The Faculty’s Numbers Man

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This story is copublished with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the spring of 2023, administrators at UNC Greensboro announced that significant changes would be coming. Enrollment had dropped by 11% in three years, a concerning number for a tuition-dependent regional college, so the institution would be reviewing all of its academic programs. “We are not in a ‘rainy day’ situation,” Chancellor Franklin Gilliam later wrote in an email to campus. “Our enrollment declines are not temporary.”

But members of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors were skeptical that the institution’s financial situation was actually so dire. So they turned to Howard Bunsis, a campus-finance expert, for a second opinion.

The professors were right, Bunsis found: UNC Greensboro was, in fact, in “solid” financial condition and didn’t need to cut any academic programs.

It was a strikingly different finding than the one campus brass made, but a familiar one for Bunsis.

Over nearly two decades, Bunsis, an accounting professor at Eastern Michigan University, has conducted analyses of more than 100 colleges’ finances. In many of them, he’s come to the same conclusion: that campuses are on much more stable ground than administrators claim, that shrinking the faculty ranks or cutting academic programs is unnecessary, and that if there is bloat, it’s at the highest ranks of the institutions.

Bunsis’ work has found its way into some of the most high-profile campus tussles of recent years. Faculty have used it to try to fend off budget cuts at UNC Greensboro, UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University, and a handful of other North Carolina campuses, and as fodder for unionization and contract-negotiation drives at dozens of other institutions across the country.

Bunsis is unpopular with administrators, some of whom have accused him of spreading misinformation that panders to professors who refuse to accept reality. But his fans on the faculty say his work strips away bureaucratic obscurities to pose important questions about how colleges spend money—and what they value. Is the accountant helping professors bury their heads in the sand or giving them a way to resist wrongheaded austerity?

Union Man

Although campus chapters have presented him as an independent analyst, Bunsis is clear that his loyalties lie with faculty unions. The AAUP is “the organization I’ve given my life to,” he said, and he can cite the organizing drives, contract provisions, and election outcomes to prove it.

But it wasn’t obvious Bunsis would end up in that role during his upbringing in Brooklyn and Long Island. His mother was a Democrat and his father voted Republican, though neither held extreme views. When he began his undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, Bunsis was much more focused on sports; even after realizing he wasn’t much of an athlete, he devoted himself to organizing teams, arranging competitions, and coaching club basketball.

But a political-science class served as a sort of liberal awakening, and he “drifted toward that side of the political spectrum” after college. He assumed he would follow in the family business—Bunsis’ father and two brothers are all accountants and lawyers—so he went to law school at Fordham University before a short stint in public accounting. But it wasn’t for him, so he decamped to the University of Chicago for an MBA and doctorate in accounting.

“I like being called two things in life,” Bunsis said. “I like being called professor, and I like being called coach. And that’s what I get called by most people who know me.”

Shortly after he arrived at Eastern Michigan as a tenure-track professor in the late 1990s, Bunsis found another calling as a union man when colleagues negotiating the faculty union’s next contract asked him to conduct a salary analysis. He’s been dissecting colleges’ finances—and working with the AAUP—ever since.

“The word ‘budgets’ begins with B and ends with S.”

Howard Bunsis, Eastern Michigan University accounting professor

He met Rudy Fichtenbaum, then a professor of economics at Wright State University, at an AAUP conference in the early 2000s, and they became frequent collaborators. They developed an index to gauge institutions’ financial health and often teamed up on financial-analysis workshops, coaching other faculty on how to make sense of college finances. 

The two also climbed the ranks of the AAUP, becoming presidents of their local organizations and assuming national leadership roles, Fichtenbaum serving eight years as the organization’s president and Bunsis acting as chair of its since-disbanded labor-negotiation wing.

These days, Bunsis is just a rank-and-file AAUP member, but his penchant for coaching has found an outlet in the association’s financial-analysis program. The AAUP coordinates financial reports produced by Bunsis, Fichtenbaum, and Bonnie Fox Garrity, a former D’Youville University professor. Their services are free for chapters heading into contract negotiations, with the AAUP paying the analysts’ fees. 

