‘Teaching and research at the highest possible level’

New chancellor outlines a course for future

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

John Lombardi

n the eve of a new academic year, the campus is doing well, according to Chancellor John Lombardi, thanks in large part to a strong faculty, a decent financial condition and a focused mission.

     In an Aug. 20 interview, Lombardi said the campus has enough money to do what it needs to do in the short term, which is to deliver the curriculum and continue to do first-class research. The keys to its success include focusing on teaching and research and developing a culture of fund-raising, he added.

     "I think the University at the moment is in what I would call a fair financial condition," he said. "And what that means is that it has enough money to do what it needs to do but it has no luxury and it has no ability to make mistakes.

     "Whether those resources are adequate for the long term is another conversation which requires us to think more strategically," he said.

     Strategic thinking about finances is two-pronged, he said. The campus needs to integrate fund-raising as an ongoing activity into its culture, and it needs to evaluate how it spends the dollars it already has in order to make sure they're being put to the best possible use.

     "The University's in pretty good shape to do what it needs to do," he said. "And part of that is a result of the retirement cycle, which, while it has taken away some talent, it has also released some money. And that allows us to recruit new faculty in places where we need them."

     Lombardi said that evaluating how to allocate money in a university is more difficult than doing so in a business because the bottom line isn't the central issue and because there are always more projects worthy of funding than there is money to go around, no matter how wealthy the institution.

     "In universities, the question is never in choosing between the good and the bad, 'cause it's easy to discard the bad," he said. "The question is in choosing amongst a range of good things.

     "The game is to see how much quality you can generate for a given input of dollars. And the business you're in is a handicraft, one-of-a-kind of business. Every kid is unique that you graduate; every faculty research project is unique. Every class you teach is unique.

     "And so all decisions in a university are difficult because they all carry much the same risk at each decision. You can't do them wholesale. So that makes the task of everybody harder, and that's why everybody's always upset because the decisions you make [are] amongst good topics."

     Because most good ideas can't be funded at a university, people see money as being in short supply, he said.

     "I've never been on a campus where people weren't sure they were in crisis," he said. "It doesn't matter how much money they have. It doesn't matter how happy they are; they say, 'Oh, gosh, things are terrible; morale is bad. We don't have enough money. I don't know how we're going to compete.'

     "The miracle is, ... the number of institutions that actually go broke are few. And especially of this kind - practically none. So the sense of crisis that people have from time to time is more an artifact of political discourse than it is a reflection of reality.

     "Another thing that happens, too, is that [at] universities like this that have had a high dependence on the state and a high sense of entitlement from the state, the culture of competitiveness is not as well developed. Other institutions of similar type have learned they can't rely on their state. Most of the other competitors of first-class institutions like this have figured that out by now. So we're just a little bit slow coming into this mode in which we have to recognize that the state, while it loves us and needs us, is incapable of supporting us at a level to which we need to become accustomed."

     Lombardi said that developing a culture in which fund-raising is seen as an ongoing responsibility and an investment in the camp-us's future as much as its present will allow the University to increase its resources over time.

     "People like me spend a minimum of two days on the road, raising money every week," he said. "And that's a minimum. Fund-raising is a long-term, permanent activity. People who imagine that you're going to go out and have a big dinner party and make money and everything will be OK, like you were raising money for a political campaign, don't understand the nature of higher education funding. It's all based on endowments and gifts that come in over time. And often you work for 10 years and you raise a ton of money, but the benefit of that money accrues to people who come after you be-cause it's in the form of endowment. You'll get some money that will allow you to do things today, but you'll also get a lot of money that will allow your successors to do things in the future.

     "In most other states with first-class research universities, they figured out back some time in the '80s, if not before, that the states would do what they could do, but it wouldn't be enough to support competitive excellence and that the institutions themselves had to take ownership of their own revenue stream. They had to raise money, and they had to commercialize their intellectual property, and they had to push their grants and contracts to the outside limit, and they had to make relationships with industry and business, and they had to make their auxiliary enterprises at least break even if not profitable, and so on.

     "So we have to make a choice. Either we want to compete with the best or we don't care to be one of the best. And if you're going to compete with the best, you have to do what the best do. Because if they work harder than you do and more effectively than you do, they're going to win.

     "The state will not provide enough. If you live in anticipation of what the state ought to do, basically what you do is fail to take the steps that will make the institution successful. Because you're waiting for the good news to come; you're waiting for your ship to come in. But the ship isn't going to come in. It hasn't come in anywhere.

     "Now, some states do a better job of supporting their universities than the commonwealth does, and we need to try to do everything possible to get the commonwealth to a better job in supporting higher education; there's no question about that. But even so, to imagine that we did the best possible job and the commonwealth responded in the best possible way, there'd be enough money to do what we do, the answer's 'No, there wouldn't.' We need to do absolutely everything else at the same time. And I think that's the take-home message of an assessment of where the institution is relative to the world in which it lives."

     In assessing the campus itself, Lombardi said its size - "too big to be small and too small to be big" - and its concentration in the arts and sciences gives it much of its character.

