UT Knoxville is in the midst of a difficult redefinition. How good do we want our state school to be?

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

They're 20-8. The best in a decade. On their way to the NCAA Tournament. It took hard work, discipline, and more than a few screw-ups along the way, but the University of Tennessee men's basketball squad made a name for itself this year.

But then, you knew all that. The team's travails—from a pre-season European tour to last weekend's close loss to Arkansas in the SEC Tournament—were documented, debated, extolled, and excoriated every step of the way.

What the 246,000 fans who paid to see the Vols play at Thompson-Boling Arena this year probably don't know is that a similar struggle to produce a first-class program is under way elsewhere on the Knoxville campus. The goal: to make UT Knoxville competitive academically with the best schools in the nation.

Tennessee, despite the hyperbole of its elected leaders, does not have a world-class state university. UT Knoxville, the state's flagship campus, can boast a handful of programs that rank at or near the top of their fields. But even among its peers in the Southeast, its reputation in national rankings—which most academics publicly scorn but privately covet—lags behind not only perennial powers like the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but often ostensible equals like the Universities of Georgia and Florida.

On the Knoxville campus, a master plan of sorts is taking shape to shore up the school's strengths and pare away its less productive programs. The effort has raised internal questions about where and how UT needs to improve and whether administrators have the insight and the guts to make the necessary hard decisions.

But everybody agrees the local debate is only part of a larger issue: how much the state values higher education and how much it's willing to pay for it. To that end, eyes are on Nashville, where Gov. Don Sundquist awaits recommendations from a "blue-ribbon panel" on higher education.

From the outside, the heated discussions may look like Ivory Tower arcana with little relevance beyond the insular world of academia. But what happens over the next few years in Knoxville—and in the legislative halls of the capitol—will have a lot to do with what kind of education UT can offer its students in the future.

The Money Picture

The 1990s have been rollercoaster years for universities nationwide, although in Tennessee it's been mostly a downhill ride.

The lean economic times that kicked off the decade produced a series of severe budget cuts for most state schools. Edward Hines, director of the Center for Higher Education at Illinois State University, says, "The worst year in the history of state higher education support occurred in '92-'93, because of the national recession and the

effect of federal pullbacks on states."

Higher education is typically item number four in state budget priorities, after K-12 schools, Medicaid, and prisons. And unlike those three areas, it's not a federally mandated service, which means it's easier to cut.

Tennessee actually bucked the trend for a few years. With the passage of a half-cent sales tax increase in 1992 under Gov. Ned McWherter, the state was able to boost higher education funding while others declined. But the lift wasn't sustained. As other states started enjoying an economic recovery, higher education spending picked up elsewhere. In general, Hines says, "it's been basically five years of increasing funding." Except in Tennessee.

In Hines' most recent study, Tennessee ranks 47th in the nation in new spending on higher education during the past two years. That puts it last in the Southeast, behind Florida (3rd), Louisiana (4th), Virginia (7th), North Carolina (10th), Georgia (11th), Mississippi (22nd), South Carolina (24th), Kentucky (36th), and Alabama (45th).

There are a couple of reasons for the discrepancy. Most of the new money from McWherter's tax increase from 1992 to '97 went to boost teacher salaries and reduce class sizes at the K-12 level. Moreover, although the state economy has been strong, Tennessee, with no income tax, hasn't enjoyed the kind of budget surpluses most other states have in the past few years. (Sales tax revenues—the state's largest funding source—don't grow as boisterously in boom times as income tax revenues.) Tennessee also, of course, has no lottery—several states, most notably Georgia, funnel millions of dollars a year from lottery receipts into education.

But even in states where universities have benefited from new funding, Hines says things are different than they used to be. State legislators are talking more about accountability and results in higher education, and they're less willing to blindly fund it on the basis of its good intentions. Consequently, universities are under pressure to look at themselves critically, identify what works and what doesn't, and get rid of the things that don't. It's a mirror of the downsizing, rightsizing, and restructuring that have marked corporate life in the past decade.

