dagblog - Comments for "Teresa Sullivan and UVa"

Great job, Dr. Cleveland. I

Historiann — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 03:57:19 +0000

Great job, Dr. Cleveland. I think you've laid it all out nicely.

Thanks for the insight,

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 16:13:47 +0000

Thanks for the insight, Steve. That's an excellent illustration. Our non-academic readers should know that this kind of arrangement has become standard. Indeed, many such arrangements involve even lower wages for even larger larger classes.

This post didn't have time to talk about the scandal of adjunct labor, but one of the things that has happened over the last decades is an increasing demand on the humanities to turn higher and higher profits, the better to fund other things. And hiring adjuncts, rather than full-time faculty, has been a major result of that.

As an adjunct teaching

Steve R — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:07:12 +0000

In reply to Thanks for your comment,

As an adjunct teaching required composition courses at a large (private) university, I feel qualified to comment here. I'm paid about $5k to teach a composition course of 19 students. If you add up the amount those students nominally pay for the course (as a fraction of each of their total tuition bills), it comes to about $90k. Of course, that's assuming they're all paying full freight, which is unlikely. Let's assume the total figure is something more like $45k. I can't imagine that my course's portion of ongoing administrative, building maintenance costs, etc. tallies up to $40k, so clearly, my course is thoroughly subsidizing something. There are two required courses at the university: both are housed in the English dept., and about 90% of both are taught by adjuncts. That makes the English dept. quite a profit center. From an administrative standpoint, it's brilliant; the English dept. can call more shots than you'd expect, because they're funding all kinds of stuff. From an ethical standpoint (underpaying a cadre of fire-at-will instructors to deliver a universally-shared experience for undergraduates) it's reprehensible. Unfortunately, it's such a common practice at universities that few (except the adjuncts) question its ethics. (And e-learning is just the same thing on a larger scale: I know of another local university whose music education e-learning program funds the entire fine arts dept., which waits to hear about e-learning enrollments before sending acceptance letters.)

How's that strategy working

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 21:16:17 +0000

In reply to Cleveland comments are very

How's that strategy working out for them?

Cleveland comments are very

Dave Campbell — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:52:47 +0000

In reply to Teresa Sullivan and UVa

Cleveland comments are very convincing. Too bad the good doctor has such a problem with "business types." We nasty business types know that whatever moves are taken, they are senseless unless they support the strategy. Strategies are senseless unless they are meant to achieve objectives. Objectives are senseless unless they are defined and measurable. In UVA's case (I have no relationship with UVA), it appears that the BOV is charged with defining objectives, taking its counsel from whatever sources its individual members choose.

Thanks for your comment,

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 20:48:37 +0000

In reply to Dr. Cleveland - Thank you for

Thanks for your comment, Chris. And I'm very sorry to see what's happening at Virginia. Let me say up front that I don';t have any insider information. If I were a UVa insider, I would not be blogging about UVa under a pseudonym (and I don't use this blog to discuss my actual employer).

I'm basing this post about what I know about how universities run in general, and what had been more or less reliably reported by the press.

So I might be wrong about the Medical Center. I certainly have some other details not quite right (Sullivan has done some online-learning stuff, although not in the big exciting way her opponents wanted). And I haven't seen budget numbers for any of these schools or departments.

But this is what I know about just about every school: the humanities are a profit center, because their overhead is so low. This seems counter-intuitive if you think of it like a student choosing a major or a professional school. It's easy to assume that the fields where graduates get more lucrative first jobs are where the money is. But that doesn't follow at all. There's no connection between how financially profitable something is to learn and how profitable it is to teach. Schools often lose money, or just break even, on the "practical" majors and turn a profit on the "impractical" classes.

English literature is very cheap to teach. You have a professor, you have some students, the students buy some books and read them: you're in business. Engineering programs, on the other hand, are crazy expensive. You need labs and equipment and lab staff and all kinds of things. (And on average you're paying the engineering professors significantly more than the English professors.) The overhead for STEM is very high, especially when you consider the research programs that it takes to keep STEM faculty happy. (The overhead on humanities research is also usually low. I did some humanities research today. It involved reading books.) This is how UVa became stronger in the humanities than the STEM fields in the first place. They were building a general-purpose university, but their money bought them stronger humanities departments than STEM departments.

