Is there a post-crisis recovery for UC and its university kin?  So far, not so much.  At this blog, we've been forced to chronicle permanent austerity.  The long-term problem was confirmed this week by a Public Policy Institute of California report that reviews the public funding cuts of the past several decades at all three segments of higher education in the state.  (If you are just tuning in, Hank Reichman has a helpful overview of the PPIC and State Auditor reports, and of editorials decrying the long-term state disinvestment.)  There's no news in the PPIC report for our readers, and the Senate "Futures Report" on the UC budget identified the same trends ten years ago.  But it's good to know the cuts word is now spread around.

So the question is, what are Sacramento or Oakland or local campus administrations going to do about it this time?   How about some focused goals for rebuilding?  Could we set some goals?  For example, could we say, "no students sitting on the steps in any lecture hall anywhere at UC by Fall 2018?" This is the first step towards where UC needs to go.

To end bottlenecks and then get to the real upgrades, we're going to need to end our current UC spin cycle.  The cycle is Problem--Kludge--Drift--Crisis--Pushdown.   Push the crisis down to the lower levels.  And repeat.  The cycle isn't addressed but is enabled by the marketing and public relations crusades to which UC has become so prone (e.g., Prof. Reichman and Bob Samuels on the recently-revealed UC Davis effort to scrub the pepperspray incident from Internet search results.)   Some of our problem is money. Some of it is how we bury our problems as fast as we can.

Step 1 is to face the fact that we can't just keep postponing the repair jobs.  Our time is up.  We have been watching the cram down of publics to a lower functional level for a couple of decades, and have long watched the cuts widening the gap between them and their private university cousins.   Chronic underfunding has seriously damaged the public research university core, which is Instruction and Research.  As the same problems stay unsolved year after year, the public on whom we count to fund the rebuilding decreasingly believes in the quality of the former, and has been blinded to the costs of the latter. Polls show that large majorities of the public want strong public universities (80% in the March PPIC poll, page 21).  But they are not convinced that public university quality has been maintained, or that research is a major cost in which state taxpayers must share.

I see declining faith in UC quality in occasional media reports and in the comments of UC students, particularly those who have friends or family at comparable private colleges. I see it in low take rates of UC admits.  Systemwide data show that all non-flagship campuses need to admit five students for every one that actually comes.  We often focus on the gigantic and growing number of UC applicants or on the proportion of UC applicants who end up on some UC campus (43.5%).  But if we look at each campus as a distinct university, we might wonder at the low percentage who think that specific UC campus is the best educational choice for them.  The non-flagship UC may be serving as the world's biggest safety school for the top 1/8th of high school graduates.

In addition to public skepticism, universities face powerful commercial and political forces that want to unbundle them into training pathways that can be separately monetized.  This would mean dumping the infrastructure that integrates the curriculum--and that supports research.  This week's ritual Chronicle of Higher Education query, "should universities exist?" appears as an interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, who ponders whether universities are different from anything else and why professors aren't more like bloggers.  In reality, the answers to such questions aren't that tough. Universities do integrative instruction across disciplines and methods like nothing else. They conduct indispensable, money-losing research like no other institution is willing to do.  With teaching, public universities need to show Active Learning + Individual Feedback --> Cognitive Gain.  I'm being simplistic, but you get the direction.  And yet our publicity hides the problem rather than inspiring progress.

Step 2 is to anchor every single institutional change in a clear positive goal.  We have an unfortunate wealth of examples of not doing this.  Nearly eight years after the financial crisis hit, Berkeley's chancellor described a structural deficit that would force permanent restructuring on top of the continuous search for savings of the past decade (see Section 4).  This week, he announced that 500 jobs would be eliminated, totaling about 6% of the campus workforce. Faculty, who are excepted from these reductions, attended a forum in which bad news was stirred but no gains were imagined. One gain from "realignment" would be to move staff from the managerial peripherals back to the educational core. But unless there's a goal to do this, kludging and drifting will mean more pushing of cuts down to students and faculty and frontline staff.