"That's a very different way for higher education to think," Hines says. "Business people look at that and scoff because they've been doing it for years. But it really is a new thing to higher education."

Theoretically, the pay-off for such tough self-analysis is greater confidence and, by extension, better funding from legislators. That's what UT leaders are hoping for as they grapple with their own reinvention effort.

Reshaping a Campus

Q:How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?
A:Change?
—Joke making the rounds at UT

John Peters knew he wasn't playing to an entirely friendly crowd when he stepped to the lectern in the University Center's Shiloh Room on Monday, Feb. 2.

"I sense a certain tenseness here, an air of anticipation," he said, scanning the faces of UT's Faculty Senate, a group elected to defend the interests of the university's professors. Peters, UT's vice chancellor for academic affairs, was there to present a report that marked a first for the campus: a joint effort by the deans of all 16 colleges and divisions to identify UT's strengths and weaknesses. The report singled out 42 top programs, ranging from chemistry to deafness education. It also targeted 25 others for elimination or mergers.

The Council of Deans report is the most recent—and most controversial—chapter in a story going back at least three years. In 1995, Chancellor Bill Snyder appointed an Advisory Committee for Planning and Budgeting to make recommendations for improving UT's budget process. The group was created in the midst of a series of tight budgets, which forced the university to make cuts in programs across the board. No faculty were laid off (although more than 70 UT support staffers were), but many positions that became vacant when professors left to retire or take jobs elsewhere were not filled. The result was a largely random cutback dictated by convenience rather than planning. In response, the advisory committee suggested creating two groups—the Academic Program Evaluation Committee (APEC) and the Non-Academic Program Evaluation Committee (NAPEC)—to figure out a more focused way to distribute the school's scant resources.

The creation of committees to create more committees sounds like standard Chinese-box bureaucracy, but Snyder made it clear he expected more than paper-shuffling. At the first meeting of APEC last April, he told the 12 faculty members appointed to the group "to develop a proposal for the reshaping of the campus" by that fall. APEC responded with a broad but pointed "vision of what UTK should become in the 21st century." Among the group's assertions were:

* "Continued incremental budgeting and attempts to support all or most current academic offerings will strangle initiative and assure mediocrity for the great majority of UTK programs."

* And in closing, "Change is painful, and nowhere more than at academic institutions, whose deliberative culture strives to maintain the status quo."

Still, the group didn't feel equipped to do the heavy lifting its report called for, what APEC co-chairman and psychology professor Alvin Burstein calls "evaluating 300 programs in 10 minutes." So Snyder and Peters turned to their college deans.

Deans have traditionally been watchdogs for their own turf—trying to secure maximum funding for their faculty and students—and tend to see each other as rivals for the administration's affection. But after six months of lively discussions, they produced a report with specific recommendations that bore all their signatures. Warren Neel, dean of the College of Business Administration and a man not particularly given to hyperbole, says, "It may be the single most important event that has happened in over a decade on this campus."

In citing the 42 "outstanding" programs, the report recommends they be the first to get new funding when it's available and the last to be cut in tight budget years. They were chosen based on national rankings and the prestige of faculty and students.

"To my mind, we have developed a new machinery for decision-making in the university," says Lorayne Lester, the silver-haired dean of UT's largest school, the College of Arts and Sciences. "It is an effort to get the entire campus community to acknowledge that we have certain strengths, that we need to build to those strengths."

But there's some faculty uneasiness about where the "new machinery" came from and how it works. Take the three linguistic departments under Lester's supervision—Romance, Germanic and Slavic, and Asian languages. The deans' report calls for them to be merged, a move Lester announced to her faculty in late January. She says it's a simple matter of efficiency; the three can work under one department head, with one support staff. Money saved can go more directly to academic areas of the program. The three were separated in the first place largely because of office politics, Lester contends, "the result of past difficulties and enmities."

Immediate reaction has been mixed, with some faculty protesting both the move and the way it was presented. In a letter to Lester, one professor called it "the most depressing and frustrating experience I've ever had professionally."

