Millersville's greatest resources are its human ones: the faculty who teach our students and the staff who support them. In Fall 1998 we employed 844 full-time employees (Table 11-4).

Millersville's array of full-time employees has remained fairly stable over the past five years (Figure 11-2).

Source: IPEDS Fall Staff Surveys

We try to limit our personnel expenditures to no more than 78% of our E&G budget, in order to give us the budgetary flexibility to provide adequate facilities, equipment, and other support to our employees. Our efforts have succeeded; the percentage of E&G budget spent on personnel has ranged between 73% and 76% over the past four years. Furthermore, our percentage of E&G budget spent on personnel costs, mandatory transfers, and fixed operating costs has been the lowest or second lowest in the State System for the past four years.

Most of our personnel costs are established by collective bargaining agreements and other decisions at the Commonwealth or State System level. Our personnel costs are also affected by employee longevity. Turnover rates are low; it is not unusual for employees of all kinds to retire with two or three decades of service to the university, and it is rare for an employee to be terminated involuntarily. This longevity adds to our knowledge base and gives us depth and stability.

In the mid-1990s, the University came under criticism from faculty and others for dramatically increasing the number of administrators. An Administrative Complement Task Force appointed in 1997 found that 89 administrative positions, 32 of them managers, were added over ten years. Many of these positions were added to enhance technological support and to implement our first capital campaign.

In 1995, the Board of Governors imposed a complement cap on each System university. Millersville is not allowed to increase the number of authorized positions except under certain exceptional circumstances. This has effectively checked the increase in administrative positions.

As a further curb on the size of the administration, in 1998 the President approved a new process for reviewing all non-faculty vacancies. Before a vacancy can be filled, the department must prepare an extensive justification for the position, including benchmarking the department's overall staffing against comparable operations at a minimum of five peer institutions.

Our challenge now is providing appropriate staff support when the complement cap and low turnover give us little flexibility to be responsive. One of our greatest concerns is meeting our need for technological support when we are intensively implementing new technologies supporting both academic programs and administrative systems (see Chapter 7). We have addressed these needs by training current employees and hiring temporary staff whose positions are not included in the complement cap. These solutions are not entirely satisfactory. It is not always cost-effective to have faculty train themselves and their peers on instructional technologies, and using temporary staff can lead to erratic support for critical systems and technologies.

Faculty and employees of color are discussed in Chapters 3 and 8, respectively.