BY JUDITH GRANT

This three-part article continues from Part 1 and Part 2.

Failure to Invest in the Region

At OU, we have a special mission to educate the citizens of the state of Ohio, especially those in the region of Appalachia. “Today, fewer Ohio adults age 25-64 have at least an Associate’s degree or a high-quality workforce credential compared with the rest of the nation. The numbers are even more alarming for minorities. In Ohio, 26 percent of African Americans and 27 percent of Hispanics have at least an associate’s degree or high quality workforce credential compared to 40 percent of whites…The lack of access to higher education in Ohio has not only hurt prospective students, it has harmed whole communities.”²² This particular aspect of our mission points to the importance of the regional campuses of Ohio University. These campuses have suffered greatly even to the point of being ignored as meaningful parts of the Ohio University structure. In recognition of this fact, the university devised the “One Ohio” plan, intended to unite the Athens campus with the regionals in a common mission to serve the state of Ohio. Key features of One Ohio included financial plans to tie the regionals more firmly to the Athens departments in order to incentivize the integration of regional faculty into their respective departments. It seems as though this plan has also been abandoned, and the fate of the regional campuses, their students and faculties, remain tenuous.

In short, at Ohio University, faculty have been reeling from a merry-go-round of budget emergencies and failed solutions for decades. The aforementioned are just a few examples. An untallied amount of labor time has been spent by faculty responding to executive requests for a dizzying number of plans and data only to face the abandonment of this plan or the irrelevancy of those data. Faculty labor has been squandered even as administrators flee outward and upward to higher-paying jobs attained with resumés built on their time at Ohio University, irrespective of whether their initiatives actually left the University better off. Meanwhile, major structural problems at Ohio University remain unsolved. From 2008-2009 to 2017-2018, a period of 9 years, average faculty salaries only increased a total of 1.7% in real inflation adjusted terms, while tuition was increased 13.9% in real inflation-adjusted terms. During the period 2009-2010 to 2018-2019 spending on administrative salaries increased 23.4% in inflation adjusted terms.

Note that spending on administrative salaries was increased in real terms at close to twice the rate of inflation of the increase in tuition, 23.4% versus 13.9%, indicating that in a short period of time a significant amount of resources shifted to administrative salaries and away from the core teaching and research functions of the university.²³ In short, the problems we now face are not just the fault of the current administration. They come from decades of poor leadership and mismanagement.

Lessons in How Not to Plan

The current strategic plan, “Fearlessly First,” is neither fearless nor first. In fact, it is entirely predictable, looks like the plans of almost every other university, and repeats the past mistakes of previous leadership at OU. It looks to the very same set of solutions to which every other public university is looking: recruit more students, offer more courses online, create a more fluid faculty workforce that can – as the OU document often repeats – “pivot” to respond to market trends, “rapidly deliver market responsive programs,” “rapidly launch new programs” and “sunset old ones” if they are “ineffective,” presumably, as measured in terms of financial stability.²⁴

Like many strategic plans, it is a budget model wrapped in housekeeping issues that masquerades as vision. Far from being “fearless,” this strategy is born of financial panic and offers nothing that is not present in dozens of other university strategic plans. No public universities will be “first” with these tired solutions. As Arthur Levine has argued in his observations about higher education’s new status as a “mature industry:” “Most colleges and universities in the country” are “fundamentally alike” and vary primarily in the “number of professional programs” or in size of undergraduate and graduate programs.²⁵ “The answer to the ‘revenue problem’ has always been ‘get more students who can pay’ or ‘go recruit in a new market.’ Those wells are drying up.”²⁶ In short, if Ohio University adopts the same hackneyed point of view of every other university, it can only hope to keep its head above water in the sea of universities adopting the very same strategies, eventually sinking as it diverts more revenue from the academic mission to marketing and recruitment.