It's true, humanists don't bring in much grant money, but STEM grant money gets eaten up, and sometimes more than eaten up, by the research projects that bring the grant money in. And schools spend to attract the grant money.

So it's about overhead. But a school can charge the same amount of tuition for 3 credits of low-overhead Art History class as it can charge for 3 credits of a high-overhead course in Organic Chemistry. Yes, the school might charge a small lab fee for organic chem, but if they were turning a profit on that tuition, would they need the fee? So, for example, First-year composition classes at many universities are a major revenue generator. They're cheap to teach, and you can charge the same amount per credit hour as you could for a computer-science course that required lots of hardware and server time. But I guarantee you, all the revenue from teaching comp doesn't stay in the comp program, or go to giving the comp teachers raises. It goes to soak up the red ink elsewhere.

German and Classics at UVa may well be profitable programs. They are likely not the profit centers that other humanities disciplines are because they spend a lot of time on the most expensive kind of humanities teaching, which is language instruction. (Language instruction is labor-intensive, and requires a high degree of professional competence, i.e., a teacher who is not only fluent in the target language but speaks it with a native or near-native accent.) At worst, those programs might run a small deficit (because a small department of humanists can really only run a small deficit), so much so that eliminating them would actually not save much money.

(That's before we factor in things like endowed chairs. Many of the Classics professors have professorships funded by the investment returns on money donated specifically to fund a chair in classics. The money can only be used for that.)

I know this does not seem intuitive. But people like to talk about teaching the humanities as "wasteful" or "expensive" because they don't like the humanities and think they're impractical. (Speaking German doesn't strike me as a useless skill, but whatever.) When people say that teaching the humanities is too expensive, they're not really being practical. They're being emotional.

Chris brings up an

PublicSchoolEngy — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:54:59 +0000

In reply to Dr. Cleveland - Thank you for

Chris brings up an interesting point. I'll put my devil's advocate hat on for a second.

Should a program's profitability 'score' give consideration to the post-graduation donations of the alumni base it generates? Are these 'spires' in the STEM areas investments in future cash flow?

/DA hat off.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the original post and the discussion. It's an unfortunate subject matter, but it is a great case study in the issues facing public education.

Dr. Cleveland - Thank you for

CeeJay — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:40:46 +0000

In reply to Teresa Sullivan and UVa

Dr. Cleveland -

Thank you for an excellent article that shows your understanding of the situation and gave me some new ways of looking at the problem at UVa.

I'm a multi-degree alumnus, and I'm deeply saddened by the harm that I think this power play will bring to the University of Virginia.

I am particularly intrigued by your third (and most counter-intuitive) point. Given the Board (or at least the Rector's) ham-fisted handling of this situation and the apparent desire to apply wildly inapplicable models to the "pursuit of excellence" at U.Va, I instinctively distrust their vision for the university. If "program prioritization" is part of that vision, and I agree that it seems to be one of the pillars of Dragas' vision, I'd like to understand more about it.

While the whole concept is counter-intuitive, I am most intrigued by the assertion that the humanities are a profitable "pillar," from which revenue can be "borrowed" to fund other programs. I had always understood that the College of Arts and Sciences, the home of the humanities at UVa, and its graduate college parents, were the least profitable "schools" in the University -- graduate humanities faculty don't bring in much grant money, and while the alumni base is large, it's not as (relatively) affluent or as generous as the alumni of other "colleges" at U.Va. Perhaps what I've read focuses only on giving, though, not on a ratio of tuition to cost.

The "cost" of the Medical Center is another counter-intuitive piece of this puzzle. I have recently read that UVa Health System was operating at a profit (article from local Charlottesville paper here: http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/2011/sep/15/uva-health-system-profits-soar-ar-1313370/ ). When you say "Medical Center", do you mean the hospital, the Med School, something else entirely, or some combination of the three? Thanks.

Again, I appreciate your taking the time to share your view on the fiasco unfolding in Charlottesville. You offered a fresh and interesting perspective that helped me to see the situation in a new way.

Thanks,

Chris

With regards to the ranking

Verified Atheist — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:03:45 +0000

In reply to Well, anonymous, that is

With regards to the ranking comment, I think it's worth stressing a major point that Tudor left out of his op/ed. Although UVA's over all ranking has dropped to #25, its ranking for public schools is tied for #2. It's been tied for #1 or #2 for as long as I can remember. (Also, let's not forget that these are US News & World Report rankings. I still can't believe how much traction they get!)

