Two weeks ago the university quietly released Huron Consulting’s report on the Queen’s Budget Model. When the report was completed in June 2022, senior administrators promised that it would be published online. However, despite numerous requests at Senate and elsewhere, it took the university almost two years to release the report publicly. That we now have access to it is likely the result of QUFA’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FIPPA) request, which forced the university’s hand. Ironically, transparency was one of the issues that drew the consultants’ attention. The document can be found here.

While we hope to do a more in-depth analysis of the report soon, there are a few higher-level issues we can point out on first reading:

1) Huron, like QCAA, argues that budgeting for operations in isolation from other funds (e.g. donor funding, research revenue) is poor practice, noting that ~90% of the institutions that use activity-based budgeting (which is more or less the model used by Queen’s) incorporate all funds into their budgeting process. As the consultants argue: “Integrating an all-funds view into budget models and resource decision-making processes can help the University understand the comprehensive resource portfolio at their disposal.” This finding is in stark contrast to the messaging that the community has been receiving from the administration over the past year.

2) According to the consultants, the current budget model includes disincentives for research, underfunds research, and hurts research intensive faculties. Of all Queen’s strategic goals, Huron assigned only research to the negative ‘red’ category and noted that current practice “creates a losing environment for research heavy Faculties.”

3) Huron argues that more central funds need to be gathered and then distributed across the university, noting that, in comparison with other universities, Queen’s is an outlier given how little money is distributed through central. The report also says that there is a ‘distribution gap’ between faculties/schools. We’d note that the recently established deficit mitigation fund accomplishes this redistribution to some extent. However, at Queen’s, this redistribution of funds is not framed as best practice, as Huron suggests, but as a burden for other faculties ‘forced’ to ‘bail out’ the struggling FAS.

4) Lack of transparency in budgeting and a complex budgeting process that does not engage faculties was a recurring theme in the report. For instance, the authors write: “Annual budget presentations focus more on what the Faculty has accomplished rather than having strategic funding conversations. Additionally, no decisions are made at these meetings, causing Faculties to feel in the dark as to how funding decisions are made.”

What remains unclear is why the university sat on this report for two years and what, if any, recommendations they have implemented or chosen to ignore. This report was received at a crucial moment when the university was considering how to respond to budget pressures, yet it was not shared with the wider university community. While the administration has said publicly that a crisis is no time to address our budget model, this position ignores the years of work that had already gone into reviewing the budget model before the crisis began.

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