This history can be seen in Charles Schwartz's recent update of UC costs, based on new detail from UC's Corporate Personnel System  He found that even after 2008, the main growth areas are "Senior Professionals" and "M10-Managers," particularly in functions that appear to be controlled by the higher administration ("Institutional Support").   (Individual campus charts are here;  Prof. Reichman discusses the Auditor's different claim that aggregate administrative costs were flat between 2006 and 2012.)  Drift and pushdown place the cuts in frontline Instruction and Research, and spare the upper-middle categories that have grown the most.  I'd love to be proven wrong, but so far realignment is destined to offer more of the same.

All change must include the upgrade, though this isn't easy to do.  Another example comes in the form of a UCSB memo issued by the Executive Vice Chancellor and divisional Senate chair and bearing the subject line, "Planning for Increased Enrollment, 2016-17" (Attachment 1).  It noted the additional resident students President Napolitano had agreed to accept (5000 systemwide next year via a 15% increase in UC-wide admissions, and a possible 5000 in the two years following).  It said that UCSB needed to find an additional 2700 seats per quarter starting this fall, and asked faculty to be more flexible than ever in accepting non-prime time assignments for their courses.

So far so good. I'd already gotten a registrar notice about their failure to place 50 courses by the third draft of the fall schedule.  I'd heard about a plan to give incoming students better pass times so they wouldn't be shut out of lower-division courses by juniors and seniors.  These are examples of important operational problems that need solving.  But I was optimistic: since I've been teaching large lectures on the swing shift for years, I assumed the registrar could find the classrooms and offer enough sections--especially if the deans granted our full TA budget requests, which they had not done last year.  And it's always good for faculty to learn more about the back-office issues faced by staff.

But by the time I read the memo, I'd received a dozen irritated reactions to this memo from faculty across campus.  Most referenced this paragraph:

Departments should consider such strategies as offering multiple iterations of impacted courses, deploying lecturers and graduate student instructors strategically to cover the maximum number of needed courses and sections, and experimenting with innovative formats for lectures and sections. There may be opportunities (consistent with Academic Senate policies and contractual obligations governing workload) to organize instruction in alternative formats, including the further integration of on-line components. In select cases, when appropriate and within policy, student peer review and the judicious use of some advanced undergraduate instructors might supplement instruction by faculty and graduate student instructors. It also may be possible to recall some emeriti to teach high-impact courses.

This was an alarming list of the "innovations" of the miserable year of 2009, in which most departments were forced to teach lectures without sections, to convert essays into multiple-choice exams, eliminate senior seminars from their requirements, cut smaller courses even if they were intellectually central, and so on. These were mostly abandoned as soon as we could afford to do so, since faculty felt they lowered quality and students gave them bad reviews.  As for online teaching, hybrid courses --mixtures of online and face-to-face--can be very good, but versions that raise quality don't save money at all.  (Read online pioneer Candace Thille on the subject, or my analysis of the costs of the Georgia Tech-Udacity online masters program.)   Colleagues from all disciplines were especially annoyed at the idea of peer-grading for undergraduates.  Peer-to-peer learning is of course central to the seminar format and is quite valuable, but only in the context of faculty-structured courses that include expert review of student work.  From the student perspective, if going to UCSB grading will mean your paper is reviewed by the student sitting next to you, you might as well start UCSB Co-Op College in Isla Vista and get your student-graded higher learning for free.

Why such a dismal message?  Was the enrollment "surge" going to wash us away?  I decided to check. UCSB has just under 11% of UC's resident undergraduate total (using pulldown menus), which puts its share of the New 5000 at about 550 new students.  UCSB's Long Range Development Plan already called for adding 5000 students on a 2010 base of 20,000 over 15 years (page A-4; UCSB already had 22,218 headcount students in 2010). Adding 5000 students over 15 years means adding an average of 333 students in every year. So the "surge" means the campus will bring 220 additional students beyond what its LRDP had been planning for anyway. Or maybe we were taking 675 students, based on the 2700 seats, which would be an additional 340 students beyond our LDRP.