Mike Handelsman, a professor of Spanish, is among those affected. But he insists his longstanding skepticism of APEC and all that surrounds it has less to do with the impact on his department than with the process itself, which he thinks is superficial.

"I'm very concerned about what I see to be a spreadsheet mentality here," says the bearded prof. "In an institution as large as ours, it's very easy to fall into that trap. I'm just concerned that the commitment by the administration not to 'drag their feet,' to use their words, has taken us to another extreme...Inevitably what is going to happen is too many good people—faculty members, students, programs—are going to fall through the cracks. Very good people."

While Peters and Snyder are at pains to say exclusion from the "outstanding" list shouldn't be taken as a slight, Handelsman says it's hard to take it any other way. "Now I'm supposed to generate enthusiasm with students when I know the University doesn't think much of me?" he asks.

Not all faculty are so standoffish. Burstein, the APEC co-chair, gives Peters and Snyder high marks for at least trying to involve faculty members in the big decisions. He notes the deans' report is not the final word—various faculty task forces are already being formed to study its recommendations and help put them in place.

The one thing supporters and detractors of the campus revamping agree on is that UTK can accomplish only so much by itself. Mark Miller, a professor of journalism and president-elect of the Faculty Senate, is cautious in assessing the plans for change. But whatever their merits, he says pointedly, "These program changes are not going to save enormous amounts of money, not anywhere near the money we'd need to become a world-class university. Not even close. We need to find ways to get more revenue."

Peters hopes the deans' report will help pave the way. "What this document says is, look, we think we have our act together, we know what we're good at, and we need investment. ... If they don't invest in us, we're certainly going to work as hard as we can to achieve our goals, but we certainly won't get there as fast."

Living With Neglect

Jim Wansley folds his lean frame into a chair, flips through the papers on the table in front of him, and says cheerily, "Cancel the crisis, we're doing fine."

Wansley, a professor who heads the finance department in the College of Business Administration, is at least half-joking. He's looking at a photocopy of pages from the March 2 issue of U.S. News and World Report, which has once again placed the Knoxville campus business school among the top 20 public MBA programs in the country. He and his fellow department heads, gathered for a morning meeting with Dean Neel in a conference room on the top floor of the ovular Stokely Management Center (a.k.a. the "spam can"), are understandably pleased. But they're also well aware of the struggles they face in maintaining and building that reputation.

The MBA program ranks 19th out of all state universities, and 43rd overall. It's a ranking that actually went up from last year, despite UT's budget cut. As Neel observes proudly, "We didn't get here by waiting for someone to fund us."

But at the same time, a few minutes of discussion with Neel's department heads reveals a level of frustration beneath the pride. It's most evident in complaints about the Glocker Business Administration Building, the aging H-shaped structure that houses most of the business classrooms. Keith Stanga, head of the accounting department, notes that he just returned from Central Florida State University, hardly the premier school in the Florida system, which has a shining new business building. "Their physical facilities are superior to ours," Stanga says.

"That's the single largest impediment to us moving from here to there, from where we are to where we want to go," adds accounting prof Jan Williams.

They're not talking about anything high-tech. "Furniture breaks and no one fixes it," Stanga says. "Blinds fall down and they stay down for a week."

The facilities are more than a nuisance, the faculty say. They have the power to scare off potential MBA students who have been wowed by sparkling edifices elsewhere.

To the department heads, such neglect symbolizes a lack of commitment to the university itself—its mission and its students. It also shows up in faculty salaries, where UT lags far behind its peer schools. A full professor in the business school, for example, makes $80,765, compared to a peer average of $95,980. In the College of Social Work, the gap is even bigger: $56,609 compared to $73,053. To bring all Knoxville faculty up to the peer averages, officials estimate it would cost about an extra $6.3 million a year. The 1- to 2-percent pay raises Gov. Don Sundquist has proposed this year won't make much of a dent.

