The Story that Needs Changing

In the last few weeks I've given a number of talks on college campuses about the self-feeding devolutionary spiral in puliic university funding.  I've tried to describe the mechanisms that are continuing to accelerate decline, and identify points of resistance that could help with rebuilding.   The goal must remain mass quality rather than limited access to premium content.  Our higher ed system is stratified enough as it is, and "private good" solutions only make it worse.

Robert Mejia offers an overview of my "Rebuiling the Public University" talk at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.  By coincidence, I spoke in the same room a few hours after UI-Urbana faculty had met their new systemwide president for the first time, and heard him speak directly about his plan to take control of enrollments away from each campus and centralize them systemwide.  This struck me as the kind of administrative exercise that makes an executive's mark without improving the institution itself, and that distracts attention from the deeper issues of rebuilding funding and upgrading academic goals.

An example of the deeper issue occurred the day after the coverage of the Illinois faculty meeting, in an article in the Los Angeles Times on how California public universities are leading the way in public tuition increases averaging over 8% last year.  The article started with a causal connection between legislative cuts to public funding and increases to student tuition.  But it then cited an expert saying that the real problem wasn't public funding cuts but public campus inefficiencies, particularly the inefficiency of faculty who don't teach enough.


My critique of the elements of this damaging story is posted on the University of Illinois Faculty Association page.  I would like such critiques to be part of a broader effort to change the public narrative about the everyday work of public universities, so that yahoo solutions can't so easily get dropped into the middle of articles to distract the reader from the real issue.

The real issue is that imposing higher teaching loads and more on-line instruction on public universities won't reverse the relentlessly growing gulf between elite privates and their once-elite public peers.  The economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman, in their recent book Why Does College Cost So Much?, note that the inaugural, 1987 edition of the U.S. News and World Report rankings had eight public universities in their top 25. In 2010 the top-25 includes exactly 1 public university (UC Berkeley, at #21). 

The rankings are of course rather silly, but they do include measures such a per-student expenditures and average student-teacher ratios. On these measures of quality, public universities have been allowed to decline for decades. The decline is directly connected to falling public funding, which has never been replaced by the private sources so ardently discussed, in spite of the decades their advocates have had to achieve this replacement.

The result is stark, in Archibald and Feldman's terms:

In 1980, public universities spend roughly seventy cents per full-time equivalent student for every dollar that private schools spent.  By the middle of the 1990s, that figure had fallen to fifty-three cents per dollar.  These changes have consequences (p. 237)

We already know where the combination of cuts and "efficiencies"is taking us -- towards a class hierarchy of private over public, in which the latter, who teach close to 4/5ths of all college students, are forced to lower quality further while pretending they are not.

Teaching processes can always be improved, but public university executives need a much tighter focus on closing the funding gap with private universities so that we can close the gap in quality of service. Playing around with alternatives to rebuilding funding will only make the public-private gap that much wider .

"Recalibration" in Minnesota

by Susan Cook
Assistant Professor of English

This past fall, and six weeks into my tenure-track position at Bemidji State University, I was advised by senior faculty members to go back on the job market. Our new university president, Richard Hanson, had just announced a “recalibration” plan that focused on what he termed the “distinctiveness, sustainability, and innovativeness” of the university. “Recalibration” is of course a euphemism for budget cuts. Bemidji State, a member of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system, is a campus with approximately 5,000 undergraduate and 300 graduate students. It faces a $5 million shortfall over the biennium. In practical terms, “recalibration” means the loss of 35 faculty positions, 32 graduate assistant positions (half of the current positions), 10.75 staff positions, and the men’s track program.

I came into the English Department this fall with two other new colleagues, both of whom were called on the MLK, Jr. holiday and asked to meet with the president the next morning, when they were given their retrenchment notices. Faculty lines were cut in English, Visual Arts, History, Philosophy, Art History, Modern Languages, Music, Physics, Environmental Studies, Sociology, Economics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Accounting, Technological Studies, Physical Education, Professional Education, Psychology, and Theatre. The cuts will mean the termination of Art History and Theatre. By cutting entire departments, the administration was able to cut tenured as well as tenure-track and fixed-term faculty.

Throughout the process, the strategy seemed to be one of divide and conquer. At an October 13th meeting between faculty and administration, the president announced that faculty from targeted academic departments would be offered early retirement incentives. The list of departments was released to the university community, along with an announcement that the president was considering retrenchment. As one colleague told me, distributing the list of departments from which the administration hoped to secure early retirements seemed a deliberate attempt to pit retirement-age faculty against the rest of their departments. The administration also informed us that every department on campus would have the opportunity to write a 600-word explanation of its “distinctiveness, sustainability, and innovativeness.” It seemed clear to everyone that the writing assignment was meant to be a distraction, as well as a means of asking departments to justify themselves in implicit relation to other departments.

A few of us began asking about other solutions to the funding crisis—what about furloughs, or individuals who had expressed the desire to share one tenure line? The administration said this was a question for the faculty union; the faculty union informed us that it did not endorse furloughs or other solutions. The dominant mood around campus has been one of resignation and muted resistance: behind closed doors, faculty talked about organizing a vote of no confidence in the president, but no one voiced this idea aloud at faculty senate meetings.
In my department, people began posting anonymous reactions to the cuts on a bulletin board. The board was removed by administrators and then returned by a faculty member, the fight for jobs co-opted by a struggle for freedom of expression.

What is troubling to many of us is the way these cuts have been distributed. The liberal arts have been hit most hard, and instruction overall has weathered the brunt of the cuts. Bemidji State already held the distinction as MnSCU’s most administration-heavy university. Despite the president’s claims to the contrary, “recalibration” did not include cuts to administration—only administrative staff. At the October 13th meeting, faculty argued that the proposed restructuring seemed to be “a complete flip from what has been the mission of our university in the past – specifically, us being a: ‘Liberal arts university with select professional programs.’” The president responded: “I don’t know that it is a flip – but I don’t know that the other (mission) was accurately describing what this university is.” In a later written response dated February 23rd, the president modified his view, stating that “Our main task is to inculcate the power and wisdom of the liberal arts into each student…Inculcation is not a product of programs but is a product of interaction and teaching process. It (inculcation) can happen in a mathematics course, or an accounting course, or a psychology course.” Leaving aside the problematic repetition of the term “inculcate”—which the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us means to “endeavour to force (a thing) into or impress (it) on the mind of another by emphatic admonition, or by persistent repetition”—this statement reduces the liberal arts to a skill set that can simply be added into other, more central courses of study. Illustrating this application of the liberal arts, President Hanson goes on in the same document to quote “T. S. Elliot [sic]”: “‘Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.’” “Recalibration,” Hanson writes, “is very much the same sort of experience.” To summarize the logic: “recalibration” is the same sort of experience as experience, which is to say “recalibration” is a paradox.

It seems clear that the goal of this “recalibration” is to make Bemidji State more of a vocational school, to give customers the career results they demand. One of my graduate students articulated the trouble with this line of thinking: in ten years, she said, if someone wants to get a liberal arts degree, he or she will have to be able to pay private school prices for it. My student may be right. This round of “recalibration” is over, but state legislators have been eager to continue cutting the higher education budget. I won’t be coming back to Bemidji State in the fall—I went on the market as my senior colleagues advised and was fortunate enough to be offered a job.  At a private university.