Established 1826 — Oldest College Newspaper West of the Alleghenies
NEWS

Opinion | An open letter to President Hodge: step back from mediocrity

Britton Harwood, Professor of English, harwoobj@muohio.edu

Dear Mr. President:

At the risk of appearing alarmist, I suggest the next few days leading up to the December meeting of the board of trustees will be crucial for our university. I imagine the board will have your evaluation of the 35 recommendations offered publicly in mid-October by the Strategic Priorities Task Force. The board may reveal some of its own thinking about  Miami's next budget. It is a time to be serious.  

One struggle that looms has to do with handling the $8.6 million reduction in state subsidy projected by the task force for the five year period they planned for. Taking the worst case (losing that 11 percent of our 2009-10 subsidy all at once), this would mean a new annual loss of $8.6 million. State subsidy for us is not generous, amounting to only a fifth of all the unrestricted revenue at our disposal in the 2009, but it is crucial nonetheless.

The task force absorbs $6.2 million of this loss with two very bad ideas. (As you would expect when 18 people bringing intelligence, wide experience, good will and diligence to a months long effort, surely a large majority of their recommendations — for example, a tuition surcharge yielding $2.0 million when students take more than 18 credit hours in a semester — invite prompt adoption.) Nonetheless, our colleagues do genuine mischief in suggesting, first of all, a change in "the faculty mix." They propose a reduction in the tenured or tenure track faculty by 20 percent, or about 150 people. Thus, lecturers, as they would be called, replacing professorial faculty, would be hired on perhaps five year contracts on the basis of their demonstrated ability to teach and perform institutional service, but not for successful research or creative activity.

Hiring them is proposed as an economy and doubtless it would be there are, for instance, often expensive laboratory start-ups related to our new assistant professors. At least in some divisions, salaries for our full professors are competitive nationally, but in principle the rank of full professor will never be available to lecturers although it is where the money is. There is nothing unfair about this since people will decide for themselves what to do. Any port in a storm.

But there are certain problems in populating this new caste whose morale is low and likely to fall lower. Those of us who teach I think will agree that our best classes continue a process of discovery that started elsewhere. We get the manna to our class while it is still fresh. Not much is to be expected from a class where students are not interlocutors. Minors, specific sequences and courses are born because individuals have invested themselves passionately in certain ranges of materials or questions. Exuberance is beauty. The task force prizes "the intensive interaction that many of our classes afford," yet recommends elimination of at least 200 of the small sections where that is likeliest to occur.

This is a long step toward mediocrity for Miami. Not surprising since 2009 came and went without our having made much of a case for being "first in 2009." Hiring middling candidates makes it harder to hire superb ones who may well look for esprit de corps. For 30 years or so now, because we could go to market with attractive jobs, my own department has established at least a favorable reputation for itself across the nation and in Europe and Asia. The steady stream of new colleagues whose brilliance in their own writing has not failed to illumine their teaching has been good for our students. Tell them that brilliance is less important than something else and they are not likely to darken our doorstep.

If we forgo $6.2 million by doing better than our peers in recruitment and by remembering that all teaching aspires to the condition of tutorial, how can we make up the $6.2 million with other cost cutting? I hope the task force or any successor group will take a broader look at Miami's unrestricted income, particularly the revenue of our auxiliary enterprises. These are businesses, enterprises, of course, but ones clearly appropriate for a university to conduct. Moreover, they are helpful to our core work. Being enterprises, they do not astonish us when they make or lose money. Our largest such enterprise is the residence and dining hall system. It is profitable, but our use of the profits is constrained not only by applicable law, but by promises the university has made to people or entities to protect their investments in buying the bonds the university has sold, chiefly for buildings and equipping buildings.    

For a long while now, Miami has marketed itself as a rare combination. Because of the modest size of the student population and a spacious, verdant campus, Miami strikes the visitor as something akin to a private liberal arts college. Our self-advertisements go on, nonetheless, to introduce our university status attested by the richness of our curriculum. The plan to reduce the size of the faculty runs counter to the impression of high individual attention, the goal "of reducing the overall number of majors" runs counter to the impression of a major university.

Something of a similar contradiction presents itself in our auxiliary enterprises. In the 2009 fiscal year, the residence and dining halls ran a profit of $8.2 million. In that same fiscal year, Intercollegiate Athletics ran a loss of $13.9 million. The task force might have recommended a transfer of $6.2 million from the first of these auxiliaries to the second without damage to anyone's eating and sleeping. The consequence would be that $6.2 million in instructional fees and subsidies would not have had to replace the general fee being moved to Intercollegiate Athletics to pay the deficit there. The net result of the current practice is the use of instructional fees and subsidies to beef up a sinking fund for auxiliary buildings.

This sinking fund, popularly called CR&R, began fiscal year 2009 with a balance of $8.7 million. By the end of the year, this had grown to $18.5 million. Miami makes frequent use of outside experts. In light of the fact that current plans call for the expenditure of some half billion dollars on renovating our residence halls, it might be well to secure expert review in prioritizing. In fiscal year 2008, Ohio appropriated $10.4 million for our capital expenditures. In fiscal year 2009, the capital and appropriation was $10.6 million. The university's perennial practice of transforming operating funds into capital ones has been a continuing source of argument. The task force had no comment on this, but owing to the diminution of state support for operations this probably should not have been overlooked as one of Miami's practices. We, of course, are almost certainly not alone in this.

Enjoy what you're reading?
Signup for our newsletter

One further suggestion for the task force or its successor group: 10 years ago, in fiscal year 1999, Miami collected $224 million in unrestricted education and general revenue. Miami spent 46.6 percent of that, or $104.4 million, on our core purpose, our highest priority, instruction and departmental research. This past year, Miami collected unrestricted E&G revenue of $368.9 million, but spent only 44.6 percent of that on its core expenses. If it had funded these at the same rate as 10 years earlier, teaching and research would have been enhanced by $7.4 million. We are used to thinking that health costs are pushing the costs of instruction out of reach. To the contrary, seven of our millions seem to be missing.


Read More

Trending