University council battles UG on budget
After a long and pointed discussion between the university council and the board during a council meeting on Thursday, eleven council members endorsed the budget, ten didn’t, and three abstained.
While the number of council members who endorsed the budget was bigger than the number that didn’t, this did not result in an endorsement from the council as a whole. For that, at least half the number of votes plus one need to be in favour of endorsement. That means there’s no official negative recommendation, either, and the budget has not been rejected. The vote will be deferred to the university’s supervisory board.
Insufficient information
The budget led to a heated discussion, as the council claimed it had been poorly informed on seven different topics.
The discussion went from the redistribution of funds based on the Van Rijn recommendation, to the two million euros the AFAS implementation has cost, more than seven hundred thousand euros that is to be spent on the Dean Entrepreneurship project – which has yet to be evaluated – and more than six hundred thousand euros that’s been spent on facilities management due to corona.
The council claimed it didn’t have time to prepare. The discussion of several topics, like arrangements made with faculties concerning the Van Rijn redistribution and the corona-related costs of facilities management, came too little, too late, because most of the arrangements had already been agreed upon.
Cause of concern
Hans Biemans with the board of directors admitted that the council had been insufficiently included in the decision-making process. He said he doesn’t want to use the corona crisis as an excuse, but had to confess that because of the current situation, not all decisions have been made in unison with the council.
The council initially asked the UG board to postpone the budget vote, to allow everyone to better prepare. But Biemans argued that for certain topics, like the Van Rijn distribution and the facilities management issues, it was impossible delay any discussion. These were then put to a vote and approved.
De AFAS and Dean Entrepreneurship costs, as well as the costs to implement an integrity policy, were postponed to the next meeting.
The fact that the council didn’t endorse the budget as a whole is a cause of concern for Biemans: ‘We do still have to work together, and I don’t really know what to do about the people who voted against the budget.’