The recent explosive growth of the endowment controlled by FAS has made it more dependent on this source of income. While endowment payout accounted for only 25 percent of FAS revenue in fiscal 1990, it made up 39 percent in 2000. In the same time period, student payments declined from 35 to 28 percent.

Within the FAS operating budget—$521 million in fiscal 2000—these funds are distributed among six broad categories of spending, the largest of which encompasses faculty and staff salaries, department operation costs, and faculty recruitment.

Each January, the FAS Financial Office sends to the departments a target budget for these expenditures for the following fiscal year. Departments have until May 1 to request more funds than were laid out in this target budget.

“For the most part, departments are able to live within this target budget,” Murphy says. “The [additional] requests we get are fairly modest.”

Department chairs note that the growing endowment income of the University has helped to increase the success of making such requests.

“It’s more likely that if we’ve got a sensible proposition to put before the dean that we will get a sympathetic ear,” says Roderick MacFarquhar, Williams professor of history and political science and chair of the government department.

But Hoffman says on occasion requests are denied—particularly when they do not fit with long-term FAS goals.

“Sometimes it’s just not congruent with Faculty initiatives,” Hoffman says.

Hoffman says these initiatives—expressed in Knowles’ annual letters to the Faculty—are at the center of all funding decisions made by FAS.

Departments are often also helped by restricted endowment funds—which are the responsibility of the department’s financial personnel to manage.

But funds to employ faculty are controlled directly by University Hall, and departments must appeal to the FAS central administration to obtain new faculty appointments.

“Every department always wants more positions,” William A. Graham, Jr., professor of the history of religion and Islamic studies and chair of the department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations, says in an e-mail. “Large undergraduate enrollments tend to enable departments to get more positions or a specific initiative by the faculty, such as that a few years ago in [the Department of Afro-American Studies].”

FAS also makes significant expenditures on capital projects like the ongoing renovations of Widener Library and the construction of the Bauer Life Sciences Building. Such projects are one of the greatest tangible benefits of the last decade’s tremendous growth in the endowment, Hoffman says.