In an ideal world, the State of Ohio would understand its financial responsibility to educate its citizens and would increase the state share of instructional costs to its state universities and colleges. But we do not live in an ideal world. And given recent national trends, increases in state funding are extremely unlikely to be forthcoming, especially if university leaders do not aggressively advance the case for higher education as a public good. It does not take a business model to know that an institution needs money to run. However, money management cannot substitute for or drive the strategic vision. An alternate vision can demonstrate what kind of goals emerge if we begin with the principle that higher education is a public good whose primary mission is teaching and research. If we follow the path of cutting university expenses based solely upon administrator’s perceptions of economic inefficiencies, we will lose our hearts and souls as academics and as citizens. More to the point, we will participate in the destruction of public education. The ultimate losers will be our students and their parents, who make substantial financial sacrifices for a college education, and the citizens of Ohio, all of whom benefit from the public good of high-quality higher education. We owe them better.

Vision

Ultimately, the concrete components of any vision that would emerge from a reframing of the university as a public good would have to come from the collaborative work of faculty and administrators using a very robust shared governance. They cannot come from one person writing an analysis. However, an analysis of our situation from a changed point of view does suggest that we ought to favor some options over others. For example, faculty cuts of any kind – including the firing of instructional faculty, should be an absolute last resort. Faculty are at the heart of teaching and research, and it could be mentioned, also of revenue production. Likewise, there should probably be no change in faculty teaching loads since teaching loads should be commensurate with the expectations of an institution with a research active faculty. If we take teaching seriously, instructional faculty should be paid a wage that is consistent with their status as highly skilled professionals. They ought to be offered the opportunity for teaching intensive tenure track jobs because their academic freedom is as crucial as that of tenured faculty. We should end the fiction that faculty spend 20% of their time on service, since the devolution of clerical tasks onto faculty, rising service obligations and so on, require increasing levels of faculty time. Extra service should either be compensated with extra pay or service expectations broadly understood should be realigned to acknowledge that faculty time is not infinitely expandable.

Any necessary cuts should begin from the places that are least central to the primary missions of teaching and research. They should first come from executive salaries, executive bonuses, the hiring of assistants and expensive outside consultants, and from right-sizing the most expensive parts of athletics. Perhaps we do not need to have OU on television with teams playing to nearly empty stadiums. Perhaps an improved library is more important than a study center for athletes. Perhaps improving current classroom technology and scientist’s lab facilities is more important than paying Pearson. We should pay more attention to high quality academics, and not only for the sake of “efficiencies” or “revenue generation” or “marketing.” Initiatives such as Ohio Honors, Certificates, Themes should be guided by curricular standards, workload concerns and academic integrity. Fundraising priorities should be brought into line with transparent goals that are driven by the needs of students’ academic work and faculty needs to do their jobs well. We could evaluate fundraising on its value to the mission, not merely on how many dollars it brings in. In general, we ought to stop empowering finance to dictate rules that inhibit faculty research. We should freeze regional campus budgets until we figure out how to use those campuses to fully engage the important role that they have in the creation of leaders in Appalachia. We should budget on realistic enrollment projections, and respect limits to growth using measures of quality education and quality students. We should play to OU’s historic strength as a residential campus with a strong commitment to the liberal arts, and excellence in its professional schools.

No one is going to give this to us. We must demand it.

Judith Grant is a professor of political science at Ohio University and a member of the AAUP chapter there. 

Endnotes:

[22] Mark Nevin, “To Make College Affordable Increase State Funding,” Lancaster Eagle Gazette (January 19, 2019).

[23] OU-AAUP White Paper, Fall 2019-2020, “Ohio University’s Budget Crisis.

[24] Molly Young, “Garbage Language: Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?,” New York (February 20, 2020).

[25] Arthur Levine, “Higher Education’s New Status as a Mature Industry,” Chronicle of Higher Education (January 31, 1997).

[26] Jon Boeckenstedt, Angel B. Pérez, Richard A. Clark, Madeleine Rhyneer, and Stefanie D. Niles, “Where Did All the Students Go? Five Views on the Great Enrollment Crash,” Chronicle Review (October 2, 2019).