Metro Pulse/Insights/UT's Academic Holding Action

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by Joe Sullivan

After budgeting to absorb an impending nine percent cut in state funding, UT officials are insistent they can do so without hurting the university academically.

"Our first principle has been to preserve academic programs and instruction, and by and large we've been able to do that," says the provost (and chancellor-designate) of UT's flagship Knoxville campus, Loren Crabtree. Faced with a $15 million cut in the $166 million in state funds received this year, Crabtree says that UT-Knoxville will cover it with cuts ranging up to 30 percent in administrative, support, and maintenance costs, deferral of equipment purchases, and sundry other savings. Many of these will have indirect effects on faculty and students, he acknowledges; but the only academic area facing outright curtailment is continuing education.

The fact that faculty positions will be protected may not be much consolation to groundskeepers and clerical workers whose jobs could be in jeopardy. But after all of the faculty erosion that UT has sustained over the past several years, it is heartening to hear that its core teaching and research missions won't be suffering further slippage.

"Our highest priority is to preserve faculty," Crabtree says. Indeed, after declining from 1,078 to 987 between 1997 and 2002, the size of the full-time faculty is actually due to increase by 20 or more in the year ahead. Prior to Gov. Phil Bredesen's proclamation of the nine percent cut, UT had searches underway for 29 new faculty positions. "We've had to pull back on nine of them. But if tuition increases, we hope we can come back and restore some of these positions," Crabtree says.

Tuition increases could, in fact, go a long way toward offsetting the $15 million reduction in funding on which Crabtree's budgeting has been based. While no decisions on tuition have yet been made, Crabtree points out hypothetically that a nine percent increase would yield about $9 million. After a 7.5 percent increase this year, following double digit increases in each of the two preceding years, UT officials profess to be averse to raising the cost to students above the present $4,000 a year. But the alternatives are worse.

"We have to have some tuition increase just to meet higher fixed-costs increases in utilities, new buildings that are coming on line, and so forth," Crabtree asserts. And he points out that many other public universities are raising tuitions sharply in response to budgetary crunches, so that even with an increase "UT would still be in the middle of the pack."

Cuts in state funding for higher education are so pervasive that they are serving to insulate UT from slippage relative to its peers in other ways as well. In Georgia, for example, state funding got slashed by 10 percent this year with no improvement in sight, and as a result, no faculty raises. In Virginia, a further 12 percent cut is projected for next year on the heels of an eight percent cut this year. And according to reports compiled by the Southern Regional Education Board, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina are also experiencing significant cuts as well.

Although Crabtree's budget doesn't provide for any further faculty raises, he insists that UT has actually been narrowing the faculty salary gap relative to its peers. "With increases of six , six, and five percent over the past three years, we've definitely gained on the competition, even though we won't be making progress this coming year," he says. The gains, he believes, have helped UT with both faculty retention and recruitment. "We're doing really, really well in our new hires this year, and we're paying nationally competitive salaries."

For all his emphasis on preserving academic programs, Crabtree acknowledges that "we're trying to do too much with too little support from the state." Similar refrains have been sounded repeatedly over the years, coupled with lots of lip service paid to the need to prioritize so that selected programs get more resources while others that are weaker or less pertinent get scaled back if not phased out. Yet very little has come of prior prioritization efforts in an academic setting where every discipline seems bent on turf protection, and tenure protects its faculty members.

Crabtree now seems resolved on changing that—even though any changes won't come in time to affect funding allocations for the difficult year ahead. "This past week," he relates, "I initiated a process with the Council of Deans that we will carry on very carefully over the next few months of identifying programs that might possibly be eliminated or reduced and to reallocate resources, we hope, to areas of high priority. By summer we will have identified a relatively short list, and by fall decide where we're going."

If Crabtree can get meaningful reallocation decisions on this timetable, it could do a lot more for UT's long-term academic strength than the budgetary holding action with which he's been preoccupied up to now.