Report on UI grad programs rankles

Say the words “culture of Moscow” to anyone familiar with the college town, and a stereotype of artsy granolians is likely to emerge.

But when consultants hired by the University of Idaho use the term, they have something different in mind – an inflexible, unproductive faculty they say is hindering the UI’s efforts to overcome the financial crisis of recent years.

The report on the UI’s graduate programs, prepared by the Yardley Research Group, says the school’s professors cling to longtime divisions and hostilities, are committed to an outmoded idea of the university’s mission, and see themselves as overworked and under siege – when in fact they lag behind others in producing research and publishing scholarship. The report concludes that the “destructive” members of the faculty should be offered early retirement.

“We do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the current faculty culture is one of the factors causing a brain drain away from both the University and the state,” the report says.

Faculty leaders say the report gets the culture of Moscow wrong, and is cast in such a nasty tone that it’s likely to impede change rather than inspire it. Professors have also challenged some of the data used to quantify and compare faculty productivity.

“I am disappointed in the tone of the document, which comes across as both arrogant and condescending,” said Douglas Adams, an English professor for 36 years and an officer on the Faculty Council.

Adams said the report could make it more difficult to engage professors in developing the very improvements the report suggests. “People will have their backs up in ways that probably could have been avoided,” he said.

Dale Graden, a history professor and former president of the Faculty Council, said the report missed the mark.

“To me, it almost verges on being disgraceful, some of the comments they made about faculty culture,” he told the Lewiston Morning Tribune. “That’s a joke. That’s a complete farce. The people I know work from morning to night, seven days a week.”

Provost Doug Baker, who commissioned the report along with UI President Tim White, said he hopes it will prompt improvements that expand on efforts already in place. The past couple of years have seen the UI expand its faculty hiring, improve its fiscal health, win praise from accreditors and begin developing research initiatives across several disciplines, he said.

He acknowledged that the report is “biting at times,” but he said many of the criticisms of faculty attitudes are based on interviews conducted more than a year ago.

“We wanted to hold up a mirror and look at ourselves, at where we’ve been and where we’re going,” he said. “We’re rebuilding the institution.”

Research vs. teaching

Commissioned last year by the university, the $103,000 report’s first draft concludes that UI is lagging behind its peers nationally in research and graduate programs. The report blames that primarily on a failure to restructure and refocus the university after financial mismanagement of its efforts to expand into Boise helped created a budget deficit of $20 million in 2003.

The university’s reaction to the financial crisis – and subsequent loss of roughly 200 professors and sinking enrollments – underlies much of the report.

“The best response to the financial crisis would have been strategic reduction and elimination and corresponding marshalling of resources to build existing strength,” the report says. “Instead, the University continued to do everything it once did, with the consequence that most of what it is doing is not nationally competitive.”

The report recommends that UI shift resources toward research and graduate programs that attract significant funding, and away from “financially unproductive” academic programs. It says UI should work to improve research productivity and recruit better graduate students, and it says the school’s professors have a “very low” rate of publishing scholarly research.

It also suggests that tenure-track faculty should spend less time teaching undergraduate classes, and that the UI should turn over more of those duties to non-tenured faculty such as adjunct instructors.

Faculty Council Chairman Don Crowley said that he and other professors have concerns that the report makes graduate and research programs such a singular priority.

“They were asked to look at graduate programs so in a sense they became advocates of graduate programs,” he said. “I, at least, don’t want to sacrifice the undergraduate part of the program to enhance graduate programs.”

The report’s authors say there’s a “mistaken concept” of the university’s core mission, which “has caused a major research university and land-grant college to function, in many critical respects, as a liberal arts college.”

Baker, the provost, said the report should spur UI to consider whether it’s balancing the needs of undergraduate and graduate programs, but that undergraduate education will still be an important mission for tenured faculty.

He noted that one of the consistent themes in the report is a need for research centers that combine disciplines. He said UI already has several such efforts under way, such as its interdisciplinary effort on water issues in the West.

“We’re a different university than we were a few years ago,” he said.

‘We try and do everything’

The report analyzes the graduate programs at each college in the UI and concludes that the university is stretched too thin, attempting to offer programs in many subspecialties instead of focusing on key areas.

Adams, the longtime English professor, and others said they agree with that part of the analysis.

“The university has needed to have a really in-depth and important discussion about its endeavors in graduate education for at least 20 years,” he said. “We try and do everything. We just don’t have the resources. No one has the resources to do everything.”

The 435-page report includes a college-by-college breakdown of graduate programs and research efforts, comparing UI to other colleges nationally. The comparisons show that most UI programs don’t offer competitive stipends to attract grad students, and that UI faculty has tended to bring in less grant funding than peers at other schools.

Some professors challenge the figures used in those comparisons, while acknowledging that budget cuts have increased undergraduate teaching loads.

Despite the range and depth of the report, though, it is the authors’ focus on “faculty culture” that is likely to attract the most discussion.

The report says that the “culture of Moscow” is provincial, and that professors lack an understanding of national standing in their fields. Hiring is often based on considerations such as whether a candidate fits into the community and not his or her research, the report says, and UI has a widespread habit of hiring and promoting from within rather than conducting national searches.

It also criticizes the faculty for failing to galvanize after the financial crisis and leaving the recovery to administrators, and it portrays a widespread sense of entitlement and lack of accountability. Baker said that a final version of the report will be finished after comments are accepted from people around the university. Then discussions will begin around campus about ways to respond to the report’s suggestions. The Faculty Union plans to meet this month to discuss the report, Crowley said.

“I’m sure it will be a topic of a lot of conversation when faculty return next week,” he said.