How hard would this be? I looked at the enrollment increases of previous years.  I have folded in non-resident students since they didn't increase as dramatically at UCSB as at other UC campuses.

Figure 1: Annual Changes in Undergraduate Enrollment, UCSB, 2008-2015

Year	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Total Ugrad	18892	19796	19186	18620	18977	19362	20238	20607
Year On Year		904	-610	-566	357	385	876	369

In 2009, UCSB added 900 students in one year.  In the two-year period 2009-2011, it lost nearly 1200 undergraduates, which created some infrastructure headroom.  After 2011, the campus has added at somewhere between 350 and 400 undergraduates per year, and nearly 900 in 2013-14.  This is a bit above the growth rate planned in the LRDP. The Napolitano 550 (or 675) for UCSB is 150-350 beyond recent average increases, and less than the campus handled the year before last.  It is also in the neighborhood of the 300 Nonresident International students the campus enrolled in each of the last two years.

In other words, we could see the surge as getting us two years of LRDP growth in the space of one. We could focus on translating it into a quality upgrade.  The memo noted the Santa Barbara campus's popularity with applicants.  More students won't overwhelm us. They won't burden us.  All our campuses do need to fix big things: senior managers need to keep president Napolitano from making bad deals and pushing the costs down.  They need to get full costs for new students and not the current $5000.  But in the process, UC needs to keep focused among other things on how desperately it needs to be raising the quality of learning. It needs to be building its popular base by giving UC students the education they way they want when we actually ask them-- the ability to get into the courses, and later, individualized advising, sequenced, coherent majors, coordinated distribution requirements, and exposure to research.

So the problems are obvious, but we can only fix them with the continuous creation of full-scale rebuilding goals. The subject line should be, "Planning for Better Instruction and Research, 2016-17."  It should note, wow we're in such a healthy sector of endless demand: let's do some new fun things with the surge.

Somewhere Michael Lewis tells the story about what the boss of a trading floor--perhaps John Meriwether--would do when a trader hung on too long to a losing position, hoping that it would turn around. He would approach the trader from behind, and whisper his version of the old Dusty Springfield song--"wishing, and hoping, and thinking, and praying."   Which meant, dump it, eat your loss, try something else, right the hell now. (Left: Wisconsin System Board of Regents Vice-President J.R. Behling.)

This would be good advice for governing boards of universities, who are doubling and tripling down on a losing strategy, which is to elbow their faculty experts further out of educational decision making.  Exhibit A is Wisconsin's #faketenure story that continued today with a Board of Regents Education Committee vote on UW-Madison layoff policy (materials starting at page 160).   They voted the changes through, and the full board is slated to do the same thing tomorrow.  The changes move faculty expertise over educational impacts to the fringes of program decisions.

Sustaining the spirit of the thing, the UW Regents had backed the system president Ray Cross's decision to refuse to allow chancellors to deliver their reports on the effect of state budget cuts on their campuses--wishing and hoping they haven't permanently damaged the university system they are legally obligated to protect, and making sure they don't publicly hear otherwise. (Nico Savidge reported that President Cross was concerned about the effect of a "two-hour drumbeat" of impacts of cuts that was too "repetitive.")

Last month, the UW Regents voted in favor of tenure dilution for the overall system; today's vote applies only to the Madison campus. You may remember that Wisconsin had tenure written into its state statutes, and then Gov. Scott Walker and his Republican allies in the state legislature deleted it. They also weakened shared governance and cut the university's budget by around 8 percent.  At first, senior officials in the UW system said this was okay because they would just move the previous tenure procedures from state statute to university code.

