How Shall We Know Ourselves?

Budget Update for the 602nd Meeting of the Faculty Senate
February 28, 2002

At the end of the last Faculty Senate meeting at which Representative Kulik spoke, I was asked to provide a budget update at this current meeting. Although there has been no change in the amount of the cuts we have received--$15M in late November plus another 1.7M a few weeks ago as the Governor exercised her emergency powers, the indicators for the state’s revenues have worsened, as Representative Kulik referenced at the last Senate meeting.

To address this $16.7M deficit in our current fiscal year, we have needed to announce layoffs and program reductions or eliminations. There are continuing reviews to determine how to make cuts and adjustments in other areas. Remember that nearly 80% of the operating budget of the campus is in people, and people are in programs.

As you know, the Governor’s 2003 Budget bill projects a 5% growth in tax revenue and factors in a projected statewide savings of $136M from the early retirement program, among other assumptions. Some believe these assumptions to be overly optimistic. There remain many critical unknowns. While we know the number of those who actually signed up for the state’s early retirement program, we will not know the actual number of employees who exercise the option until June 15. The critical number for us for next year will be whatever the 2003 budget actually is. That is the number within which we will need to operate the campus.

The many unknowns require a state of constant agitation or scrambling with such strategies to deliver next semester’s curriculum as temporary part-time appointments for retired faculty, while the committee appointed by Provost Seymour simultaneously plans how best to manage the longer-term issues. Our mission has not changed, but our approach to how we fulfill that mission will necessarily have to change. We will be different, but whatever we are must be very good.

These are difficult times.

In difficult times, we are confronted with a challenge: how shall we know ourselves? Shall we know ourselves only in terms of our limitations? Or shall we know ourselves in terms of our strengths?

How shall we know ourselves?

After many years of watching the shifting energies of this institution, I’ve come to believe a point made by organizational theorists Cooperrider and Whitney ("Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change," in The Change Handbook, Eds. Holman and Devane) that we grow toward the questions we ask of ourselves. If we only ask ourselves about what is going wrong, paying attention only to our problems and deficits, then the university falls deeper into a sense of deficiency. If we only ask ourselves what greater calamity lurks on the horizon, then the university falls deeper into a state of paralysis, of dread.

We grow toward the questions we ask of ourselves.

When we inquire about what we continue to do right, what we continue to do exceptionally well, then we grow toward our excellence. There is much, I believe, we are doing exceptionally well right now. There is much we have to celebrate:

• The Davis Educational Foundation has awarded the University a $460,000 grant to support the redesign of five large lecture courses and thereby improve undergraduate education.
  
  
• Just this week, Helena Horak, a senior, was named to the First Team of the All-USA College Academic Team, by the national newspaper USA Today. She is one of only 20 college students in the country chosen for the First Team, based on outstanding intellectual achievement and leadership. She is a double major in biochemistry and biology, and a double minor in chemistry and anthropology with a GPA of 3.94. Last summer, she won an NIH biomedical Research Fellowship to study nuclear proteins associated with drug-resistance in ovarian cancers. And, she is co-captain of the University’s Division I women’s tennis team. This is the kind of student we attract here…who thrives here…the kind of student who challenges us to be even better than we were.
  
  
• This spring, the College of Engineering opened and dedicated the Microsoft Center for Women in Engineering and Science in Marston Hall. The center was made possible through a gift from the Microsoft Corporation. The multipurpose room will be used for tutoring, meetings, and lectures. It includes five computer stations, a lounge area, and a professional development library. Establishing and ensuring such an environment is just one of the many ways the University tries to address the national problem of under-representation of women in engineering and science.
  
  
• Professor Derek Lovley, head of the microbiology department, with several doctoral students and a colleague from the U.S. Geological Survey, found a unique community of microbes in a hot spring in Idaho that may hold clues to life on Mars and other planets. The discovery was spelled out in the January 17 issue of the journal Nature, and publicized around the world. The same week Professor Lovley and another team found a way to harness the energy produced by microscopic organisms found in underwater mud. The findings were announced in the January 18 issue of the journal Science. That week Professor Lovley was interviewed on National Public Radio as one of the few scientists to have articles in Science and Nature, the nation’s pre-eminent science journals, in the same week.
  
  
• Other recent awards and recognition for university faculty include an AT&T industrial ecology fellowship; a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright grant, awards from the American Chemical Society, the Council for Chemical Research, the Animal Behavior Society; grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, and others.
  
  
• The University has raised some $440,000 for COMECC, an indication of our ongoing commitment to building a more caring society.

Highlighting positive achievements is not meant to deny the severity of the challenges we face. By now, I think you know I don’t believe in avoidance. But I do believe that a pre-occupation with negativity can quickly drain our collective energies. By continually reminding ourselves about our challenges, we forget our strengths.

And what we can least afford to do now is forget our strengths. Our strengths reflect our vitality: we are alive, and, as I quoted at the campus memorial service around the pond: all living things lean toward the light.

