by Joe Sullivan
For years, former UT presidents and chancellors have talked about the need to prune marginal academic programs in order to concentrate on cultivating programs that are more highly regarded or more central to the university's mission. Yet, even as UT's budgetary constraints have gotten ever more severe, scarcely any such pruning has been done.
Now, at long last, an effort is underway to make good on all the lip service that has been paid to the proposition that UT can't continue to be as many different things to as many different people as it has been in the past. At the initiative of Chancellor Loren Crabtree, a task force has been formed that will focus on eight "relatively uncompetitive" programs that have been identified as candidates for elimination.
Determining their fate will be tedious and fraught with controversy. But the task force's chair, Vice Chancellor Ann Mayhew, is resolved to see it through. "The point is that if we can get this process established, then we will have something in place at this university that we have never had before. We have lots of processes for adding programs. We don't have any processes for getting rid of programs," says Mayhew.
The eight programs being addressed include the Botany Department and graduate degree programs in planning, educational administration, engineering management, and health and safety science. Also on the list are undergraduate majors in engineering physics and human resource development, along with a minor in dance. Mayhew reckons savings to be derived from elimination of all of them would total a little over $1 million, which isn't all that much in relation to the Knoxville campus' overall budget of $346 million. And it would take several years to realize even these limited savings because programs would be phased out so as to allow presently enrolled students to complete their degrees.
Even though the proposed eliminations are far from a solution to UT's budgetary problems, Mayhew views them as an important test of the university's will, and she expects it will be sorely tested. "We're going to get enormous protest on three or four of them," she says. Alumni, parents, students and employers accustomed to hiring UT graduates in a given field will all be heard from. And because they mostly involve the elimination of faculty positions, so will the faculty.
Mayhew's 15-member task force includes several faculty members along with administrators and student representatives. But the faculty's role in the decision making process transcends the task force and is illustrative of just how hard it is to effect change in academia. The task force will initially hold hearings on each proposed elimination, and its timetable calls for making recommendations by the end of February. These will go to the graduate and undergraduate councils of the Faculty Senate which are due, in turn, to make recommendations to the full senate for action in May. Senate recommendations will then go to the chancellor, who will make his own recommendations for action at the June meeting of the Board of Trustees.
A test case that's on a faster track than the others is the proposed elimination of the Department of Planning which offers only one degree program, namely, a masters in urban and regional planning. Because no new students were admitted into the two-year program this fall it will die a natural death after graduation next spring of the 20 second-year students who remain enrolled. Indeed, it's been teetering on the brink ever since the university tried unsuccessfully to kill it several years ago because of its low standing.
That attempt drew a firestorm of protests from planning agencies that draw upon its graduates, and Mayhew readily acknowledges the state's need for professional planners. However, the program is down to two faculty members, and "when you get that small, we're going to have to put more money into it if we're going to rebuild it."
A good case can be made for rebuilding the program, and Mayhew says her task force "will be considering all the pros and cons." One factor is that the University of Memphis offers a well-regarded program in the field, whereas UT's program is so poorly regarded that its accreditation is in jeopardy. "We're going to have to be willing to give up some programs to other schools, and this may be a test case of whether we're willing to do so," Mayhew says.
If the Botany Department is eliminated "we would obviously continue to teach about plants," she says. "One of the things that's happened in the biological sciences is that old departments have disappeared. Zoology has disappeared, and botany has disappeared in many places because we now train in processes that are common to both plant and animal life."
As suggested by its name — The Review and Redirection Task Force — Mayhew's hope is that her unit can free up funds for reallocation to areas of academic strength and opportunity. "Candidates would be in areas of biology, ecology, genome science and sciences that feed off the spallation neutron source where we have a comparative advantage. Exercise science and nutrition are two other areas where we have strength and need to continue to build, and we have lots of other hopes," she says.
The fear, though, is that further state funding cuts that Gov. Phil Bredesen has been forewarning the university to expect will subsume any savings. A five percent reduction that's been intimated would cost UT at Knoxville $8 million and dwarf any savings from the elimination of programs now proposed. But even in that case, the savings would at least cushion the shock. So they beg to be pursued.
November 13, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 46
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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