At our APSCUF-KU Meet and Discuss meeting yesterday, I was able to articulate something that I’ve attempted to say many times before, but rarely with such clarity (in my head at least). We were on the second item on the agenda [APSCUF-KU MD 16 Nov 2010 Agenda] focused on retrenchment past, present, and future. I listed the last item under our discussion of retrenchment as follows:
d. Administration’s understanding of “smart growth.” Request vision statement for what this entails and how departments should begin thinking about long-term development.
The reason for focusing on “smart growth” as a concept had to do with the way that Ken Long, Assistant Vice President for Administration and Finance, and Matt Delany, KU Budget Director, used the term at their budget presentation at ChairNet’s October meeting (10/19/2010). At one point, Ken Long said that “we” need to look at areas where we can have growth with no additional resources. He called this concept, “smart growth.” He said that it was a term that LAS Dean Anne Zayaitz had used at a recent meeting. One of the chairs interrupted him to ask if he understood what the term smart growth meant and that it did not mean to “grow without any additional resources.”
I anchored our discussions of retrenchment around this term because it was being used by one of the university’s chief budget people with little sense of the concept’s rich practical and conceptual history. At yesterday’s meeting, I noted that when Dr. Zayaitz uses the term, I trust that she is using it in a manner more consistent with the term’s full meaning. However, when I hear the term being picked up after “hearing it a meeting” by the Budget Office in the midst of what it keeps on calling a financial crisis, you might understand why someone trained in rhetoric would prick up his ears.
My point of bringing what could be dismissed as a simple misuse of a term, was that I wanted to press the administration to put forward a vision statement for the university that would provide some rationale to what otherwise seems like an ad-hoc process of budget cutting. I know that upon reading this several members of the administration will throw up their hands in outrage and my characterization of their decision-making process as ad-hoc. By ad-hoc I do not mean that the administration did not do work. I mean that as of today they have not articulated any coherent vision that would explain the criteria they used to make their cuts. Perhaps it was a process of matching existing programs and faculty with dollar amounts without regard for the impact on academics. Who knows.
On the one hand, the administration has made the case that they are making budget cuts because of a financial crisis. OK. It would seem to me that if a university has to make significant cuts in its programs and effectively fire tenured faculty members, then I would think the administration would use that opportunity to think long and hard about the priorities and future of the university. If I were the president of a university at a time of such cuts, you could be damn sure that my first order of business would be a process to establish clear, public, and purposeful principles that would guide the cuts. I would want to ensure that everyone–students, faculty, the community, state legislatures, and the media–could all see where the university was going and how it planned on weathering such severe cuts. I would recognize that hard decisions had to be made, but it would be critical that all stakeholders had a clear understanding of why certain programs (e.g. the Early Learning Center) were being cut, while others (e.g. the College of Business) were seeing increased funding. It only makes sense to do so.
In the absence of any clear vision, there are few ways of reading the administration’s action other than conjecture. In the examples I’ve given above, I could make a case that the university is clearly shifting its focus away from its long tradition as a teachers college and toward business and “vocational” programs. Cutting the nursing program seems to suggest that KU has decided not to contribute to the kind of workforce development in health care that the state seems to need. The elimination of the Advising Center along with cuts in programs for at-risk students seems to suggest that the administration is moving away from its mission to serve the surrounding communities in favor of more “traditional” students. The fact is, none of us know. We’re stuck reading tea leaves.
What I do know is that in the absence of any clear administrative vision, any set of principles that will guide the next round of cuts (I am just going to go ahead an assume there will be a next round based upon the latest administrative public relations materials), all faculty and staff will be on edge wondering if they will be the next victim of administrative cuts. When the English department is asked to reconsider its growth, what does that mean? Based upon what? When the administration says that as part of its current planning for the next round of budget cuts the Department of Academic Enrichment is being “looked at,” what does that mean? Looked at how? How is such a department supposed to make a case for its own value? In short, a tremendous amount of work is going to be put into guessing on ways to demonstrate the value of our academic programs.
