A Very Selective Budget Crisis at UA

The University Council’s Standing Committee on Informational Technology recently sponsored a demonstration of the latest instructional technologies available to UA faculty. Hosted by staff and leadership of the Instructional Sevices division of IT, attendees were introduced to the diverse software, hardware and design services available to them. Clearly, there’s been a good deal of investment by the University of Akron in these sometimes impressive soft and hard technologies and there’s a push to implement them.
In response to a query about costs of design services to departments, most of which have experienced still more–and harmful–cuts to their operating budgets, attendees were told “No, no charges. We have a huge budget and we’re happy to spend all of it. They’ll just take away anything we don’t spend at the end of the year anyway.” And then attendees were told, presumably as a joke: “That’s a secret.”
So, we’re moved to ask three questions, one of which we’ve posed here several times in the past and to which we’ve never received an answer:
1. While departments and colleges are suffering deep cuts to their operating budgets; while some departments lose personnel (faculty, chairs, administrative assistants) with no approval yet to seek replacements, just how much has the upper administration sacrificed in order to meet it’s own “budget crisis”? An auxilliary question: How much has the budget for the athletics program been cut to help meet this budgetary deficit?
2. How much of a cut to the operating budget did your departments experience–this year–and how has that affected services to students, class offerings, your ability to perform your duties? Let us know.
3. Budget crisis? What budget crisis?