FSU Town Hall Meeting
Askew Student Life Center Auditorium
942 Learning Way
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
3:30 – 5:30 PM
Tallahassee, FL 32306
Today there was a town hall style meeting about Budget Crisis at FSU at the Askew Student Life Center Building where the President, Provost, Faculty Senate President and Vice-President of Florida State University were present. First the President gave a talk about the situation, explaining the hole FSU is in. He also showed graphically how the general revenues have declined over the last three years and told that even the optimistic projection for the next two years don’t even fill the hole fully. Then both members of the Faculty Senate addressed the audience alternating with each other. Once they presented their talks, the question and answer session began.
There were five general area of questions and the first one pertained to Panama City Campus. Then the rest of the questions pertained to Deadman School of Hospitality and Golf Management. Later questions were about how will the students be able to complete the courses they were already registered. The answers to these questions were that no final decision has yet been made about closures and students already enrolled will be allowed to complete their courses.
Once the on-line and e-mail questions were done, the audience questions were heard. The general theme was what was the reasoning behind selecting 21 programs that were targeted for closure. The Provost said there were no single criteria for their selection. He said that there were three proposals one of the proposal was what was published.
Both the President and Provost stressed that no final decision about closing any of the programs have been finalized. They asked everyone to concentrate on the political process rather than worry about the program cuts. But again and again the questions were raised why for example Russian languagae program has been targeted while the cost of running the program is minimal.
They asked people to call their Senators, Representatives, and the Governor first to reduce the cuts. Then they said we can worry about the program cuts. However, they stressed that FSU will be very different from now than it was 4-5 years ago.
Archived webcast can be seen at this link: http://mediasite.apps.fsu.edu/Mediasite/Viewer/?peid=a31b4966b6d3448db4c078006fdd326c (You need to have Internet Explorer or install Microsoft Silverlight to see the webcast).