The trustees also agreed they would not increase IUB student ticket prices or reduce the amount of student seating available for basketball games during the one-year period.

Approval of the $30 fee means that tuition and fees for IUB students for 2004-05 are complete. Total annual tuition and fees for in-state students who enrolled at IUB before summer 2003 will be $5,736.72. For in-state students new to the campus beginning in summer 2003, tuition and fees will total $6,776.72. The increase is 4 percent. Total non-resident tuition and fees for students who enrolled before summer 2003 will be $17,530.32, and for those new to the campus beginning in summer 2003, the rate will be $18,589.52.

The athletics fee proposal was approved following a wide-ranging discussion among trustees about how to reduce a $5 million athletics department deficit that is increasing each fiscal year by about $2 million.

The board discussed several alternatives, including a recommendation from IU President Adam Herbert that called for a combination of actions to reduce the deficit and a suggestion from trustee Pat Shoulders to increase the student activity fee and, in return, provide a ticket package to students.

In addition to recommending a $30 athletics fee, the president recommended phasing out ticket subsidies for faculty and staff and eliminating an athletics department subsidy to the Bloomington campus for academic support services. The recommendation also included a number of commitments to students, including no increase in the fee for at least four years and maintaining the number of seats available to students for basketball (7,800 seats).

“Students have been clear in helping me understand this issue, and they shouldn’t be the only ones to bear the full burden,” Herbert said. “The trustees and I are interested in a long-term resolution of this issue. We want to position the athletics department to be financially sound and strong.”

The proposals from Shoulders, Herbert and a committee appointed in April by Ken Gros Louis, interim senior vice president for academic affairs and Bloomington chancellor, to recommend alternatives will form the basis to begin discussion about long-range plans to eliminate the deficit.

In other action, the board:

Approved the 2004-05 fiscal year budget of $2.2 billion. That is a 4.6 percent increase over the 2003-04 budget of $2.1 billion. The budget includes a policy for salary increases ranging from 1 percent to 3 percent for faculty and exempt staff. It also offers funding sufficient to provide non-exempt staff earning less than a full-time equivalent rate of $25,000 with a flat increase of $625. Across the university, this special consideration for the lowest-paid employees will provide an effective average percentage increase of 2.6 percent for continuing non-exempt staff. The same distribution will be proposed to the unions that represent employee groups on several campuses.