Nearly fifty faculty members at Illinois State University have now signed an open letter objecting to the use of a consultant on academic affairs and enrollment issues. The letter was published in the Vidette student newspaper late last month with more than thirty signatures at first. Additional faculty have since signed on.
One of the letter writers said the Education Advisory Board offers generic information ISU could generate on its own. Professor of German Jim Van Der Laan disparaged an advisory board presentation as generic and said it's a waste of about one-hundred-thousand-dollars in university money in tight times.
"There seems to be a little bit of con in the consulting firm title," said Van Der Laan.
Provost Janet Krejci disputed that.
"To understand with best practices and what's working is something that would be hard for us to do to understand what eleven-hundred other schools are doing," said Krejci.
Van Der Laan said the administration may also be using the recommendations to undercut faculty shared governance and to provide a rationale for predetermined choices, such as program cuts. He said there are disturbing features in a power point and handout from the EAB presented at a retreat last summer.
"The administration advised the chairs and directors to use the handout, the power point and material there to secure faculty buy-in to the administration agenda," said Van Der Laan.
He said there is "something fundamentally surreptitious" about the administration's PowerPoint campaign and intent to manipulate faculty.
Provost Krejci said the EAB is a useful source, but only one of many ISU uses.
"We don't follow any specific recommendations of theirs and we are not identifying any recommendations now. But, we do want to learn. We're very focused on trying to prevent what other universities are trying to go through with layoffs and program issues," said Krejci.
Krejci voiced support for faculty shared governance saying the faculty have a strong say in what happens and the administration has not advanced any particular item from the advisory board reports. She said Academic Senators have worked hard on a variety of issues and truly transformed the institution over time.
The administration noted the Chronicle of Higher Education has praised faculty assessments of healthy shared governance on campus.
Van Der Laan dismissed that result as a non scientific survey of people exhorted by the university to respond.
Van Der Laan also emphasized a portion of the letter that mentions the high cost of a university education and that the State has greatly reduced its funding for higher education. Signees, he said, know that the price-tag for higher education has increased enormously over the last thirty years. What is not so well known, but equally problematic, said Van Der Laan, is that forty percent of that increase is attributable to administrative costs (October 2013 "Index" of Harper’s Magazine).
A similar critique of administrative bloat as a major source of rising costs of college in the New York Times has been a popular read in Higher-Ed circles.
A common institutional response has been that 'administrative' also includes staff such as workers in academic advisement, student life, Office of Residential Life, Title IX, ethics officers, counseling and health services, rec center staff, civil service folks, and so on. The defense includes the idea that in an increasingly competitive marketplace the non-faculty staffing has been affected by increasing parent/student demands for service, legislative mandates, evolving best practices, and yes, some bloat though not an overwhelming amount.
Administrators also say the long slide in state support for higher education should not be discounted as a major contributor to the rise in sticker prices at colleges and universities.
Van Der Laan argued that even after growth in rank and file staff, top-tier administrator positions and their salaries have skyrocketed compared to professors and constitute an unacceptable drag on the system.
Letter signers also expressed concern at the erosion of full time tenured faculty. Van Der Laan points to the University web site quick facts showing that more than seventy three percent of all faculty appointments at ISU are non tenure track professors. This includes part time appointments of people who teach only one or two courses.
ISU Trustees received a report on full time faculty make up last week. That chart indicated that since 2006, ISU tenured faculty accounts for mid to high fifty percentile range of total full time faculty. The percentage of those who have tenure rose slightly over the last couple years before dropping slightly this year.
Those eligible for tenure were another twenty percent to twenty-eight percent of the faculty over the period. That category is trending sharply lower over the last couple years to a hair above twenty percent this year.
Those full timers not eligible for tenure held largely steady right at twenty percent from 2006 to 2013 before heading slightly up. Non-eligible pulled even with eligible last year and is higher than tenure eligible this year for the first time in the displayed period. These trends reflect only full time faculty not the NTTs who teach one or two courses.
Van Der Laan indicated worry that the financial trends and devaluation of the humanities risk diminishing the liberal arts emphasis of a college education. He agreed with the argument that non tenure track professionals may be wonderful teachers but that tenured professors offer a chance for students to participate in faculty research and potentially polish critical thinking skills more than in other contexts.
Provost Krecji said ISU's commitment to the humanities and a liberal arts basis for higher education remains unchanged.
Both Krejci and Van Der Laan agreed that the issues at stake in this debate would not have as much tension if not for the state budget crisis and the fact ISU received less than a third of its usual state funding last fiscal year, and about half ot fhis budget year's allocation, with no certainty of getting more.
Krejci maintained ISU is well positioned to be thoughtful and strategic about resource allocations instead of reactive to crisis.
The Text of the Letter.
The economic challenges currently facing higher education in our state and this country present our
university with difficult decisions. It has come to our attention that Illinois State University has
contracts with the consulting firm EAB (Education Advisory Board) which has provided the
administration with a PowerPoint “handout” containing analyses and recommendations ostensibly
applicable to our university.
According to the company website, EAB offers “best practices to address education’s top challenges
with research forums dedicated to presidents, provosts, chief business officers, and many other key
academic and administrative leaders.”