     "That creates a context that is actually significant," he said, "because universities are always trying to figure out who their competitors are, and a lot of times people pick the wrong competitors." Comparing the campus to schools much smaller, much larger or that have a large number of professional schools, isn't useful, he said.

     "So you have to be like yourself. You have to figure out, well, 'Who are we?' Which is actually more important than 'Who are they?'"

     The "we" Lombardi has found since coming on board July 1 is a cohesive community.

     "This place has the capacity to be more focused than most places because of its concentration in the arts and sciences and it only has a few professional-type schools," he said. "It has management and engineering and public health and nursing and it has ag[riculture] and so forth. But we don't have law, which is a noisy thing, and we don't have medicine, which is a noisy thing, and that means that it's an institution that's more focused on basic research. So the place is more compact, feels more coherent than larger institutions that tend to be more fragmented and have agendas that are much less connected.

     "Now, [when] you go around campus, people tell you every-body's unconnected, there's not enough cohesion, not enough community and all that, but that's against some abstraction that exists nowhere. And that's the abstraction that we are all this great collegial community and we all share our intellectual enthusiasms and we all get together over lunch and talk about great ideas. Some of us do, but most of us don't. And no place do they do if they are an institution of this type.

     "The other thing that's char-acteristic of this university is that we have good faculty. They have good reputations outside in the world, they do good work, they publish, they compete for grants and contracts, and that's an asset of the institution that has to be supported and cultivated and enhanced and expanded. That's the power engine that drives the place. It's what draws the students, it's what draws the revenue, it's what draws the attention, it's what gives the place its character."

     Lombardi said he wants to see the campus focus on its "main event," teaching and research.

      "We're here to do teaching and research at the highest possible level," he said. "It's kind of a mantra: 'teaching and research at the highest possible level.' And it's important to remember the mantra because it's easy to get lost on fringe issues. And fringe issues may well be important, but they're not the main event. The main event is teaching and research; that's what we do. If that isn't healthy, it doesn't matter what the fringe issues are. Even if all the fringe issues are fixed, and you don't do teaching and research well, you fail. That's the only thing that matters in a university is that teaching and research be done well. Because everything else that's good flows from that, everything else. That's who we are. That defines us."

     Lombardi said faculty efforts over the past half-dozen years to articulate the University's priorities will allow the campus to move forward in implementing academic plans.

     "One of the beauties of this institution is that the faculty has been engaged in this process extensively for the last four or five years, and there's a huge amount of documentation already assembled by the faculty about priorities and directions and all those things. So you don't have to reinvent that wheel.

     "That's good news. It means that we don't have to delay because the faculty's already spoken on so many issues. And so now the goal is to say, 'How can we mobilize the money and the resources and the enterprise to try and achieve those objectives?' And then that involves us reporting back to the various faculty groups: how the money's being moved and what the criteria are for measuring success against these objectives and getting people to say, 'Yeah, those are the right criteria.'"

     Lombardi said the goal of any university is to get better and that his work to implement faculty priorities is part of a larger effort to improve the campus in any way he can.

      "It's a very simple-minded sounding goal but actually difficult to do," he said. "And so in the next 90 days my job is to work as hard as possible with folks to address every conceivable issue that you can that will impact getting better. And some of that involves paying attention to the capital plan and getting ready to make sure that that's going to work over the next three to five years, and part of it involves making sure that the budget system is set up so that it will deal with both the realities of our revenue and the consequences of the changes in that revenue stream that have come about and it will involve trying to become engaged with the campus life in all kinds of ways whether it's the students or the faculty or alumni or sports and all the various programs that are out there.

     "It has to do with making sure that UMass Amherst has a voice that is identifiable and clear in the conversation both about higher education in the commonwealth, as well as higher education nationally."

     Another way to become better is to pay attention to how each dollar is spent, he said.

     "And then we can measure whether or not it's producing some kind of benefit. Are we getting students taught better? Are we getting faculty more support for research and they're doing more research? Are the buildings getting fixed up better? What's the better that happened? And how do you know it's better?

     "Part of it is getting people to do a better job of making choices. And those aren't choices that somebody in central administration can make. These are choices that have to be made by people who know what they're doing."

     Although he'll be doing a number of things over the next 90 days, converting his interim administrative positions to permanent ones is not something he is rushing to do, he said.

     "For everybody's who's been here, it looks like they've been interim for a while, many of them, but to me, they've been interim for a month. So what do I know?

     "My job is to do two things. One is to understand whether we are organized the right way, and the second is to understand whether and how to go about either searching or making permanent or whatever it is you do with the people who are here and the positions that are here. And some of them will require a search and some, the people in them may turn out to be terrific and they may not require a search, but we'll have to see.

     "Obviously the positions that are closest to the academic domain are the ones that we'll pay the closest attention to making sure that they're solid, especially deans. As the deans come up, they need to have immediately a national search because that's the core business of the University. Staff positions aren't so clear. In the case of staff positions, if you have first-rate people in the organization and they're performing exceedingly well, the gain you get by going out nationally may not be so great, if there's a gain at all. And so I don't know enough to make that call yet."