[Vision2020] Spokesman Review story on Yardley report

[Carl Westberg]

UI professors are behind, says research groupShawn Vestal
Staff writer
January 5, 2008Say
the words “culture of Moscow” to anyone familiar with the northern
Idaho college town, and a certain stereotype of artsy granolians is
likely to emerge.
But when a team of consultants hired by the University of Idaho use
the term, they have something different in mind – an inflexible,
unproductive faculty they say is hindering the UI’s efforts to overcome
the financial crisis of recent years. 
The report on the UI’s graduate programs, prepared by the Yardley
Research Group, says the school’s professors cling to longtime
divisions and hostilities, are committed to an outmoded idea of the
university’s mission, and see themselves as overworked and under siege,
when in fact they lag behind others in producing research and
publishing scholarship. The report concludes that the “destructive”
members of the faculty should be offered early retirement.
“We do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the current
faculty culture is one of the factors causing a brain drain away from
both the University and the state,” the report says. 
Faculty leaders say the report gets the culture of Moscow wrong, and
is cast in such a nasty tone that it’s likely to impede change rather
than inspire it. Professors have also challenged some of the data used
to quantify and compare faculty productivity. 
“I am disappointed in the tone of the document, which comes across
as both arrogant and condescending,” said Douglas Adams, an English
professor for 36 years and an officer on the Faculty Council. 
Adams said the report could make it more difficult to engage
professors in developing the very improvements the report suggests.
“People will have their backs up in ways that probably could have been
avoided,” he said.
Dale Graden, a history professor and former president of the Faculty Council, said the report missed the mark.
“To me, it almost verges on being disgraceful, some of the comments
they made about faculty culture,” he told the Lewiston Morning Tribune.
“That’s a joke. That’s a complete farce. The people I know work from
morning to night, seven days a week.”
Provost Doug Baker, who commissioned the report along with UI
President Tim White, said he hopes it will prompt further improvements
that expand on efforts already in place. The past couple of years have
seen the UI expand its faculty hiring, improve its fiscal health, win
praise from accreditors and begin developing research initiatives
across several disciplines, he said.
He acknowledged that the report is “biting at times,” but said many
of the criticisms of faculty attitudes are based on a limited sample
taken about a year and a half ago.
“We wanted to hold up a mirror and look at ourselves, at where we’ve
been and where we’re going,” he said. “We’re rebuilding the
institution.” 
Research vs. teaching
Commissioned last year by the UI, the $103,000 report’s first draft
concludes that the UI is lagging behind its peers nationally in
research and graduate programs. The report blames that primarily on a
failure to restructure and refocus the university after financial
mismanagement of its efforts to expand into Boise helped created a
budget deficit of $20 million in 2003.
The university’s reaction to the financial crisis – and subsequent
loss of roughly 200 professors and sinking enrollments – underlies much
of the report. 
“The best response to the financial crisis would have been strategic
reduction and elimination and corresponding marshalling of resources to
build existing strength,” the report says. “Instead, the University
continued to do everything it once did, with the consequence that most
of what it is doing is not nationally competitive.”
The report recommends that the UI shift resources toward research
and graduate programs that attract significant funding, and away from
“financially unproductive” academic programs. It says the UI should
work to improve research productivity and recruit better graduate
students, and it says the school’s professors have a “very low” rate of
publishing scholarly research.
It also suggests that tenure-track faculty should spend less time
teaching undergraduate classes, and that the UI should turn over more
of those duties to non-tenured faculty such as adjunct instructors. 
Faculty Council Chairman Don Crowley said that he and other
professors have concerns that the report makes graduate and research
programs such a singular priority.
“They were asked to look at graduate programs so in a sense they
became advocates of graduate programs,” he said. “I, at least, don’t
want to sacrifice the undergraduate part of the program to enhance
graduate programs.” 
The report’s authors call this a “mistaken concept” of the
university’s core mission, which “has caused a major research
university and land-grant college to function, in many critical
respects, as a liberal arts college.”
Baker, the provost, said that the report should spur the UI to
consider whether it’s balancing the needs of undergraduate and graduate
programs, but that undergraduate education will still be an important
mission for tenured faculty.
He noted that one of the consistent themes in the report is a need
for research centers that combine disciplines, and he said the UI
already has several such efforts under way, such as its
interdisciplinary effort on water issues in the West.
“We’re a different university than we were a few years ago,” he said. 
‘We try and do everything’
The report analyzes the graduate programs at each college in the UI,
and concludes that the university is stretched too thin, attempting to
offer programs in many subspecialities instead of focusing on key areas.
Adams, the longtime English professor, and others said they agree with that part of the analysis.
“The university has needed to have a really in-depth and important
discussion about its endeavors in graduate education for at least 20
years,” he said. “We try and do everything. We just don’t have the
resources. No one has the resources to do everything.”
The 435-page report includes a college-by-college breakdown of
graduate programs and research efforts, comparing the UI to other
colleges nationally. The comparisons show that most UI programs don’t
offer competitive stipends to attract grad students, and that the UI
faculty has tended to bring in less grant funding than peers at other
schools.
Some professors challenge the figures used in those comparison,
while acknowledging that budget cuts have increased undergrad teaching
loads.
Despite the range and depth of the report, though, it is the
authors’ focus on “faculty culture” that is likely to attract the most
discussion.
The report says that the “culture of Moscow” is provincial, and that
professors lack an understanding of national standing in their fields.
Hiring is often based on considerations such as whether a candidate
fits into the community and not his or her research, the report says,
and the UI has a widespread habit of hiring and promoting from within
rather than conducting national searches.
It also criticizes the faculty for failing to galvanize after the
financial crisis and leaving the recovery to administrators, and
portrays a widespread sense of entitlement and lack of accountability.
Baker said a final version of the report will be finished after
accepting comments from people around the university, and that then
discussions will begin around campus about ways to respond to its
suggestions. The Faculty Union is planning to meet later this month to
discuss the report, Crowley said.
“I’m sure it will be a topic of a lot of conversation when faculty return next week,” he said.
Contact Shawn Vestal at (509) 459-5431 or by e-mail at shawnv at spokesman.com.
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