The University of Arizona Faculty Senate voted Monday to call for an external audit of the university’s finances.
Thirty senators voted in favor, with 14 opposed and three abstaining.
The vote came just days before UA President Robert C. Robbins must present a plan by Dec. 15 to the Arizona Board of Regents to deal with a financial “crisis” including a $240 million miscalculation in UA’s projected cash reserves.
Faculty Senate Chair Leila Hudson, who called for Monday’s special faculty meeting, proposed the motion to endorse the request for an external audit, originally proposed by the UA Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences.
The department’s faculty voted unanimously in November to call for an “independent financial audit of the University of Arizona, with respect to the financial crisis and days cash on hand.”
The initial letter with information about the vote was sent to Hudson and Mona Hymel, the vice chair of the Faculty Senate, on Nov. 14.
“This would be a largely symbolic vote supportive of the unanimous resolution in the department,” Hudson said at Monday’s meeting. “We don’t have details here about how it would be paid for, it’s merely an endorsement of another audit.”
She added that “we don’t have the power of the purse, or the power over the senior leadership team to enforce this vote. It’s merely a symbolic vote in support of a department that has been very central to the university.”
The university does conduct its own audits, as does the state auditor general, Hudson added, but those audits don’t “address certain aspects of the internal circulation of money” including the “flows of money within the institution such as our internal loans to athletics.”
In last week’s Faculty Senate meeting, Robbins confirmed that the university has given loans of $86 million to athletics since 2018.
Faculty senator Ted Downing called such loans “these games.”
Wolfgang Fink, an engineering professor, said he favored the call for an outside audit.
“There’s many different kinds of audits but each one of them has a script of what they’re looking for,” he said. “With an independent outside of state audit, there may be a whole lot more room for crafting and asking certain questions which certain internal audits wouldn’t cover.”
University of Arizona President Robert Robbins talks about the financial issues facing the university and possible solutions at a Faculty Senate meeting on Nov. 6.
