Chair Talk #12
Chair Talk #12 (again with help from Prof. Tricia Serio)
I sat in the stadium a few weeks ago, along with about 40,000 others, to celebrate the UA’s 151st Commencement on a perfect May evening in Tucson. It was a well-orchestrated and joyful event. My role was to carry the mace, help hood the Honorary Degree awardees, and sit on the platform for the 90+ minute ceremony. An excellent time to reflect on the past, present and future of the UA.
Our past is impressive – we have risen to be among the world’s top research universities. But our future is uncertain. Over the next 10-15 years there is going to be a significant ‘shake-out’ amongst the top tier of public research universities, almost all of whom are struggling for resources. The UA is currently in that top tier, although our position within it has slipped in recent years. This shake-out will result in only a handful of publics surviving in the top echelon, while many others fall behind.
Our core challenge is to make sure we are amongst those that thrive, and to do it in a way that sacrifices neither the quality of the enterprise nor the unique culture that enabled the UA to become the first-rate institution it is, and determinedly seeks to remain.
Given this almost existential challenge, how do we proceed?
To start, faculty engagement will be essential. I write now to encourage you to spend some of your time, before the next academic year begins, thinking about what you can do individually and what we might do collectively to ensure that we sustain and even enhance the University’s standing.
To successfully meet the core challenge we have to continuously invest in high quality faculty and infrastructure. Given shrinking state support and limits to what our students can afford to pay for tuition, it is clear that in order to make these investments we will have to be more strategic in how we handle our resources.
Broadly, two kinds of strategies are available:
- Increase the total resource base (through philanthropy and new/expanded academic programs)
- Use existing resources more efficiently (in how we teach and run the university)
No one will argue with the strategy of trying to increase the size of the base. That’s not quite the case when one talks about increasing efficiency. In a recent Chair Talk, Prof. Tricia Serio and I pointed out that we can gain efficiency (e.g., save money) by teaching more, teaching more cheaply, or teaching more “rationally.” We already do some of the first two – larger classes, more part-time faculty – but there are limits to these two approaches. First, teaching loads have effectively risen in recent years for various reasons. All faculty teach, and most teach well, but further increases in teaching loads will only work against the goal of strengthening our research and scholarship. Second, while using cheap labor to provide instruction more efficiently may be one way to “save” our research/scholarship, it’s many short-comings , both practical and ethical, have led UA leadership and faculty alike to agree that we should limit, and even decrease, the extent to which we employ part-time faculty.
This brings us to being more rational about our instructional mission. This will involve hard work because there are disciplinary distinctions to be addressed and much of the optimizing we need to achieve will require looking across Departments and even Colleges. Hard work yes, but also very necessary work if we are to meet the challenge we face.
I suspect we're all part of a university because we want our professional activities to be balanced between research, teaching, and various forms of creative activity and scholarship. All must be preserved if we are to attract and retain the best faculty and the unique educational experiences they provide to our students. Threats to any of these constitute a threat to the entire enterprise, and rationalizing our approach to instruction is a way to try to preserve our balance.
Given all this, I would invite you to start this hard work, gently over the summer, by occasionally contemplating the following: how can we rationally re-structure the ways we approach our instructional mission so as to free up resources? While UA Online will be a part of any comprehensive solution, the bulk of what we will be doing for the next 5-10 years will be here on campus, and it is our programs on campus that need our attention now.
If we can, collectively, as a Faculty, figure out how to re-structure the ways we disseminate knowledge, we might just enhance our institutional capacity to continue generating new knowledge. Doing this in a state whose political culture poorly understands the value of research and scholarship is challenging indeed – but if we don’t take on the challenge we almost certainly doom ourselves to mediocrity, something I wager most of us are not at all willing to accept. I intend to make this issue a focus of my second (and last) year as your Faculty Chair.
Enjoy the summer, and your scholarly and other pursuits – see you in August! And I can’t promise your inbox won’t be cluttered with further thoughts along these lines as I and the other faculty officers ponder the future this summer.
Lynn Nadel
Chair of the Faculty