a searchable database so that citizens could “google their tax dollars.” States such as Kansas, Indiana, and Missouri  followed by establishing by law websites that allowed taxpayers to “google their tax dollars.”

Illinois recently passed a bill and a transparency website was launched in August. However, missing from this portal are large tracts of taxpayer money —notably the money appropriated to state universities. This needs to change.

Why, one may ask? It will cost so much money and be an organizational challenge of harrowing proportions to put the vast and labyrinth like expenditures of state universities online in an easily searchable database. It would be superfluous as well, people may argue, because such a website would not accomplish anything despite all the effort that would necessarily be poured into making transparency a reality for all state universities including UIS.

School districts are required to post salary scales  of their teachers and also required to have access on their website to information about the salaries of administrators. Some go so far as to post their entire budgets on line, easily accessible by the taxpayers who provide the fuel for the furnace of public education. A natural extension of this policy would be for public universities to do the same. It could even be considered more important and more essential because not only do they use money from our tax dollars, but as students contribute again with tuition and fees.

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Illinois Policy Institute report released October 29, UIS had a 74.9% increase in tuition and fees between 2002 and 2007. Increases in both administrative and educational spending were the second highest of any public university in Illinois. There are certainly reasons for some of this, such as the exponential growth of the university’s infrastructure.  On the other hand, instructional spending far exceeded enrollment growth – two figures you’d think would grow in lock step with one another. In either event, students and even faculty have a right to know where and how that money is being spent.

The true essence of transparency is accountability. In an age of instant information, taxpayers should have the ability to hold those who spend and make decisions accountable to those decisions they make with other people’s money.

Transparency, in the form on an online portal, should not be designed to embarrass or malign the university and the administration, but rather serve as a check on the checks they write everyday with student and taxpayer money.

A portal updated in as close to real time as possible would give everyone  a tool to see that the money they work so hard to earn, is working just has hard for them while they earn a degree or send a loved one to college.
State governments are doing it. School boards are doing it. It is time the University of Illinois follows suit.