The UMD administration recently rolled out a program prioritization initiative designed to guide a process of cutting our way to greater financial stability. The initiative is said to be motivated by a looming budget crunch – ironically, at a time when our legislatively allotted budget has either stabilized or increased.
The goal, according to administration, is essentially to establish a process by which decisions can be made about which programs to expand, which to maintain, and which to cut. From a faculty perspective, one of the biggest problems with the recent prioritization initiative is that it has been associated with a narrative that seems profoundly to misunderstand the reasons for ballooning costs in current higher education.
From the perspective of academic consultant Robert Dickeson, runaway academic programs have overextended many universities and need to be candidly and realistically assessed; where necessary, they should be eliminated.
But there is another view of the costs ailing universities. According to noted political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, the actual culprit has been the rapid growth in administration and professional staff. According to Ginsberg, who will be delivering a public lecture at UMD the evening of Thursday, September 26, the numbers of faculty have grown as well, but only proportionate to the growth in student numbers.
The administration’s prioritization plan, which is to be implemented by committees currently being selected by our Deans and Vice Chancellors, and commencing when most faculty are not on campus, draws heavily on the work of consultant and former university president Robert Dickeson. Dickeson’s book, in fact, has been recommended to all members of the campus community.
But when it comes to diagnosing the problems facing the University, Dickeson gets it wrong. From his perspective, the source of the budgetary woes of the contemporary university is the academic side. According to Dickeson's Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance (Jossey-Bass, 2010), "academic programs… are not only the heart of the collegiate institution; they constitute the real drivers of costs for the entire enterprise, academic and nonacademic." According to Dickerson, academic programs continue to exist "without critical regard to the relative worth." (15).
The villain in this narrative becomes the faculty, and the book attempts to document how faculty, out of an inflated sense of academic freedom and autonomy, a misguided egalitarianism, and a greedy pursuit of job security, typically resist the very prioritization initiatives Dickeson advocates (21-2).
However, an alternative narrative – the one presented by Benjamin Ginsberg, an eminent scholar at Johns Hopkins University – views excessive costs in higher education as the result of spending outside the ranks of the faculty.
According to Ginsberg in his book The Fall of the Faculty: the Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011), university costs have skyrocketed not due to the cost of faculty but due to the rapid growth in the ranks of administrators and professional staff.
According to Ginsberg, between 1975 and 2005, faculty numbers have grown by 51%, a rate similar to corresponding rises in student numbers. During the same period, administration grew more quickly, at 85%. But it is in the category of professional staff where numbers have grown at an amazing 240% (25). Some of this growth may be legitimate. But in this narrative the faculty are victims, not villains, and prioritization appears misguided or even hypocritical insofar as it becomes an excuse to cut faculty even as non-faculty ranks have grown far more.
Which narrative one chooses will matter greatly when it comes to making trade-offs between academic and non-academic programs. Under the current plan proposed by the UMD administration, academic and non-academic programs will follow separate but parallel prioritization processes.
Once academic and non-academic programs and committees complete their reports, decisions about trade-offs between academic and non-academic programs will not be made until the level of the Chancellor’s Cabinet. This is the Chancellor’s closest advisory body, and since it consists of Vice Chancellors along with a few others, there are really only two members (the EVCAA and a Faculty Fellow) that explicitly represent academic programs. As a result, if we are to avoid misguided cuts that hamper our core mission, it is important that faculty are of a single voice when it comes to establishing funding priorities at UMD.
Along these lines, UEA-D is co-sponsoring Ginsberg’s talk the evening of September 26 (more details to follow) in hopes that UMD faculty can be both united and empowered to play a role in a story that is less demoralizing than Dickeson’s tale of administrators taming faculty excesses. From Ginsberg’s perspective, academic programs and faculty lines ought to be eliminated only as a last resort after other potential excesses have been addressed.
A “prioritization” process consistent with this alternative tale would be a two-step process that would first eliminate as much as possible from non-academic costs and programs before even considering the possibility of diminishing the academic programs that are at the core of what universities do. Only this kind of logic reflects priorities that can enable us to best deliver the instruction to our students and undertake the research that are the mission of the University of Minnesota.
Michael Pfau, President UEA-D