Other chapters, including advocacy chapters that don’t have collective-bargaining rights, like those at public colleges in North Carolina, can apply for grants from the AAUP to cover the bill, which Bunsis would say only is “less than five figures.” (Chapters have also used GoFundMe campaigns to hire Bunsis; in 2024, one such effort listed his fee as $7,865.) An AAUP spokesperson said he was unfamiliar with the specifics of the program, referring reporters to Bunsis for more information.

Faculty members looking to Bunsis for a counternarrative almost always get one. His analyses reliably dispute the notion that cuts are necessary, and they target administrative salaries as the culprits for runaway spending.

Administrators and others have been quick to point out Bunsis’ track record. An independent fact-finder in an employment-dispute case at Wright State in 2018 noted Bunsis had shown faculty members there “essentially the same PowerPoint” he used at dozens of other institutions. “At every single one of those schools, Dr. Bunsis testified on behalf of labor and claimed that the financial condition of the college was healthy enough to support the union’s proposals,” the fact-finder wrote.

An Assembly/Chronicle analysis of 38 Bunsis reports publicly available online found that, in more than a third of them, he described an institution’s finances in positive language: “good,” “very good,” “strong,” “very strong,” or “excellent.” Another 18 institutions, he declared, were in “solid” shape. The remainder he described in more neutral language: “average to solid” or “decent to solid.” Only one—Wright State, in 2018—was described in explicitly negative terms: “a significant decline.”

In particular, many Bunsis reports point to healthy reserves and positive bond ratings as evidence that financial constraints are overstated, and to administrative spending and athletics as the real source of any budgetary shortfalls. Administrators have cited this pattern to suggest bias. As a 2020 statement from the University at Buffalo put it, the “similarity of the financial analyses calls into question the objectivity of the analysis.”

If his findings are similar across campuses, Bunsis says, it’s because of industrywide trends that have persisted as long as he’s studied university finance: Less and less money is going to the faculty—thanks in part to a growing reliance on cheaper adjuncts—while more and more goes to administration via increased spending on athletics, the professionalization of areas like admissions and advising, and booming salaries for endowment managers.

“That’s what we’re showing,” Bunsis said. “That’s how we got people to join unions 25 years ago, and it hasn’t changed because the trends are the same. No matter what university I look at, the administrative costs are too high, and they’re growing at a faster rate than the instructional costs. That’s almost universal.”

That makes Bunsis highly skeptical when university leaders claim financial precarity. He speaks about them as so many Chicken Littles, sure that every change to the business cycle will bring fiscal ruin.

“Administrators have been saying the same thing since we started doing the work,” Bunsis said. “We don’t have money. We’re poor. We have to make cuts. The world is coming to an end.”

Shrinking

Bunsis says an analysis can take upwards of 100 hours to prepare, most of which is spent not on crunching numbers but on familiarizing himself with local conditions: state politics, student demographics, research profiles, athletics culture, hospital ties, and everything else that adds up to the institution’s bottom line.

Dissecting those bottom lines—conducting an analysis of the analysis—reveals how Bunsis and his administrative counterparts reach different conclusions from the same numbers. For one, the prognosis sometimes depends on how far out you are projecting.

Take UNCG, whose enrollment began declining during the pandemic. The UNC system was worried enough about the long-term impact of those accumulated losses that, in 2023, it capped the annual amount of funding institutions could lose from enrollment declines to give leaders more time to enact a “strategic realignment.”

Bunsis posited that the enrollment declines at UNCG needed to be dealt with—but that they didn’t require immediate, drastic cuts. The campus had positive operating cash flows, so revenue decreases wouldn’t necessarily put it in the red, he said. And even if they did, state appropriations were increasing, and UNCG had healthy reserves that could cover a few bad years if needed.

“We want faculty more involved with administration, understanding the budgetary realities. And Bunsis gets in the way of that.”

Wake Maki, UNC Greensboro senior advisor to the chancellor for strategic initiatives

Besides, enrollment declines weren’t abnormal coming through the pandemic, said Danielle Bouchard, now chair of UNCG’s AAUP chapter.

“It’s not like if there are challenges, we don’t want to face them, but can we wait and see?” she said of the faculty’s mindset in 2023. “Can we have another process where we’re all working together that would maximize shared governance for the whole campus and also minimize losses?”

