From time to time on this blog, we have taken note of UCLA's budget travails and the absence of up-to-date budget documentation. We have noted that while UCLA at one time published annual budgets on a regular basis, that practice seemed to stop. A new CFO, under pressure from the Academic Senate, finally published a budget book which we subsequently analyzed. But then he said Very Bad Things about the older budget documents which got him fired. We now have a new interim CFO and a pledge by the administration to be "transparent" about budgetary matters:
The pledge includes a schedule of budgetary reveals, starting with a "retreat" that will take place this month. (We already noted this retreat in our Sept. 1 post about the new Athletics Director.)
Sitting in the background is ongoing concern about a deficit in the Athletics Department which is not supposed to be a cost to the university:
In her final report to the Academic Senate and community, outgoing Senate Chair McAvoy included this message about budgetary matters:
Budget: Over the course of the academic year, Administration shared more budgetary information with the Council on Planning and Budget (CPB). This information has included both written documents (overall budget pictures, unit level budgetary information, etc.) and productive conversations with interim VC/CFO Reem Hanna-Harwell and others. Senate Leadership and EVCP Hunt developed a Budget Transparency Protocol that describes expectations for sharing budget information to support Senate consultation. An inaugural annual budget retreat with Senior Administrators and CPB/Senate leadership is scheduled for September that will allow a retrospective of the past year and to plan for a productive year ahead. In these times of fiscal strain, it is imperative that the CPB is engaged in these difficult deliberations to fulfill its advisory role, which we will continue to emphasize.
Full report at https://senate.ucla.edu/news/august-2026-ucla-academic-senate-updates.
While we await the retreat, we note that there is no actual budget information in the statement above or the earlier documents. As blog readers will know, we have been retaining budget information in a page on the Internet Archive so that nothing gets lost or disappears:
https://archive.org/details/ucla-budget-book-v-final-feb-2026.
Yours truly is aware of a longstanding Public Documents request for budgetary information from UCLA that keeps being met with apologies for delay, but no documents. This could be the result of stalling, or it could be that Murphy Hall really can't readily produce the numbers. So there remains the question of just how much information Murphy Hall has about the budget, a large portion of which is in the health enterprise. (The Health Enterprise seems to have its own CFO and more command of its own information.) In this age of computerization and AI, one might think that a simple command would produce estimated income statements and balance sheets, historical, present, and projections of the future. However, there is the possibility that although one might reasonably think that is the case, one might be wrong.
At the retreat, Senate representatives might want to look at the accounting system as well as whatever accounting numbers are presented. If the system can't produce timely estimates on command, being transparent about unavailable information won't be helpful.
Maybe the ultimate question is whether we have a retreat or an advance.
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