When the university task force proposals were unveiled, the UW AAUP demonstrated that they were not equivalent to established tenure.  One key issue was that under the new proposals, tenured faculty could be fired on grounds of program discontinuation, rather than on grounds of financial exigency that affected the whole institution.  Could the business school dean now decide to fire the public health faculty because it could make more money giving those lines to the unit on financial engineering? Could the provost decide that the English department could fill seats more efficiently by cutting 18th Century Studies and laying off their tenured professors?  Faculty analysts thought so.  For example, in February Nick Fleisher walked through some helpful detail about how this would work. But throughout the process, UW-Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank, system president Ray Cross, and other senior managers assured faculty that nothing meaningful would change.

Then something meaningful happened last month. The Wisconsin Board of Regents met and ratified weakened tenure protections over the protests of the faculty senate.  A key passage of the new university rules reads as follows (page 31):

The maintenance of tenure-track and tenured faculty, and of essential instructional and supporting services, remains the highest priority of the university. To promote and maintain high-quality programs, the institutions of the UW System may over time develop new programs and discontinue existing programs. Accordingly, and notwithstanding RPD 20-23 (Regent Policy Document on Faculty Tenure), a tenured faculty member, or a probationary faculty member prior to the end of his or her appointment, may be laid off in the event that educational considerations relating to a program require program discontinuance.

The plain meaning of this text is that if administrators decide to end a program, they can fire tenured faculty by invoking "educational considerations" and not just financial ones. These are, as the next paragraph explains:

related in part to regular program review, and reflect a long-range judgment that the educational mission of the institution as a whole will be enhanced by program discontinuance.  This includes the reallocation of resources to other programs with higher priority based on educational considerations.  Such long-range judgments generally will involve the analysis of financial resources and the needs of the program and any related college or school.

In the new Wisconsin system, educational factors are mixed together with financial ones. This means that programs will not now be evaluated intellectually and then structured so they don't lose too much money (though high-value research programs in STEM always do).   This means they can be reviewed for their return on investment, and higher expected profitability in financial engineering can trump higher intellectual value and other non-market and social benefits in public health. (I discuss the ROI version of educational review in "The Humanities as Service Departments.")

But who would calculate ROI and the public-value tradeoffs?  Under what collaborative process? Faculty have believed since before the 1915 founding of the AAUP that educational considerations form their unique expertise, and that they would decide what is studied and taught.  At the March UW Regents meeting, Regent Tony Evers attempted to codify this faculty authority, as Colleen Flaherty described in her excellent blow-by-blow.

Evers proposed that the policy be amended to specify that a designated faculty committee review programs being considered for closure based on purely educational concerns, alongside any other committee considering them based on financial and/or educational concerns. 

“This focuses our efforts on educational considerations being our primary consideration,” Evers said. “Not all of it, but primary.” 

The amendment, adapted from a request by faculty representatives from across the university system, echoed an earlier statement to the regents by Geoffrey Peterson, chair of political science at the university system’s Eau Claire campus: that faculty concerns about the proposed policies could be summed up by saying that “economic factors cannot and should not take precedence over academic considerations and academic freedom when making programmatic decisions.”

A majority of regents rejected the forming of an autonomous faculty judgment of a proposed closure's educational value, with the motion failing 11 to 5.

Regent Evers made a second attempt to maintain the precedence of educational considerations and, by extension, faculty authority in the firing of tenured professors.  He proposed language saying,

long-range [programmatic] judgments will involve primarily educational considerations and secondarily the analysis of financial resources and the needs or the program and any related college or school. Fiscal considerations must be preceded by educational considerations. Criteria for determining whether a program should be eliminated ought to place greatest emphasis on the quality of the program involved. Such assessment should take into account the quality of the faculty, the value and the particular character of the program and the performance of its students.

This amendment also lost 11 to 5.

Regent Evers took a third swing, proposing "that the layoff policy should be changed to say that administrators will pursue' every alternative to faculty layoffs in the event of a program closure, instead of 'consider.'  He picked up a few extra votes with this one, but still lost in an 8 to 8 tie.