Bunsis wasn’t alone in projecting positivity, either: The UNC system’s own financial-health metrics showed UNCG in good standing even as enrollment declined.

But Gilliam, UNCG’s chancellor, and his supporters still thought immediate action was needed because the enrollment drops were on the way to creating a structural deficit, where annual expenses outpace revenues, even if it hadn’t yet arrived.

Bunsis’ conclusions “ignore the reality that our revenue is heavily dependent on enrollment,” Gilliam wrote in an October 2023 statement to campus. “No responsible analysis of our finances would conclude that we can lose 2,500 students—a number equivalent to an entire first-year cohort—over four years and not have to consider substantial changes.”

He also quibbled with some of Bunsis’ claims. For instance, while Bunsis cited increased appropriations as reason to be bullish, Gilliam pointed out that much of the increase came from raises handed to state employees, which wasn’t the same as having extra cash on hand.

Ultimately, UNCG cut 20 programs and paused admissions in two others. Making those strategic shifts was the smarter financial move because it staved off potentially larger problems in the future, said Wade Maki, then chair of the UNC system Faculty Assembly and now Gilliam’s senior adviser for strategic initiatives.

“We’re not shrinking anymore, but the structural problem was we weren’t going to get back up to 20,000 [students],” Maki said. “Had we followed their advice, we would just be bleeding our reserves—until when?”

Bunsis’ critics can point to UNC Asheville, two and a half hours down the road, as a cautionary tale. Its enrollment decline began a few years earlier, but it didn’t make any substantial changes until around the time UNCG did. Asheville ultimately lost 25% of its student body and saw its credit rating—already a notch below UNCG’s—downgraded, resulting in higher interest rates. The campus is still recovering. (The fact that it was hit by a historic hurricane in 2024 certainly didn’t help, but the problems began long before then.)

The institution faced calls for even more drastic changes, even after a round of layoffs and program closures similar to those at UNCG. (Bunsis has not advised faculty members at UNC Asheville.)

Durham Bullish

Other differences between Bunsis and administrators center upon sometimes-weedsy definitions that nonetheless carry big implications.

That was the case at Duke, which parted ways in 2025 with more than 600 employees through a combination of buyouts and layoffs, citing a bad budget forecast that was exacerbated by the chaotic higher-education funding policy pursued by the Trump administration.

But in his analysis in January 2026, Bunsis claimed those cuts weren’t necessary. Drawing from audited financial statements, he reported that Duke had $8 billion in unrestricted reserves it could have used to cover losses while the various legal challenges over White House policies wound their way through the courts (not including the $6 billion in unrestricted reserves for Duke’s hospital arm).

Administrators often claim they still can’t touch that money for short-term downturns or shifting political winds, saying it’s best conserved for true emergencies. But if that were true, Bunsis argues, external auditors wouldn’t consider the funding unrestricted. Claiming the money is otherwise “designated,” as administrators often respond, doesn’t convince Bunsis, either: “Again, that is not accurate, as the Board has total discretion over these funds,” he wrote in his Duke presentation.

Bunsis is correct. But there are still good reasons not to move around money that’s already been promised for some particular use. 

While Duke’s trustees could have repurposed unrestricted funds, doing so would have spurred intense pushback from its intended recipients—including faculty members. Donald Taylor, a public-policy professor at Duke, said in a January blog post that he controlled two such accounts that he uses for research costs, including parts of three staff members’ salaries. He opposed handing the accounts over to administrators: “The last thing we need to do is have more resources controlled centrally,” he wrote.

In addition to internal politics, public colleges have to reckon with actual politics. Some forms of state appropriations may not be legally restricted, but using those funds in ways governors and legislators didn’t intend risks their ire.

For Bunsis, though, that’s the point: It’s a matter of political will, not law.

Another Bunsis touchstone—and point of contention—is his reliance on a financial metric called EBIDA, or earnings before interest, depreciation, and amortization. Because EBIDA strips away non-cash considerations like depreciation, which measures the decreasing value of physical infrastructure like buildings and equipment, Bunsis says it offers the most down-to-earth financial representation. Depreciation doesn’t require actual money in the here and now, so counting it as an expense does little but provide cover for not paying faculty what they’re due, Bunsis argues.