What we can least afford to do now is lose heart.

We have it in us to survive this. The Amherst campus has repeatedly maintained its courage in the face of financial challenges. In other remarks, I have referenced similarities between earlier times on this campus and our current circumstances. I do so again today. Early in its existence, the college struggled with a mounting debt and lack of state support. In his1878 Annual Report, President William S. Clark pointed out that the quality of the institution was not the problem: "The principal objection to the College arises from the fact that money is required for its proper maintenance."

Frustrated with the state’s lack of support, Clark wrote: "If, after due consideration, the General Court shall decide that the College is better than Massachusetts can afford…then a new institution upon an inferior plan should be organized."

Yet, Clark did not let the lack of funding be the final word. Clark saw the college of his day as a "grand experiment" that could accomplish "a vast amount of good" for the people of the Commonwealth. Even without adequate support, the experiment would go on.

Like Clark, I believe we have accomplished, and will continue to accomplish, a vast amount of good—for our students, for our state, and for the advancement of knowledge in the world.

And the people of Massachusetts know this. They knew it in 1880, when an unsuccessful proposal that the state abandon its college aroused the "latent friendship and sympathies" of the public. Writing in his annual report of 1881, President Levi Stockbridge made a remarkable observation about this event:

This effort to settle, or unsettle, the status of the College, resulted in giving it strength. And it may be reasonable to conclude that just this struggle was required to permanently establish its relations to the State, and to show that there must be a union of public and private duty and responsibility, if it would attain the highest prosperity and usefulness.

With Stockbridge, my reading of our history is one of great resilience. The challenges we have overcome have steeled our sense of responsibility and deepened our resolve. By now, our importance to the state is long established, yet in each generation we find ourselves engaged in a familiar struggle—a struggle by which we renew what Stockbridge called "the union of public and private duty" and thereby renew our strength to meet the demands of our time.

Recently, re-stating the case for public higher education, President Bulger wrote:

Today, keeping the promise of educational opportunity requires unprecedented support of the public higher education system, not just by the Commonwealth but by the private business sector, whose success depends so heavily on the graduates of that system. Because the vast majority of public higher education graduates remain in Massachusetts to start careers, companies, and families—200,000 from UMass alone—support of this system makes basic business sense for the Commonwealth.

While it is essential to focus on our strengths internally, it is also imperative that we prepare to respond to the questions about the way we operate—especially in academic affairs--which will inevitably come from outside the campus. As we advocate for the University in the Statehouse, we must anticipate the concerns of legislators and the media. Our credibility will be greater with those audiences, if we can begin to think through how we will respond to questions such as these:

• How many courses does each UMass Amherst faculty member teach each semester?
  
  
• What times of the day are classes scheduled?
  
  
• Why are there so few Friday classes?
  
  
• Why is the ratio of students to faculty 16:1 on the Amherst campus when the ratios of our peers (real and aspirant) range from 21-27:1?
  
  
• Why has there been such a proliferation of new courses when students are unable to register for the courses required by their majors?
  
  
• How many classes have fewer than 6 students? Are these required courses?
  
  
• What would be the result of having all faculty teach 2 courses each semester?

These are examples of direct, bottom-line questions—questions we have all heard. We may not like them posed absent their particular contexts, or we may think them naïve…simplistic, but they will keep coming. The fact that they are being asked speaks to the perception that the University is aloof from the pressures faced by business, by health care, and all other segments of our society, and believes itself to be entitled. It also speaks to our own difficulty in articulating and accepting accountability as a central dimension of the academic enterprise in ways that makes sense to our constituents.

As we proceed with our advocacy efforts and continue to make the case for the value of the University, we must demonstrate a new commitment to accountability—not only in terms of what we do—but also in terms of the processes and procedures we use to insure responsibility within the academic enterprise. We must ask ourselves direct, bottom-line questions, so we can address them with integrity in our public advocacy for the University.

How shall we know ourselves?

Will we know ourselves only as victims of economic misfortune and acquiesce to dark speculation about the future of the university? Will we succumb to our own brand of academic sarcasm and cynicism? Or will we recognize our resilience, our strength, our capacity to continue accomplishing a "vast amount of good"—even as we press earnestly and unapologetically for the support we know this University deserves? Shall we take concern for accountability in our own hands—or wait for others to ask the hard questions for us?

The Office of the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Community and Government Relations, Richard Conner, has identified and delineated major components of a campus Advocacy outreach and created a site listing information and tasks to do in support of UMass. http://www.umass.edu/actnow

Advocates can sign up for more information on the Act Now! web site and receive regular updates for budget and UMass advocacy. Additional resource information can be found on the Advocacy Programs regular web site: http://www.umass.edu/ambassadors

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This is where we are now. It is hard, but we will endure. To use President Clark’s phrase, the "grand experiment" goes on.