Just take a look at President Cevallos’s “KU President’s Update” from 11/4/2010. Here’s how he explains the administration’s decision to close the Early Learning Center:
While closing a facility that traces its roots back to our lab school days is hard to do, we must do what is best for the overall health of the College of Education and the university in general.
The potential projected budget gap for our institution for 2011-12 remains at $5.6 to $11.4 million. The university expects to realize about $130,000 in direct savings through the elimination of the Early Learning Center.
I’d like to know the criteria for determining “what is best.” For that matter, how does the administration actually examine its “patients” to determine their “health.” What does it mean to take the pulse of a College? My guess is that President Cevallos can’t articulate a coherent answer to these questions. If he can, I am waiting to be proven wrong. Terms like “best” and “health” in this context are empty signifiers. They “make sense” because they draw upon concepts that everyone readily recognizes, but when pressed, they mean nothing. Higher education administrators have a long history of using such vacuous language in order to justify courses of action. In his 1996 book The University in Ruins
, Bill Readings argued along these lines when it came to the growing use of the term “excellence” in higher education:
Today, all departments can be urged to strive for excellence, since the general applicability of the notion is in direct relation to its emptiness. Thus, for instance, the Office of Research and University Graduate Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington explains that in its Summer Faculty Fellowship program “Excellence of the proposed scholarship is the major criterion employed in the evaluation procedure.” The statement is, of course, entirely meaningless, yet the assumption is that the invocation of excellence overcomes the problem of the question of value across disciplines, since excellence is the common denominator of good research in all fields. Even if this were so, it would mean that excellence could not be invoked as a “criterion,” because excellence is not a fixed standard of judgement but a qualifier whose meaning is fixed in relation to something else. An excellent boat is not excellent by the same criteria as an excellent plane. So to say that excellence is a criterion is to say absolutely nothing other than that the committee will not reveal the criteria used to judge applications (23-4).
By asking the administration to provide a vision statement for the university and, by extension, the principles by which they will use to cut us, I was asking for their criteria. President Cevallos is welcome to talk about “best” and “health” as much as he likes. However, it will be little more than wasted air if he continues to fail to provide any guiding sense of leadership for the university. In the absence of willingness or ability to do so, this task falls upon the rest of Kutztown’s administration. That is, after all, part of what they get paid for.
Earlier this week I got caught up in a talk given by Bennington College’s President, Dr. Elizabeth Coleman at a February 2009 TED conference . I literally sat in my chair with my mouth open. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Coleman actually had a vision for a higher education institution that wasn’t rife with recycled MBA clichés . Not only did she have a vision for a New Liberal Arts at Bennington, she had led the college through a fundamental overhaul of the college curriculum. That is, she didn’t just have a nice vision. She enacted it.
Coleman’s moves were not without controversy. Some faculty lost their jobs. Certain programs were eliminated. In short, it wasn’t a big love fest. And yet, the Coleman’s restructuring of Bennington’s Curriculum was intentional and purposeful. You might not like some of the decisions being made, but you knew why they were being made. And from my perspective, her vision is not only coherent, but inspirational. But don’t take my word for it. Check her talk out for yourself below. If you need a teaser, here’s how she begins her talk:
I know college presidents are not the first people who come to mind when the subject is the use of the creative imagination.
Here’s Coleman:
Can you just imagine such a vision emerging from KU’s president or even the Chancellor of the State System of Higher Education? I can’t. And that’s the shame of it. PASSHE’s mission is to provide affordable higher education to citizens of Pennsylvania (primarily). It’s a shame that our students, our faculty, and staff are subjected to such a failure of vision.
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been useful for me to return to the words of the critical teacher and education activist, Paulo Freire. While Freire turns up on syllabi and bibliographies, times like these should remind us that words alone are not enough. How we put commitments into practice–in our own lives–is where the rubber hits the road. So, as we get ready to head off to Thanksgiving break, I am thankful for this reminder from Freire’s 1973 book Education for Critical Consciousness
, and local/global activism. It seemed like a good way to gear up for the Thanksgiving break…and truth be told, I spent my morning commute listening to Christmas music. I was going to get into a holiday mood by hook or by crook.
Christina J. Steffy
Kevin Mahoney
Amy LB
APSCUF-KU xchange 