But higher-education institutions, and North Carolina colleges in particular, have a widespread issue with deferred maintenance. The UNC system estimated that it would cost just under $8 billion to bring its buildings in unsatisfactory condition up to par. Students and staff were exposed to hazardous materials for years at N.C. State University’s aging Poe Hall, which was open for more than 50 years without significant renovation. Planning ahead for those costs through depreciation accounting is the standard way of avoiding a long-term problem.

“No matter what university I look at, the administrative costs are too high, and they’re growing at a faster rate than the instructional costs.”

Howard Bunsis, Eastern Michigan University accounting professor

It’s also a particular issue at Duke, says Matthew Hendricks, founder of the consulting firm Perspective Data Science. In his own examination, made at the request of The Assembly and The Chronicle, Hendricks found that Duke’s capital expenditures—its investment in buildings and equipment—haven’t kept up with depreciation since 2022, allowing its deferred-maintenance backlog to keep growing. 

Not accounting for such factors is why Hendricks says EBIDA, Bunsis’ metric of choice, is misleading. Credit-rating agencies give it the smallest weight in their ratings, he said, and some in the industry refer to EBIDA as “fake earnings.” Hendricks argues that if colleges were to spend more, as Bunsis advocates, their credit ratings would sink, increasing borrowing costs. 

What Are Universities For?

While Hendricks thinks Bunsis is wrong about Duke’s fiscal health, he ultimately recommends the same solution: Cut administrative expenses, especially highly paid staff. But the more effective way to make that case, he says, is recognizing when real financial concerns need to be managed.

That’s what worked at the University of Tulsa in 2019, Hendricks says, when he was a faculty member there. By acknowledging the university was in trouble, and using data to present a case for balancing the budget through administrative costs, he and other faculty critics of administrators’ proposed cuts were able to stave off the worst-case scenario, he says.

But following those numbers, rather than denying that a problem exists, can cause schisms. When Hendricks compared Tulsa’s expenses to similar institutions to show the impact of administrative bloat, he found that the campus had more librarians than its peers. The implication that librarians should be cut created some tension at his former institution.

Because librarians are AAUP members at Duke, they were never likely to support such a proposal, especially not when librarians bore a large share of the cuts last year—to the tune of $3 million in eliminated salaries.

What’s missing from the budget debates, said Erika Weiberg, a Duke AAUP member, is a discussion about what the university is for. Is having more librarians than average an unnecessary expense or a competitive advantage? A relic of the past or an investment in the core mission?

“Some people treat the budget like this reified thing, like that’s how it has to be,” Weiberg said. “But really, it’s a reflection of the priorities of an institution. If those priorities were different, the budget could look radically different.”

For all the talk about EBIDA and reserves, then, the fight between Bunsis and his critics may be less about finances and more about governance—about who gets to make the decisions.

“Obviously, we’re upset about the spending priorities and we’re upset about who you’re hiring,” Bunsis said. “But we—faculty and grad students and all the people who are involved in unions—all we want is to be at that table and be heard.”

Duke’s AAUP chapter was under no impression that Bunsis’ presentation would prevent layoffs, Weiberg said. But its members hoped the report could help force administrators to bring more faculty into the process.

“They haven’t made any of the changes that we’ve demanded, but there are imperceptible ways that the knowledge that more people are thinking about and invested in understanding the university’s finances and where the money is going that I think does affect their decision making going forward,” Weiberg said. “But they would never admit that.” (A Duke spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

AAUP members at Duke and UNCG said they consider that a victory. Weiberg credits Bunsis for giving them the tools needed to make their case in a way campus leaders couldn’t ignore.

But administrators say the adversarial approach Bunsis represents makes it harder, not easier, to bring faculty into the decision making.

“We want faculty more involved with administration, understanding the budgetary realities,” UNCG’s Maki said. “And Bunsis gets in the way of that.”

Bunsis has heard the complaints, and they’ve long since stopped affecting him. When he presents his analyses on Zoom, his background is a photo of his two dogs, Stella and Roxy. He writes emails in Comic Sans and is fond of the occasional one-liner. (“The word ‘budgets,’” he likes to say, “begins with B and ends with S.”)

When administrators criticize him, he says he neither responds nor really cares. “Whatever people say about me or pigeonhole me,” he said, “none of it bothers me at all.”