This really has little to do with your point, it's just I wanted to put it out there, for obvious reasons.

Well, anonymous, that is

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:30:00 +0000

In reply to Doc, when I said

Well, anonymous, that is still a narrow view of "stakeholders." And your argument still suffers from the fact that you have no evidence for it and ignore contravening evidence. The emphasis on "transformative" and "bold" leadership can be confirmed from multiple sources. It's also not clear that the Board faction had the whale donors or the economically-influential Virginians lined up. Since there are public statements from 7-,8-, and even 9-figure donors who are clearly infuriated by the move, it's clear that even by your definition all the "stakeholders" don't come down on one side.

This was not a move by a broad class of stakeholders, but by a small group. (Including John Paul Tudor, linked above, who was perhaps disgruntled when he gave $12 million for a Yoga Center and Sullivan turned it into an interdisciplinary "Contemplative Studies" center that included yoga, but would not be an academic embarrassment to the university. What Sullivan did there is pretty much the definition of how a university administrator should deal with that kind of gift.)

As I said in the original post, the beauty of a great school like UVa is that no one is bigger than the school. Even the biggest name on the faculty is just one star among many. Even the biggest financial donor is dwarfed by the rest of the donors. (JPT's $12 million gift is equivalent to what UVa has been routinely raising every two weeks.) A small cabal of deciders always has too narrow a power base to go it alone. I'd also like to come back to your exclusion of faculty and students from the "stakeholders" category. You write:

Nor did I mean the faculty, legislature or students -- although surely the faculty and students are affected most directly by the University's success.

You seem to presume that the University's success affects the faculty and students, but that the faculty and students do not influence UVa's success. If I have that right, you really misunderstand how universities work. The faculty, and even the students, certainly affect a school's long-, short-, and middle-term success, including its financial health.

It's clear that Sullivan's antagonists are concerned with UVa's rankings. (JPT's editorial kvetches that over the last quarter-century the school has fallen to #25.) But those rankings are largely based on faculty reputation and the makeup of the student body. Virginia has excellent faculty of whom many are, essentially, making salary concessions in order to stay at Virginia. (Consuming some of their market wages in happiness, as economists say.) A good deal of the strategy being discussed, by both Sullivan and her opponents, is how to retain those faculty and how to attract more like them. Everyone involved in this dispute agrees on that strategic reality, because if the cream of that faculty gets skimmed off by rival schools, Virginia's reputation and ranking will fall, and with its ability to attract premier students, faculty, and, in the long run, capital from donors. (As I've blogged before, prestige is the key to attracting donations over time.)

And of course, UVa's faculty is about to be raided. Evidently faculty are already getting recruiting calls. As Sullivan told the Board yesterday, administrators at rival schools are now setting aside the cash to raid Virginia's faculty over the next academic year. Of course they are. In their shoes, I'd do the same.

And while it's easy to dismiss the happiness of current students, no university can ignore the happiness of prospective students. They are where the tuition money comes from. Even more importantly, the university's rankings are partly based on how selective they can afford to be in admissions. If the average SAT/ACT scores of your entering class goes down, your ranking goes down. And those scores do go down when fewer students apply. If your current students are unhappy about something for a few weeks, they get over it. If your current students are very, very unhappy about something for months on end, that unhappiness eventually gets communicated to prospective students, who become less likely to come.

One place where the Board's amateur-hour drama has almost certainly hurt UVa is in the ability to attract quality students from out-of-state, who are crucial in the current model of unfunded public education. Just to keep its budget intact, UVa needs to charge a whole bunch of students out-of-state tuition. That's not a problem for a great university like Virginia. But it is a problem for a great university that's suddenly going through pointless turmoil, like Virginia. Will UVa still find enough out-of-state students to fill those beds and pay that tuition? Probably. But they'll have to dig deeper in the pool, taking less qualified students. That means the quality of a UVa education will go down, both in reality and on paper. Taking non-Virginians with lower GPAs and SATs means falling in the rankings. And decline like that can take on inertial momentum, because once you're no longer perceived as a top school it becomes harder to attract the people who would help you climb back up the ladder.