This year marks my 30th as a tenure-track faculty member at the University of Utah, a position that I have enjoyed immensely. I've been able to pursue my scientific and educational passions with zeal and I've been able to work with a lot of great students, faculty, and staff. I think it was the perfect place for me to land. Plus the skiing was great!
However, things have changed in recent years, perhaps reflecting an acceleration of long-term trends in higher education. The U has become increasingly top heavy, with more administrators being paid increasingly high salaries. There's less interest and respect for the knowledge and perspectives of the regular faculty and more top-down management. There's increasing digital bureaucracy, often obtuse in design, interfering with our ability to work "efficiently" (I put that in quotes because that word is being thrown around a lot these days as if it were the holy grail of higher education). More and more, my position is being treated as a commodity, broken down into discrete chunks to ensure that my workload is properly "managed" by formulas designed by beancounters who can quantify everything but value.
These trends are sucking the soul out of higher education. They will degrade educational quality and research innovation and they will limit our ability to recruit and retain high-quality faculty.
Today the Salt Lake Tribune reported that the U spent $6 million to hire a consultant (McKinsey & Company) to help "streamline processes and reduce wasteful redundancies across campus." The first $3.2 million involved "looking at the University's internal data, studying its systems, and developing an understanding of what's working and what's not". You know, the stuff that our administrators are supposed to be doing, potentially in consultation with our faculty, staff, and students. When I started at the U, I knew administrators who had deep knowledge of the internal workings at the University, who had won teaching awards, and who understood the challenges of pursuing teaching and research excellence as a faculty member. Today we talk about workload policies, key performance indicators, and how we can make more "data-driven" decisions.
Certainly the U needs to evolve, but the pendulum has swung too far, resulting in tyranny of the metrics and depreciation of the deep knowledge and experience of our faculty. I expect to see it increasingly challenging to recruit and retain the best faculty, a situation that may be exacerbated when programs are cut later this year, as being proposed by the legislature. During the 2008 recession, when we faced deep budget cuts, I remember the administration saying that they would never cut programs because it would be so damaging to the reputation of the U and make it difficult to recruit the best faculty.
One of my colleagues left the U last summer after almost 20 years and I am aware of others who are pursuing external opportunities. The latter is not unusual with high-performing faculty, but there are people who I believe would prefer to stay and who are now considering other options. The U is an economic driver for the state through research innovation, but the $691 million in external funding we received last year was down from $768 million the prior year, a decline of about 10%. I have served as the principal investigator for 22 externally funded grants during my career and co-investigator on several others, but am not pursuing as many opportunities now due to inadequate post-award support. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.
I share these views because I love the University of Utah and its students, faculty, and staff. I don't know how widely my perspectives are shared by others and perhaps I am an outlier. My views are personal and the U is a big, diverse place and everyone has different experiences. I feel the need though to share them because I am concerned about the future of our institution, which I believe provides incredible value for its students and the State of Utah.
Any opinions or views expressed in this article and on this web site are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utah. They were prepared on a Sunday, during non-work hours, on my personal computer.
Think we’re seeing wildfire smoke aloft today?
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. I find that the University of Utah is following the trend seen in society today. When we think of what advances have been made, nobody looks back and says "thank goodness we had administrators" though high quality administration really can support significant achievement. I only hope we begin to value those that actually contribute to our society rather than those proving the merit of their position in an organization.
ReplyDeleteI very much appreciate this post, and I believe your perspective is shared widely. I am tenured at USU and it is the exact same dynamic. In the last few years, my department has had difficulty recruiting because of low salaries and insufficient research support. Morale is at rock bottom and nearly every tenure line faculty member in my department is now looking for another job because of the actions taken by our administration and the legislature.
ReplyDeleteSpirit vs The Machine
ReplyDeleteWelcome to earth
Thank you for this post. I have been at the U for over 30 years in Biology. I have been active in research over my entire career with significant external funding and won a Distinguished Teaching Award. I am ready to retire within the next year due in large part to the same factors you mention: distrust/disgust with the University administration and greatly increased time-consuming bureaucracy with concomitant decrease in support for PIs grant activities. The nail in the coffin is this year's legislative push to further cut budgets and their demeaning views of our scholarly activities. One of my favorite things about my job is working with and helping students. I will miss that, but I will not miss the ever-tightening clamp-down by the University and Legislature and their disrespectful attitude toward our scholarship and service. I will, however, enjoy having more time to ski, hike, and be outside. See you out there! Lynn Bohs
ReplyDeleteFully agree - The corporate greed mentality has slowly been seeping into the higher ed / university landscape for years. Only a matter of time before the negative impacts limit innovation and progress
ReplyDeleteThis would be a good perspective to submit to the Trib as a letter to the editor. The McKinsey thing is absolutely outrageous, it's the kind of decision that should get people fired. Faculty morale at the U has taken a gigantic beating during the last couple of years and this is absolutely going to affect the quality of the research and teaching done here. Penny wise and pound foolish is right.
ReplyDeleteAs a student at the U it is pretty evident that the administration spends an exorbitant amount of money on extravagant projects and over inflated bureaucracy. I came here for an education (and skiing) but have a sneaking suspicion that far too much of my tuition is mismanaged. They want efficiency? How about getting rid of the two-factor authentication needed for logging on to anything university related, every single time.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason I graduated is because I knew I had to get out of there before things went south. I believe Donald J Trump is the man to fix it!
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, when you allow delusion to superceded excellence you get unqualified, over paid, entitled individuals who deny the reality of what they created on everyone else but themselves. You run into this issue.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, It doesn't look good when a disproportionate amount of professors across the state don't believe in merritocricy because it's "racist" when meritocracy is what built these fine institutions of higher learning. Not identiy politics and bathroom equlity.
Hopefully soon, they will realize the extent of the damage they willfully created when they are looking for work in the private sector and nobody sees gender studies degrees as valuable.
Holding academia accountable by stripping them of their funding, and their hopefully tax status will quickly become a sink or swim situation. You sell a garbage product and you go out of business. You sell excellence and they will come.
Nobody to blame but the Marxists who pushed it to far.
Utah Academia is full of professors who hate this country. They suggest things in classes that are marxist far left propaganda. Advocating for war but won't go themselves. Blaming white people for everything wrong with society. Teaching identity politics but claiming to be inclusive. They preach confirmation bias but they all are biased towards everyone who doesn't think like them. Marxism has infiltrated the highest levels if Utah college's and litterally brainwashes like clock work hopeless young adults. We are paying for our own destruction and implantation of a global utopia where everyone is poor. Shut it down.
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