Editorial: Budget confusion underscores Pitt’s lack of transparency

Most Pitt professors would agree that the more information a study provides, the more… Most Pitt professors would agree that the more information a study provides, the more trustworthy it becomes. But when it comes to finances, the University seems determined to keep both its students and its employees in the dark.

According to University spokesman Robert Hill, Pitt instated a 2 percent budget cut — $40 million dollars in total — across all 600 of its units, which include both academic and administrative departments. When this cut will actually take effect, however, and how individual departments plan to cope with it, has yet to be revealed.

More troubling still, the University seems to have neglected informing certain administrators of the measure. In an article last Friday, chairs of the English, communications and chemistry departments told The Pitt News that they hadn’t heard of the cut, or that it hadn’t affected their budgets.

Clearly, transparency is not one of Pitt’s priorities. But for a University responsible not only for student money but also more than $100 million in state funds, such secrecy is particularly unjustifiable (not to mention inconsistent with the University motto, “Veritas et Virtus,” or “Truth and Virtue”). Students struggling to cope with an 8.5 percent tuition hike and a 2 percent budget cut have a right to know, for instance, how many employees Pitt has cut this year. Thus far, administrators have only provided us with general overviews of their cost-saving measures, and no numbers.

Part of the problem is that Pitt, a state-related school, is not held to the same high accountability standards as Pennsylvania’s 14 public universities, and is thus permitted to reveal remarkably little information about its finances (what it does disclose can be found in the annually published Fact Book). How much support an individual department receives per year, or the salary of any single professor, is not made available to the public.

The University’s recent behavior also raises organizational concerns. We can understand why Pitt wouldn’t want the media scrutinizing the particulars of its 2 percent cut, but its failure to inform some of its own departments of the measure is not only indefensible, it’s inexplicable. If chairs were to remain unaware of the cut during the year in which it was implemented, they would eventually discover they were 2 percent over budget, and the remainder of their spending plans would be thrown out of whack.

When a scientist publishes a study in a journal, he reveals the sources of his data and the means by which he came to certain conclusions; in short, he exposes himself to criticism. Pitt officials, who are more familiar with these conventions than nearly anyone else in our community, understand this. It’s curious, then, that they seem so averse to revealing information. Just as scholarship can’t flourish without external criticism, Pitt endangers its integrity by keeping its finances to itself.