Approved by voice vote with one abstention.
President Hampton thanked the committee for work over the weekend to bring forth these necessary action items.
PCC did not meet due to confusion of calendar but voted via email to elect Dr. Buddhi Gyawali Chair to replace Wilfred Reilly who left Senate to assume position as University Ombudsman.
Chair Rye reported that while the BASC is yet to receive budgetary data on personnel salaries, as approved by President Brown, they are optimistic because Greg Rush (former VP of Finance) has been re-employed as Special Assistant to the President and he has committed to providing the data as requested. He was the contact person for the two years in which BASC received such data. President Brown was a party to the conversation and authorized Rush to do so.
She reported that there has been an initial meeting of the appointed committee to conduct a salary equity study for staff/administration and faculty. She is appointed as lead for the faculty equity research and will keep Senate and faculty updated on progress. Data will be collected over the next two weeks and the committee will meet again on March 27th, after Spring Break. Retired Professor and Special Assistant to the President Dr. Gus Ridgel is chairing the committee. She will advocate for comparisons with other state funded universities in Kentucky, other schools of similar size, other HBCU's with Land-Grant status, and CPU 2011-12 benchmarks. The committee recognizes the exceptional status and salaries of Land Grant faculty who devote a maximum of 25% of appointment to teaching. Additional comparisons of equity across campus will consider unit, division, group, length of service and rank, including part-time, adjunct, retired part-time, visiting, and artist-in-residence positions.
Time was extended five minutes with one abstention.
The committee decided what to include in the BASC report as part of President Hampton's report to the Board of Regents. The submitted report reiterated BASC's offer to forward past studies and budget comparisons on request, and points out the disparity between the target for Instructional spending in the KSU state budget request (22% by FY20) and the will of Senate per FSBASC 16-17-01 and 02 of graduated increases to target 30% over the five-year strategic plan. BASC will continue to advocate for significant increases in the percentage of KSU's budget invested in Instruction. One argument for this disparity with all other comparison groups, that has been advocated over four administrations, is claimed inaccurate and inconsistent coding and entries. If this is a problem BASC welcomes these corrections in this administration.
Chair Rye projected a 2016 chart that was given BASC by former President Burse and had been presented to him by legislators. It shows, at that time, the cost per graduate at KSU was exceptionally higher than all other state funded institutions. KSU $17,649; UK $9,537; UL $7,477; MoSU $5,709; MuSU $5,427; EKU $5,030; WKU $4,724; NKU $4,148. A non-Senator observed that UK was the second highest and it too is a Land Grant institution and this could be driving up the numbers. Rye said that is a good observation and it would be good to find out if Land Grant is factored in, but it still looks