An open budget

There are a number of problems with Portland State as an organization, and I intend—unrealistically—to write about each of them at some point. But one problem any bureaucracy faces is a lack of upward communication, and one way to increase that upward communication is to place all of the university’s budget information online. Let me start by explaining the issue in more detail.

The idea behind a bureaucracy is to organize people like a set of cabinets, which is where the bureau part of the name comes from. Each of these cabinets is organized into larger sets of cabinets above them, and so on until you get to the big cabinet that is PSU. Each cabinet has a hierarchy, and then there is a hierarchy of cabinets. For example, department heads here are under the dean of their colleges, and the deans are under a vice provost, and so forth. The point is that everything looks very pretty on paper, complete with boxes and lines that come together to look something like a pyramid.

Except, in a pyramid, the weight is centered on the bottom. In a bureaucracy, the weight of decision making is concentrated on those higher up in the hierarchy. So in theory, the president of the university is supposed to be responsible for overseeing all the decisions that happen here. In essence, the pyramid stands on its head.

There are many problems with this, but we should focus on the problem of information. No single person can possibly know everything that happens at this university, and this means that the president’s decisions are inevitably uninformed. Yes, he has advisers and reports and whatnot, but there are important facts about the everyday experiences of PSU students, faculty and support staff that don’t reach his ears before he makes his decisions. And, more to my original point, these facts are not making their way into decisions related to the budget.

To be completely honest, I do not yet know how the budget is made. The PSU budget director has kindly offered to help me start to make sense of it once this year’s budget is completed. Yet that is precisely the problem: When something as important as the budget becomes so difficult to understand, a large part of the university population is not able to provide feedback. And when we cannot provide feedback, decisions are made that ignore our needs.

Placing all of the details of the university budget online helps to solve this problem. By making the budget more accessible to those people who do understand it, it becomes possible for them to start explaining it to everyone else. And with that, students, faculty and staff will all have an easier time providing informed feedback about the university’s priorities and voicing their concerns about how money is spent.

Not to mention, the budget office can then spend its time dealing with its immense workload rather than trying to explain things to people like me.