Financial Plan - Cornell University Division of Budget & Planning

Operating plan – DetailsSignificant capital project activity will continue in thecollege in 2008-09, including a renovation project tobuild elevators and accessible washrooms to addressAmericans with Disabilities Act (ADA) complianceneeds for the college and the Fine Arts Library. Thisproject will lead to the removal of trailers from thenorth side of Sibley Hall and continue the substantialrelocation of some students, faculty, and staff thatbegan in 2007. The trailer moves will also prepare theway for the construction of Milstein Hall, due to startin late 2008 or early 2009.Arts and SciencesThe College of Arts and Sciences, one of the strongestliberal arts colleges in the country, has a facultyof 529 who teach both undergraduate and graduatestudents in more than 40 subjects. The number ofundergraduate applications to the college grew for afourth straight year, with an increase of 4 percent. Thecollege enrolls 4,000 undergraduates and more than1,700 graduate students in its own departments andrelated graduate fields and provides a sizable portionof the instruction for the undergraduates of theother colleges at Cornell. Typically 37 percent of thestudents enrolled in the College of Engineering and21-25 percent of contract college undergraduates takeArts and Sciences courses each year. Arts and Sciencesis committed to offering a rigorous and wide-rangingeducation to students throughout the university andto advancing the frontiers of knowledge in all fieldsthrough basic research and scholarship in the naturaland social sciences and the humanities.Faculty recruitment and retention remain top priorities,as the college needs to maintain academicstrength during a period when faculty are retiring ata rapid rate and new areas of study are being developedto respond to the increasing internationalizationof the curriculum, the growth in multidisciplinaryresearch and scholarship, and the development ofnew technologies. Increased offerings in Chinese andArabic and faculty who work in developing areas ofinformation science in such diverse departments asLinguistics, Statistics, and Science and TechnologyStudies, as well as in the humanities, are some of themost recent manifestations of these developments.The college’s 2008-09 financial plan includes a significantinvestment in faculty salaries, to provide strongfinancial incentives and recognition for productivityand promotion, as well as improved funding for newfaculty startup expenses. The high level of activity infaculty recruitment and a good success rate in facultyretention is also generating a demand for additionalinvestment in faculty research and summer support aswell as a need to increase the pace at which the collegecreates new facilities and modernizes existing ones.These pressures are reflected in additional capital expensethat has been incorporated in the financial planto cover renovations of office and research space fornew faculty and the cost of the initial design work ona new humanities building that will address the severeshortage of office and teaching space in the humanitiesand many of the social science departments. In addition,Arts and Sciences has again increased fundingfor instructional technologies, but this is an area thatthe college is studying and which will require moresignificant investments in the near future.The college’s financial plan calls for the use of existingfund balances that are being transferred to plant fundsto support the humanities building. The remainingdraw on fund balances is generally restricted in nature,and is being used in accordance with the intendedpurpose of the funds.EngineeringThe College of Engineering, a nationally ranked, toptenengineering college, enrolls 3,000 undergraduatesannually along with 810 Ph.D. and 470 Masters of Engineering(M.Eng.) students and employs 239 faculty,330 academic and non-academic staff, and approximately100 visiting professors and scientists.Budgeted faculty salary expenditures reflect continuedgrowth in the number of faculty positions in areas ofstrategic importance to the college and the university.Included in the 2008-09 plan is the cost of pre-filling12 faculty lines in advance of expected faculty retirementsand in anticipation of future gifts. The collegeis increasing the number of tenure-track facultypositions by 30 over a ten-year period, with 15 ofthese new positions in the Department of BiomedicalEngineering (BME), which was established in 2004,and the balance in the college’s six strategic areas ofresearch priority: systems biology, nanoscience, advancedmaterials, energy and environment, computationalscience and engineering, and complex systems.35