Faculty senators urged officials for transparency regarding central administrative budget cuts as academic schools face what they called increasingly unsustainable reductions.
Faculty senator and School of Business professor Arthur Wilson called on officials to reveal data regarding financial metrics from a “sustained” period detailing budget cuts to the central administration, as units prepare to face expense reductions for the second fiscal year in a row. University President Ellen Granberg said she would speak with Chief Financial Officer Bruno Fernandes about what information they can share, and that officials through the newly launched Foundational Excellence Initiative are working to make operational cuts in order to protect academic programs.
“You tell us that the administration is also cutting, we would like to see the data,” Wilson said. “We’ve seen the data for our school, and I don’t know if the other deans have shared data for their schools, but at this point, there is a great need for transparency about what is going on in the central administration.”
Wilson pointed specifically to budget cuts within GWSB, which he said have been ongoing for 10 to 12 years, are “too deep” and faculty are “alarmed.” He said given the extent of cuts to academic units, officials must also be transparent about how much they are cutting from central operations.
“We’re cutting into muscle and bone at this point,” Wilson said. “Is the same thing happening in the central administration? I’m sure, you can always say that. But we want to see the numbers.”
Granberg said in response to Wilson that GW’s budget challenges reflect a national trend of financial strain in higher education, and officials are looking to the Foundational Excellence Initiative — a multiyear plan officials launched in February to strengthen GW’s long-term financial health amid shifting federal policies — to identify opportunities to increase operational efficiency to avoid additional cuts to schools.
She added that the current limitations in higher education are an “existential threat” to the University’s financial model, and that schools across the nation are facing the need to restructure their finances.
“We would be in much, much worse shape if we had not been able to do a little work with our endowment and identify some other places where we could pull some cost out that would not affect our core mission,” Granberg said.
After officials cut GW’s fiscal year 2026 budget by 3 percent and announced its structural deficit, officials have taken additional measures to reduce its budget, including putting a temporary hiring freeze in place that lasted until October and laying off 43 staff members in late September as the University navigates declining international and graduate enrollment amid President Donald Trump’s visa restrictions.
The comments at Friday’s meeting come as another example of faculty senators pushing officials for budget transparency as they foreshadow continued cuts to academic departments in FY2027. Faculty senators in February pressed officials for greater transparency around the budget-cut decision process and the broader impacts those moves could have on GW’s academic mission, and senators in January said deans needed to consult faculty before making decisions like potentially eliminating programs.
Interim Provost John Lach said at April’s Faculty Senate meeting officials are using a “balanced” approach to preserve and enhance the University’s academic mission by cutting the central administration and nonacademic unit budgets.
Granberg said the current budget model is too “unstable” to support issues like declining graduate and international student enrollment because 80 percent of GW’s graduate tuition goes directly to each school under the current budget model — monetary support that is decreasing as enrollment declines further due to the Trump administration’s elimination of the Grad PLUS program and implementation of tighter borrowing limits. She added that she will speak to Fernandes to determine what financial information regarding central budget cuts officials can share with the community.
“I don’t have a problem being transparent,” Granberg said.
Faculty senator and GWSB professor Phil Wirtz said he agreed with Wilson’s comments about GWSB’s budget cuts, calling the situation a “grave concern” to the school’s faculty. He said in an email after the meeting that officials are spending “a lot” of money on external consultants and personnel salaries amid the University’s structural deficit.
“The central administration needs to be far more transparent in how it is spending students’ money, and other bodies such as the Faculty Senate need to be able to scrutinize those expenses,” Wirtz said in an email.
Wirtz at the meeting asked officials how much funding they will have left over after factoring in moving expenses associated with relocating GW’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus operations following the campus’s sale to Amazon Data Services in February for $427 million. He said he has heard officials and members of the committees he serves on cite the VSTC sale as a benefit to the University’s finances, but it is unclear how much the University will pocket after expenses are factored in.
Granberg said officials will have at least $350 million left over after moving VSTC operations to the Foggy Bottom campus, and the remaining funds now sit in an endowment fund. She said officials dedicated $200 million from the sale to student scholarships, and officials allocated $150 million into an endowment that will have a 4.5 to 5 percent payout meant to support strategic purposes with the “primary idea” to support research — which she said incoming Provost Ed Balleisen will work with deans and faculty on how to distribute.
Zoe Szajnfarber, a professor of engineering management and systems engineering and Granberg’s senior AI advisor, said in her presentation to the senate the initial feedback from the University’s strategic artificial intelligence mapping exercise showed several faculty members have been engaging in AI pedagogically. Szajnfarber added feedback also showed community members share anxiety about the future of AI at GW — primarily due to GW’s current infrastructure, which Szajnfarber said could restrict the growth of AI research — and a lack of awareness among faculty and students about AI resources.
Szajnfarber said over 75 percent of units are now using AI, the strategic framework research working group recommends direction from the “top” in order to implement AI in various disciplines.
“We need to do AI to some extent, but we need to do it the GW way,” Szajnfarber said. “There’s a lot of evidence in these working groups about what that can mean, and how we make sure that it aligns with the core identity of what GW already has as strengths.”
Faculty senator Melani McAlister asked officials to clarify the meaning of Friday’s Foundational Excellence Initiative update and if the initiative is differentiated from the rest of the strategic framework goals.
The initiative entered its next phase of development Friday, according to an email from steering committee co-chairs Milken Institute School of Public Health professor Zoë Beckerman and Chief of Staff Scott Mory. Mory and Beckerman said in the email that the committee will now start “analyzing” and “validating” community feedback, which said community members felt many University systems are overly complicated, in order to develop specific improvements for further consideration.
Mory, in response to McAlister, said the initiative aims to develop a plan to strengthen GW’s financial foundation, adding officials will publish a set of recommendations in the fall for community feedback. He said the recommendations center around three goals — to prioritize efficiency and reduce cost, generate new lines of revenue and fix administrative processes.
Orti introduced a resolution of appreciation for Lach to honor his service as interim provost, which the Senate unanimously passed. The resolution states Lach gained the trust of community members through his “transparent” and “collaborative” leadership style during GW’s financial hardships and the development of the strategic framework.
The senate also unanimously passed a Professional Ethics and Academic Freedom Committee resolution introduced by faculty senators Jamie Cohen-Cole and Shawneequa Callier, clarifying the definition of research falsification and calling for researchers to be “trustworthy” in their data collection and publications.
“They can do so not by randomly using any tool or the one that’s most easily available, but rather by responsibly using the proper research tools, which can be counted on to produce good factual, actual information,” Cohen-Cole said.
The Faculty Senate unanimously voted to re-elect Orti as its FSEC chair and elected a new FSEC.