The regental majority thus swatted down three different and increasingly diminished versions of faculty control of educational considerations. Ms. Flaherty reported,

James M. M. Hartwick, professor of curriculum and instruction and Faculty Senate chair at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, said via email that he was “shocked and appalled that the board would not adopt a single amendment that all the elected faculty representatives and all the faculty members on the [task force] requested.” 

It wasn't only faculty who were surprised.

Regent Jose F. Vasquez said he wouldn’t vote for any of the amendments because he wasn’t convinced the policy under which the university system has been operating for decades needed fixing -- even in light of the changes to state law. He said he didn’t believe that chancellors need more help running their universities, or that faculty members were so “entrenched” that they couldn’t make rational decisions about program viability on their own. 

“They understand that two things are the lifeline of higher education: quality and students,” Vasquez said. “And students come because they find the quality and affordability, and I am convinced that both [faculty and administrators] understand that very clearly. I don’t think chancellors are looking around saying, ‘I can’t deliver that,’ and I don’t think faculty are looking around saying, ‘Damn quality, damn the students, I’m here to do my research, and if I happen to have only one student so be it.’” 

Regents Vasquez and Evers are the two regents who come from inside the education sector, with direct professional expertise.  They were voted down.

Why? A key reason is that president Ray Cross sided with the regental majority against faculty control of "educational considerations." Other senior managers may have done so less publicly. A deeper reason is the majority board belief that strategic managers simply must have the power to fire employees.  Many

regents said it would be unwise to move financial concerns down the priority list, and compared closing programs to a business investing its resources in its most profitable products. “Welcome to the 21st century,” Regent Margaret Farrow said, arguing that Evers’s amendment could undo what the task force tried to achieve.

More like "welcome to the 20th century."  Even more pointedly,

John Robert Behling, board vice president and chair of the tenure policy task force, objected to Evers’s proposal, . . . saying that the creation of another committee would diminish the “flexibility, flexibility, flexibility” campus chancellors need to make decisions in light of the $250 million cut to higher education in the current state budget. 

Regent Behling should be saying, "quality, quality, quality," to keep himself and other Wisconsin leaders from steadily slashing the infrastructure that would allow the state to regain its lost leadership status.  Instead, he and the board majority went with the capacity to override tenure.   Some large portion of Wisconsin leadership has spent years obsessing about UW tenure as a main roadblock to economic greatness.  No evidence has ever been presented for this--no calculation of how expensive sociology professors are impeding the growth of contract manufacturing.  It's a political goal and a cultural belief--in much of U.S. business culture, the power to fire people makes everything fixable. "Flexibility" started out in the 1970s as a desperation move as US industry lost its postwar lead over Germany, Japan, and other rebuilt industrial powers. In the 1980s, management theorists like Tom Peters and Rosabeth Moss Kanter showed that mass layoffs destroyed company value rather than created it, but short-term executive rewards ran against them, and mass layoffs became a routine practice and sure-fire way of doping the stock price.  "Flexibility" has nothing to do with improving education.   It's imposition has already damaged education, and its practice will continue to.

So what is the point?

The point is to implement an authority structure that can control public universities under permanent austerity and in the absence of a growing and rising middle-class.  Culture wars are good for discrediting particular sources of sociocultural knowledge like ethnic studies, feminist studies, or Middle Eastern Studies.  Budget cuts are good for taking the whole public university sector down a few notches.  But to reengineer a static enterprise, after decades in which their boards failed to maintain the state revenues on which the system was built, public university governors need the audit and assessment practices that Europeans have long called New Public Management (NPM).

