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May 1 , 2006
Faculty Council ends year with master plan briefing

BY Stacia Brown

Chair Michael Rogers convened the final Faculty Council meeting of the semester on April 18 in 400 Administration, and first up was a presentation on the campus master plan by Executive Vice President Mike Mandl, who has been giving the briefing to many groups around Emory in recent weeks.

Mandl said last year’s master plan update identified some 4.7 million gross square feet of building capacity on Emory’s Atlanta campus, even as its new land-use plan stipulates that half of the University’s current acreage will never be developed. Among the highlights Mandl described during a PowerPoint slideshow were:
• plans for a new Freshman Village just north of the Dobbs Center;
• a new theology complex, sited behind the current Pitts Library building, that also will house the Center for Ethics;
• a planned bookstore/coffee house across N. Oxford Road from Druid Hills Books;
• The Clifton Road Redevelopment Project, which calls for all Emory Healthcare facilities to be moved to the east side of Clifton Road, allowing for the original Emory Hospital building to be used as a new University administration facility and a second academic quadrangle to be built on the current hospital bed-tower site.

Next, Provost Earl Lewis and Senior Vice Provost Charlotte Johnson previewed the fiscal year 2007 Unrestricted Operating Budget, which will total some $617 million (total expenses for the University plus Emory Healthcare will equal $2.6 billion).

Lewis and Johnson also said Emory soon will announce broad funding categories and amounts from the Strategic Plan Fund (SPF). Johnson added that one restriction guiding dispersal of these funds is a viable plan for reducing central administration funds to zero within five years, either by gradually attracting external support or by funding programs with definitive five-year horizons. “We cannot induce structural budget deficits,” Johnson said of the SPF decisions.

One council member asked Lewis whether the University Teaching Fund (UTF) will continue in FY07. The provost responded that he is awaiting a report from the University Advisory Council on Teaching on the need for and feasibility of creating a University-wide teaching center, and that he’d be able to say more about the UTF in the wake of that report, which is due June 1.

Reporting for past-chair Sharon Strocchia, Rogers presented a list of potential faculty counselors to Emory’s Board of Trustees. After some discussion, the list was approved unanimously and will be sent to the board’s governance committee this summer. Ultimately, the board chooses which of the proposed counselors will serve.

To conclude the meeting, Lewis and Human Resources (HR) Senior Director Theresa Milazzo briefed the council on the new Management Service Organization (MSO) set up among HR, Emory Healthcare, the University’s insurance vendors and an outside firm called ManagedCare.com. The MSO’s purpose is to gather health-insurance claims data from the insurance vendors, send it through ManagedCare.com to scrub all personal-identification information and assign random, anonymous numbers to all individual claims, and then bring the data back to Emory for analysis of health claims.

The project is aimed toward identifying cost-drivers for Emory’s insurance plans and fine-tuning those plans, along with Emory’s health-management and wellness programs, to try to deliver the most cost-efficient plans and services.

“This will give us insight into where our costs are going and how we compare to others in those costs,” Milazzo said. “It will allow us to see the kind of care our staff and employees are getting.”

This year, all the council’s standing committees turned in their reports electronically for distribution to council members, so year-ending oral reports were not given. The committee reports will be posted on the Faculty Council website (www.emory.edu/SENATE/) in May.

To close the meeting, Rogers ceremoniously handed over the chairship to new Chair Tom Frank, professor of church administration and director of Methodist studies in the Candler School of Theology. Faculty Council will reconvene in September.

If you have a question or concern for Faculty Council, e-mail Chair Tom Frank at thomas.frank@emory.edu.

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