Metro Pulse/Insights/What's Going Right at UT

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by Joe Sullivan

Amid all the furor over what's gone wrong at UT, more attention needs to be paid to things that are going right. Despite the Shumaker debacle and the pinch of state funding cuts, UT's flagship Knoxville campus is making progress on a number of fronts, both in terms of strengthening existing academic programs and pursuing new initiatives.

Many academic administrators say a lot of the credit starts at the campus' helm with the leadership of Chancellor Loren Crabtree. He gets plaudits both for the goals he has set to enhance UT's academic stature and for his resourcefulness in coming up with funding to make strides toward fulfilling them.

"Loren Crabtree has a very clear understanding of what makes a university good, and that's primarily the best faculty we can get. He's demonstrated very clearly that he thinks it's important to reduce administrative costs and transfer those savings to hiring faculty," says the head of UT's history department, Todd Diacom.

Crabtree has, of course, been embroiled in controversy himself over his decision to remove Marleen Davis as dean of the College of Architecture and Design. Davis is highly regarded in her field and also for her commitment to the community as a whole. But Crabtree made the tough decision that her persistent overruns of the college's budget, despite repeated admonitions, could no longer be tolerated.

While progress has been made on many fronts, it can be exemplified by looking at three UT departments where demonstrable strengthening has occurred over the past two years. The three departments—English, History and Microbiology—are all central to the university's teaching and research missions, and a capsulization of the strides they have been making follows:

English— During the dark years of the 1990s, the size of UTs English faculty eroded from 43 positions to a low of 34. But five new hires over the past two years, plus three more in the offing for next year, are due to restore its ranks. Department head John Zomchick also stresses the quality of the new faculty members who are concentrated in two fields in which the department has elected to focus its rebuilding efforts: medieval literature and 20th century American literature. The prize catch is Roy Liuzza, a medieval scholar who is coming to UT from Tulane. His new position will, in turn, contribute to the development of a multi-disciplinary Medieval Studies Center in conjunction with the History Department. "What we hope to do is build a nationally recognized center that will enable us to attract some of the best and brightest graduate students here to study medieval culture not only in England but in Europe as well," Zomchick says.

At the same time, freshman English composition classes, which had swelled far above the optimum size of 20 students, have been brought down to an average of 23 students with further reductions in the offing.

History— The History Department is also concentrating on selective strengthening to build a national reputation in its chosen field—in this case 19th-century American history. With the presidential papers of Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson as one of the drawing cards, the department has attracted two new full professors with strong reputations in the field. "They instantly made us one of the better places in the country to study antebellum U.S. history," Diacom says.

Two years ago, the number of history graduate students entering UT had shrunk to nine, but this year it's up to 28. Along with strengthening the department's reputation, Diacom also credits another Crabtree initiative: providing better stipends and health insurance to graduate students (who double as teaching assistants). "A year ago we were paying our teaching assistants at the very bottom of the country. Now we're right in the middle [among state universities], and that's also very important in building our faculty, because professors derive a lot of satisfaction from teaching graduate students," he says.

Microbiology— Rebuilding the ranks of a depleted Microbiology Department has taken a lot more than just the salaries of the four new faculty members hired within the past two years. "Each of them needs hundreds of thousands [of dollars] in new equipment to support their research, and it took the leadership of Loren Crabtree and the Dean of Arts and Sciences Stuart Riggsby to allow this to happen," says professor of microbiology Jeffrey Becker. He adds that "within a year or two, these people should be generating outside funding to support their whole research endeavor including the cost of technicians, supplies and equipment, but they've got to have a start-up package from the university."

Much of the revitalized department's effort has been channeled into a new program called Genome Science and Technology that involves several other UT departments in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. About 40 faculty members and 30 graduate students are involved in all, and Becker reports that, "we're attracting really good young researchers into that program." Its aim: applying information from the sequencing of the human genome and understanding how a cell or organism works.

For all these steps in the right direction, it would be Pollyannaish to portray UT as a university that's clearly on a path toward progress. Only limited academic gains can be derived from administrative savings, and there's fear that the Shumaker debacle will serve to intensify budgetary constraints. When it comes to leadership on the Knoxville campus, though, many would join with Diacom when he says, "My hope is that the Board of Trustees, and the interim president and the future president will say, 'We're going to let Loren Crabtree run it the way he thinks it ought to be run.' That's the best way to fix the University of Tennessee."