Necessity may be the mother of re-invention. Economist Richard Vedder calls the current period of economic hardship “a perfect opportunity to make lasting change that will ultimately reduce the cost of college to students and taxpayers alike.”
But is anyone taking advantage of this opportunity? We’ve found one state that is.
As the severity of the recession became clear late last fall, we at the Pope Center started looking for signs of major reforms. We found a few changes at private colleges, but public universities seemed to be waiting for money, either from their legislatures or the federal government.
We did hear rhetoric. Ohio State University’s Gordon Gee gave a highly touted speech about “reinvention” and “intentional upheaval.” But his actual proposals seemed weak. They included adding interdisciplinary programs (a trend that we’ve seen for a long time), bringing in non-academic leadership from business, and more collaboration, internally and externally.
As time goes on, we are finding a few exceptions, one of them in our own state of North Carolina. University of North Carolina president Erskine Bowles has said that the university will protect the “academic” core by cutting back on peripheral on-campus activities, and the chancellors are taking steps to do that. We will be following UNC’s progress in more detail.
So far, however, I am impressed most with Tennessee, where one of its three university systems, the Tennessee Board of Regents group (called TBR schools), is taking aggressive action to lower costs. The TBR group consists of six four-year universities and 13 community colleges.
Chancellor Charles W. Manning, who heads the Tennessee Board of Regents, started the ball rolling in November with a letter to the presidents of the system. Anticipating a 19.4 per cent cut in state funding over two years (based on the level for the 2007-2008 year), he asked the presidents for a “longer term response that will bring the system to a greater level of productivity.” As he explained in an interview, that meant, among other things, that a faculty member should become a “manager of an education process,” not necessarily just a teacher in front of a classroom.
In his letter, he used the words “a new business model,” and proposed for consideration numerous efficiency-oriented proposals. These included:
- Greater use of adjuncts (part-time, non-tenured teaching specialists)
- Coordination among schools in “expensive disciplines” such as engineering; rather than have every school aim for the ideal engineering department, each could work with other schools so give the system as a whole “depth and breadth”
- Differential tuition to accomplish goals such as filling up Friday classes and summer school and more accurately reflecting the higher costs of some major disciplines and even the higher costs of upper-class students over freshmen and sophomores
- Possible elimination of community college intercollegiate athletic programs
- Measuring faculty workload in terms of the number of students taught rather than the number of courses.
The proposal caused a stir, mostly at one campus, Middle State Tennessee University, and on a blog by Marc Bousquet, a member of the national council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Bousquet, known for his claims that graduate education is exploitation of labor, gave Manning his “Top Turkey” award on November 26, 2008, for “squeezing a few more nickels and dimes out of his already-on-food-stamps faculty, and further watering down the thin gruel he passes off as ‘higher education.’”
Manning is not apologetic, and for good reason—his critics seem few in number. In an interview he repeated his determination; such steps are necessary because legislative support has declined dramatically. Whatever the economy, he does not see this changing.
Furthermore, says Manning, the federal stimulus package will be a short-term solution at best. Its best use may be to help the university system create attractive buy-out provisions for faculty.
Currently, the TBR university presidents are developing their responses to the cuts. Although most are doing it quietly, the process is transparent at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), where most of the controversy has occurred. This school, which has aspirations for greater prominence in research, is a former teachers’ college. It has (at least) two distinguished alumni, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and Nobel laureate James Buchanan.
Whether the high hopes of Charles Manning will be realized at MTSU is not completely clear. On the positive side is the aggressive approach taken by a steering committee appointed by the MTSU president, Sidney A. McPhee. That committee was headed by Charles Perry, a professor of engineering technology. He set up a business-like process with regular reports, invitations for public comment, and requirements that the working groups review those public comments. It was a “community-wide exercise” with “early visibility of the items under consideration,” Perry said in an interview.
The committee proposals, if implemented, would have dramatically changed the academic offerings of MTSU. Responding on March 19, President McPhee trimmed them substantially but left a significant number “under consideration.” And even those evoked a student protest on the the day of his announcement.
The biggest changes would have been the elimination of whole departments or mergers with other departments. The committee also recommended the elimination of 44 majors or concentrations.
McPhee backed off—at least for now—on most of these, but still recommended a merger of the social work, criminal justice administration, and sociology and anthropology departments and a merger of the philosophy department into another department. He left 23 majors and concentrations as possibly subject to elimination and recommended consolidating seven concentrations into joint programs.
McPhee and the committee were closer on other recommendations, such as implementing a six-day schedule that includes classes on Saturday, expanding online and hybrid classes, and consolidating numerous non-academic offices.
In the academia of the past, getting even those recommendations implemented would have been virtually impossible. But it is a new era, and the problem is not going to go away. Charles Manning, who was on the brink of retirement, is probably going to stay on a year or two and is not likely to be cowed by resistant faculty members or administrators who don’t step up to the plate. We will be watching Tennessee. No doubt, other state university systems will be watching Tennessee, too.