UT President Joe Johnson is used to hearing such complaints. And he is sympathetic, he insists, leaning forward in an orange swivel chair in his orange-carpeted office on the top floor of Andy Holt Tower. But, even as he contemplates retirement within the next few years, he's optimistic about the state's commitment to improving UT. He notes approvingly Sundquist's proposed funding of three major Knoxville capital projects in next year's budget: renovations of the Hesler Biology building and the old Alumni Gymnasium, and construction of a new biotechnology research center for UT's Agriculture Institute.

Johnson's also UT's only representative on the "blue ribbon panel" the governor convened last year to study higher education. Although the group has met only a half-dozen times and won't issue a report until early 1999, Johnson sees its mere existence as a positive sign.

"There's an acknowledgment there that we need to do more for public higher education than we have done," he says.

At the very least, Johnson appears to have smoothed over relations with the governor, which had reached near-feud proportions two years ago after Sundquist made several stern comments about administrative inefficiency at UT. But to the president's critics on campus—and there are many—his determinedly sunny outlook is just evidence of his disconnection from academic realities. Few faculty members hold much hope for the governor's panel, which they fear will be too politically shackled by warring geographic and bureaucratic interests to make significant changes. Much of the panel's early discussion has focused on merging the state Board of Regents schools (ETSU, MTSU, University of Memphis, community colleges) with the UT system, an issue many faculty see as rearranging the furniture without doing anything about the leaking roof or rotting floorboards.

Panel member and former state Rep. John Bragg, who chaired the state House of Representatives' Finance Committee for 23 years, shares the skepticism. "Any time you feel like you want to do something, you reorganize," he says. "If that's all this committee does is to change from two boards to one board, I think it will be a failure."

The question, though, is whether Tennessee is capable of doing anything else given its built-in budget constraints. Bragg doesn't think so. He says the state's commitment to higher education has "evolved downward" over the past 20 years, from paying 70 to 75 percent of the total cost to about 60 percent now. (The rest comes from tuition and other fees.)

"The effort to make Tennessee have excellence in higher education..." Bragg says, pausing for a second before continuing: "The state budget, in my opinion, will only pay for a standard higher education. It will not pay for an excellent one. If you want an excellent one, you have to go out and raise money privately or some other way."

Of course, UT has been doing just that for the past three years, and with impressive vigor. A campaign that set out to raise $250 million in private donations ended up generating more than $350 million, boosting UT's total endowment to over $500 million (about $193 million on the Knoxville campus). That produced about $6 million in actual funding here last year, nearly half of it in scholarships.

But the endowment doesn't approach that of, say, the University of Virginia, where nearly $1 billion in the bank has helped stave off a decade's worth of budget cuts.

As for other possible sources, many faculty look longingly at Georgia, where Gov. Zell Miller, aided by the lottery, has made a crusade of higher education. Tennessee's Legislature is once again considering a lottery this year, which could lead to either a public referendum or a constitutional convention to amend the state's anti-lottery laws. But some skeptics point out that Georgia's lottery money goes strictly toward student scholarships, which puts more students on campus without necessarily doing much to improve facilities or faculty.

Burstein, for one, thinks talk about making UT a "top 10" school isn't terribly productive.

"We have to figure out how to be ourselves in a way that makes us proud of what we're doing and not worry about where we rank," he says. "If good students are coming here—and the students coming here are getting better according to the statistics—and the faculty continue to improve...then I think we're going the right way."

On the other hand, says philosophy department head Kathy Bohstedt, state leaders who want to know what will happen without serious new investment need only look at the past few years: "I think we could expect more of the same. The very best [faculty] would leave. The resources would be thin, so that we would cut back on our ability to teach, to do research, to recruit."

Bragg says the challenge is clear. "It appears somebody somewhere thinks there is a magic way to get excellence in higher education. There is no magic way. It's going to take a hell of a lot of work and a whole lot of money."

Kind of like a men's basketball team. Whether that's a connection Tennessee's leaders and fans will make as they cheer the Vols through March Madness remains to be seen.