Penn State President Graham Spanier is in Harrisburg today to discuss Penn State's budget before the state Senate Appropriations Committee.

Tomorrow, he will speak to the House Appropriations Committee, which could get a little spicy.

Earlier this year, Rep. John Lawless lambasted Penn State for allowing student events such as the Sex Faire. He said he plans to play a video he made at the Sex Faire and confront Spanier about it.

Spanier sat down with the Collegian in his office last week to talk about Penn State's budget process. The complete interview is below.

Q: You're going in for the hearings on Monday and Tuesday. How important are those?

A: The university treats the appropriations hearings very seriously because it is the one time each year when we have the opportunity in a somewhat formal way to defend the university's budget request. But it is one part in a very complex, year-long process that actually begins the summer before, where we begin formulating our budget plan. We test those ideas with the governor and the secretary of education and leaders in Harrisburg. We take that feedback, along with the university's needs and our evolving budget scenario, and then put that together in a formal budget request that's approved by the Board of Trustees in September, submitted to the secretary of education, then reviewed by the secretary of budget, then integrated into the governor's overall proposal, which is released the first Tuesday in February. Then there are the appropriations hearings and the discussions behind closed doors, generally through March, April and May within the legislature. In the course of a given year, I will go to Harrisburg numerous times to speak to individuals about our needs. We also hold Penn State forums on particular topics, so we will invite all members of the legislature to a breakfast meeting, for example, and talk about our needs for the medical school or talk about our progress in information science and technology or any other topics that members of the legislature tell us they would like to know more about. The appropriations hearings — people have the impression that with the appropriations hearings I go down there and make my pitch. That's not the way it works. My pitch has already been made numerous times in writing, in formal documents, in discussions behind closed doors. What the appropriations hearing is, is simply a public opportunity for members of the legislature to ask me questions. I don't make any presentation at the appropriations hearing, rather I am answering questions that legislators have to get a deeper understanding about what we're requesting.

Q: I went down for one two years ago. I didn't go last year. It's obviously difficult to do. Do you feel like you have to be a politician when you do that?

A: Not really. My style is to be as well prepared as I can, to know the university as well as I can inside out. I have several hundred pages of data that have been prepared for me that I study so that I'm in a good position to answer questions that they have. Now every year there will be a question or two where I don't have a databased answer for them and I will say I don't know really the answer to that question. But within a week we provide it to them. So my goal is to be as well prepared as I can and answer their questions to give them confidence that we know what direction we're heading in and why and that we've done it in a thoughtful way. I actually look forward to the opportunity each year to do this. For me, it's a wonderful opportunity to put Penn State's best foot forward.

Q: Are you worried at all about Rep. Lawless this year and his videotape he's planning to show?

A: Well there have been a number of years when Rep. Lawless has had challenging questions for us. This would not be the first time that occurred. But he is one member of a very large appropriations committee in the House, and the Senate hearings have always gone well. So I'm concerned about any one member of the legislature who would turn our appropriations hearing into a forum on one topic. We are talking about a budget of more than $300 million that supports 81,000 students.

Q: As far as tuition goes, is there a pretty strong link between the amount of money we get from the state and the amount tuition will go up?

A: Absolutely. The Penn State budget is a complex one. It's more than a $2 billion-a-year budget but only part of that budget is for the university's academic and educational programs. Things like room and board are separate self-supporting operations. Intercollegiate athletics — a completely separate, self-supporting operation. But when it comes to the academic and educational programs, there are two principal levels of support: tuition and legislative appropriation. And, ultimately, the level at which tuition is set is very heavily dependent on the level of the appropriation. So if the appropriation suffers, we have to make it up with tuition. And for many years now, tuition has been increasing faster than inflation because our appropriation has not kept up with inflation.

Q: At the same time, though, it seems like tuition is increasing everywhere in the country. Is that because it costs more to run a university now than it used to?

A: Yes. The cost of running a university — there is something called the Consumer Price Index that most people are familiar with. That's just in the nation, as a whole, every year, we know that it's 3 or 4 percent more expensive to live than it was the year before. So people are usually pretty tolerant of Consumer Price Index kinds of increases. But higher education has something separate called the Higher Education Price Index, the HEPI. And the reason it's a separate index, and it's almost always higher than the Consumer Price Index, is because many of the things in our society that do increase in cost the fastest happen to be major items in the higher education budget. Library materials, for two decades now, have increased phenomenally compared to anything else in our society. The electronic databases that we're introducing into our libraries didn't even exist years ago. Now they're very expensive. Universities are very people-intensive, so a huge portion of our budget is people. And the cost of employee benefits to support employee benefits to support those people has gone up much higher than inflation, generally — the cost of medical care. Every year, for example, for several years, we've been increasing our health benefits for graduate students as well trying to keep up with the cost of health care for our employees. That's higher. The costs of information technology are very high, and universities are one of the great users of new information technology and that cost has risen. In Penn State's case, you take that higher tuition level that we're contending with, and then you need to add on one percent more because we have one percent of our tuition increase for the last couple of years and for the next several years that is related to capital construction: paying off the debt for new and improved facilities on campus at all of our campuses. So those are a few of the variables involved, and so we — students should expect a tuition increase every year and they should expect it to be at least a little higher than the Consumer Price Index and in a year like this, where the governor's budget is not particularly generous for Penn State, it would be higher still.

Q: Is it too early to predict what the tuition increase might be for next academic year?

A: Yeah. We'll begin to get an idea in May or early June after the legislature passes their budget and we probably won't make a decision until sometime in June and then have it ready for the Board of Trustees meeting in July, and, you know, get the bills ready to go out the next day.

Q: Yeah, that always surprises me that we get our bills so quickly after the budget is announced, that's within a week or so.

A: Yeah, we usually mail it the next day after the Trustees meeting, but the week before we have it figured out so we tell them to begin to get the bills ready so it can go out.