by Joe Sullivan
John Shumaker's first year as UT's president has been a rough one. But amid a lot of vicissitudes, Shumaker believes he's laid a foundation for achieving goals that will strengthen the university in the long run.
When he assumed the helm last June, Shumaker faced a shutdown of the university brought on by the state's budgetary impasse. Then, after that budgetary crisis was resolved, he soon faced another crunch in the form of Gov. Phil Bredesen's mandate to cut UT funding by $38 million as part of a much-broader set of 9 percent reductions in state spending for the fiscal year ahead.
As tough as these cuts were to make, Shumaker managed to compound the damage earlier this month by authorizing a press release that portrayed them in misleadingly dire terms. According to the release the cuts "will result in the elimination of 287 positions and 228 fewer class sections in Knoxville, affecting up to 9,000 students." The release caught Knoxville campus officials by surprise and left some of them dismayed. At a hastily called news conference the following day, Provost Loren Crabtree insisted there would be no reduction in class offerings or faculty positions, only an inability to add classes that would have resulted from more faculty hires. Shumaker subsequently ascribed the gaffe to the fact that "someone who wrote a press release got that confused."
Shumaker also lost standing on the Knoxville campus through delay in naming Crabtree its chancellor. From almost the moment he took office, the new president pledged to elevate his provost, who commands great allegiance among the Knoxville faculty, to the more prestigious post of chancellor. As the months went by, Shumaker ascribed delays in fulfilling this pledge to the need to delineate respective spheres of responsibility of the two posts. But only when Crabtree finally gets appointed, as is scheduled to happen at today's meeting of the Board of Trustees, will faculty doubt be allayed.
Perhaps the biggest single source of first-year damage that Shumaker will have to overcome was his conduct of the search for a new athletic director—at least as portrayed in the media. It's clear that Shumaker preferred an AD with experience to succeed Doug Dickey, who is retiring. It's also clear that a search committee, by a 5-to-4 vote, approved Shumaker's recommendation to offer the post to Wake Forest's athletic director Ron Wellman. What this columnist hasn't tried to untangle are the knots in which Shumaker seemingly tied himself after making this offer and then withdrawing it.
The end result was that the job went to Dickey's chief deputy, Mike Hamilton, the candidate favored all along by the two most ardent athletic boosters on UT's Board of Trustees, James Haslam II and John Thornton. Shumaker's explanation that, "We got the best, but we vetted him against a national pool" has a hollow ring.
For all his tribulations, Shumaker remains a charismatic figure who conveys his strategic goals for the university with acuity and verve. These goals are now embodied in a UT scorecard that quantifies heightened expectations for 2010 in five broad categories. Those range from student and faculty achievement to attracting more research grants, augmenting the university's economy. The scorecard has become his mantra, but he leavens his passion for it with quips like, "There are some people who say the scorecard represents a barbaric attempt to measure the unmeasurable. But my point is you measure what you can."
A key goal toward which measurable progress can't be made in the short term is a near doubling of research and contracts to $350 million by 2010. But Shumaker points with pride to the formation earlier this month of the UT Research Foundation which he claims will "promote commercialization of UT research that will energize the state's economy." He also talks about its role in "rewarding entrepreneurship" and even investing in entrepreneurial ventures.
Shumaker has just named Fred Tompkins, formerly interim dean of engineering, to be interim executive director of the Research Foundation. That adds to a list of several interim appointments to key posts that also includes Henry McDonald as interim vice president for research and Brice Bible as interim vice president for information technology. As per the conventions of academia, searches are underway to fill all of these positions on a permanent basis.
An even bigger job that's been on an interim footing since last fall is the chancellorship of UT's Health Science Center in Memphis. The search for a successor to highly-regarded Bill Rice, who retired, was due to be concluded this month but is taking longer.
Along with opportunities emanating from Oak Ridge, the Health Science Center is pivotal in Shumaker's plans for making UT "an internationally competitive research university." Two initiatives aimed at furthering this cause are a federal designation as a cancer center and the creation of a College of Public Health which Shumaker has termed "a license to print money." But both of these quests are still pending.
The biggest impediment to the university's making progress, though, is a paucity of state funding. A 9 percent tuition increase that trustees are expected to approve today will offset more than half the $15 million that Gov. Phil Bredesen's budget cut from the Knoxville campus alone. But the prospects for getting any increase in state funding anytime soon are very poor.
So John Shumaker could well be facing another rocky year ahead.
June 19, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 25
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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