To extract from a gigantic literature, NPM inserts financial considerations into everything, in the form of quantitative indicators and targets.  It does not acknowledge goals that cannot be measured, though this is an obvious problem for public goods, since their value is not internalizable by the institution that creates them. NPM is preoccupied with "grading and ranking" (Shore and Wright 2015, cited below), the better to optimize outputs by moving resources from lower-ranked operations to higher-ranked ones.  NPM assesses management quality by its ability to optimize to its own determinations of efficiency: the goal is internal self-validation, not the fit between the management system and organization behaviors, outcomes, or goals.  NPM implicitly works towards a Pareto distribution (80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes), meaning that 80 or even 90 percent of your people make nearly no difference to the organization's overall value.  Mass quality in higher ed is of little interest, and the same goes for the democratization of intelligence.   Designated "top faculty" must be given the resources that, under #realtenure, were distributed widely across the campus.

The effects of this system has been abundantly studied, and I offer one critical list of effects from two leading analysts of NPM, Cris Shore and Susan Wright, to be found in "Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society," in Current Anthropology (June 2015). NPM systems lead, they wrote, to:

1. Loss of organizational trust (O’Neill 2002; Power 1994);

2. Elaborate and wasteful gaming strategies (House of Commons 2004; Shore and Wright 2000; Wright 2009);

3. A culture of compliance and large compliance costs, including the appointment of new specialists preoccupied with creating positive (mis)representations of performance (Miller 2001);

4. Defensive strategies and blamism that stifle innovation and focus on short-term objectives over long-term needs (Hood 2002);

5. Deprofessionalization, a disconnect between motivation and incentives, lower employee morale, and increased stress and anxiety (Bovbjerg 2011; Brenneis, Shore, and Wright 2005; Wright 2014);

6. “Tunnel vision” and performing to the measure, with a focus solely on what is counted, to the exclusion of anything else (Townley and Doyle 2007);

7. And the undermining of welfare and educational activities that cannot be easily measured (King and Moutsou 2010).

Recognize any of these?  If not now, then soon.

I personally believe that the historical tide is running against NPM.  It is grossly inefficient, among many other things.  Tenure had kept it at bay by protecting faculty from retaliation.  Weakening tenure strengthens our U.S. version of NPM, now coming to Wisconsin campuses near you--and in other states, as I'll discuss in future posts.   Faculty, staff, students, and administrators, whose jobs are also being ruined by this type of managerialism, now need to confront US-NPM if public universities are to move forward again.

***

UPDATE April 8th: Today the chancellor of UW-Madison, Rebecca Blank, issued a statement about the new tenure rules. She stresses the unlikelihood of program closures that would result in the firing of tenured faculty and gave examples of closures that led to reassignment without job loss.  She also claims that while the state legislature insisted

that tenured faculty could be laid off for reasons including “program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.” . . . 

In March, the Board approved a broad System-wide policy relating to tenure and the layoff of tenured faculty members.  That policy allowed layoffs to be considered only in cases of financial emergency or program discontinuance due to educational considerations.  To state this clearly: The Regents chose not to allow layoffs of tenured faculty in the case of program changes or modifications.

This would mean that Madison's new tenure rules would prevent one of my examples of a sub-departmental firing (ending 18th century studies in an English department).  I don't think it would prevent the other example (closing public health as a program or department in a business school).  I also think the definition of "program" in Section 10.01A could be used by different chancellor for surgical terminations--"a related cluster of credit-bearing courses that constitute a coherent body of study within a discipline or set of related disciplines" (page 4).  This appears to be exactly the executive power that Regents Farrow and Behling wanted to create.

Chancellor Blank also offers one of the clearer administrative statements of the value of tenure that I've seen:

Tenure provides freedom to pursue a research agenda that might be bolder, take longer to come to fruition, or that might generate controversy.  I can personally testify that I did my best work after receiving tenure. Tenure allowed me to take on a few bigger and riskier research projects, which took longer to complete but resulted in papers whose findings contributed something more fundamental to the field.

Quite true. I would add that tenure would be stronger if faculty defend the ethic of due process for all employees, and the value of job security for everyone's creativity.   This will be obvious to all of us in that future time when we stop trying to inspire effectiveness by burdening each other with threats.