Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.). Budget and Resources Advisory Committee

The Budget and Resources Advisory Committee (BRAC) was created by a resolution on the Northwestern University Senate on May 21, 1970. It was intended to provide advice on budgetary matters to the university administration and to improve communication between the faculty and administration on such matters. The seven committee members were to be chosen by the General Faculty Committee and to serve for three year overlapping terms.

Through the charge of the Committee has remained the same since 1970, its method of deliberation has changed considerably and its influence has increased commensurately. For the first several years of its existence (1970 to 1976), BRAC was hampered by a lack of technical advice and by the unavailability of data crucial to budget deliberations. In 1976, a "BRAC adviser" from the Graduate School of Management was appointed to serve as technical consultant to both the Committee and the administration. In the same year BRAC gained access to the budget requests of the University deans and to the administration's "budget (computer) tapes" which permitted the Committee to begin genuine budget forecasting with the same data used by the University administration. Since that time, the BRAC reports have provided increasingly sophisticated critiques of the University Budgets and budget planning procedures.

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