As a matter of common sense, we ask why ISU should commission, pay for, and heed such advice
which is patently generic. At a time when budget concerns threaten to impinge upon the core mission of
the university, namely, educating our students, the expenditure of nearly $100,000 on consulting
contracts with EAB raises a few eyebrows. Is it not the purview of ISU’s well-paid central
administration to perform the tasks outsourced to EAB?
The PowerPoint provided by EAB contains information made available a year ago in another
PowerPoint presented by ISU’s associate vice president for enrollment management. A third
PowerPoint presentation from the provost’s office is now also in circulation with content based on the
EAB template.
Each of these PowerPoint documents communicates institutional policies we the undersigned can
neither condone nor accept. We contest the contents and implications of those policies and call for a
reconsideration and realignment of university values and commitments.
The implicit message of those PowerPoint presentations should give pause and elicit opposition from
administrators, faculty, and students alike, for it risks undermining our core values and mission.
Among other recommendations, two stand out as especially disturbing and problematic.
One essentially advises faculty to teach and grade in ways to please our students and so keep them
enrolled (and paying!). According to the EAB’s “Roadmap for Realizing Academic Ambitions,”
institutions must “limit high-DFW [D/fail/withdrawal] courses.” Faculty would accordingly need to
give students at least Cs if not better - Cs already generally undesirable, consequently disincentives
which could conceivably cause students to leave (and stop paying) ISU.
This recommendation appears at the same time ISU has increased enrollments, while enrollments at
several other state universities have declined. Should difficulty also be avoided in ISU courses? If, for
example, students do not like to read, should faculty dispense with having them read? We may attract
students’ attention with fun and games, but we will never secure their education (or respect) by
replacing robust pedagogy with worthless proxies.
Another troubling recommendation advises that ISU courses/programs be utilitarian. They should have
practical application and lead to employment in the American workforce. (This view bears a striking
resemblance to the policies Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to implement at Wisconsin’s state
universities.)
The PowerPoint from the provost’s office suggests that we “prioritize electives by focusing on student
needs.” Such a guiding principle essentially declares that the humanities particularly and liberal arts
more generally have little or no support and role to play at our university, since the humanities are
typically considered impractical and of scant utility, in other words, not what students need.
In the October 2016 issue of the Scientific American, the editors explain that emphasis on STEM
courses (which supposedly lead to jobs) at the expense of courses in the humanities (like literature,
philosophy, languages, or history) will actually do harm to our economy. They argue that poetry is as
important as physics. We could make the same case for philosophy and finance.
They go on to spell out the value of an education in the humanities and liberal arts, which develop
analytic and synthetic skills necessary for “clear communication” and “solving complex problems.”
Similarly, Harvard Medical School has recognized the importance of the arts and humanities as
“powerful tools in medical education that have the potential to improve professionalism, reflection and
empathy among physicians and trainees, foster humanism, reduce burnout, enhance perspective,
sharpen physicians’ analytic and diagnostic skills, and improve teamwork and communication”
(http://artsandhumanities.hms.harvard.edu/what-we-do).
Learning how to read and write well in humanities courses involves learning how to think well,
certainly excellent training for any career. To champion and promote the humanities is not to depreciate
or detract from any other courses of study at ISU with a more vocational emphasis. However, the EAB
recommends a paradigm shift, from “every discipline deserves equal investment” to “investing equally
in all disciplines will lead to mediocrity.” We disagree, and we believe that the university must invest in
a broad range of disciplines in order to prepare the next generation with the kinds of creative and
dynamic thinking required to devise solutions for the economic, political, environmental, and social
crises of our times.
In addition to their undeniable utility, an even greater benefit might well be gained from what could be
called the inutility of the humanities (and liberal arts). That is, the study of literature, history,
philosophy, art, or music affords us a way of knowing and knowledge fundamentally different - and
therefore of inestimable value - from that offered by our culture of technological consumer capitalism
with its monetization of everything, its winner-take-all competition, its impersonalization, its
quantification, and its devaluation of anything which is not demonstrably efficient and mundanely
useful.
Yet, the inefficiency of poetry or pure physics (that is, physics not tied to corporate and government
grants and agendas) is an incommensurate gift and of great value. It allows for creativity, for
unexpected discovery, and for seeing the world from otherwise unavailable perspectives. As
Christopher Ingraham reported in The Washington Post (7 September, 2016), recent studies have
demonstrated that literary fiction boosts “the quality of empathy in the people who read it” and “in a
way that few other works of art,” not to mention other disciplines, can. The meditative thinking needed
to read literature offers an alternative and counterbalance to the calculative thinking and statistical
analysis employed in management, commerce, corporations, and technology. In other words, the
humanities teach us to be humane.
As a matter of professional practice, as well as in response to the budget crisis, ISU faculty are well
aware of the importance of revising our curriculum and pedagogical practices to make sure we meet the
needs of our students. And in response to economic constraints, we have allowed class sizes to grow
and have watched as professors are replaced with temporary and part-time instructors - sometimes
appropriately perhaps, but all too often in ways that destabilize programs and deny students classes
with actual professors. Much of what we are doing already is right, and there is no reason to abandon
those educational practices with a proven record of success.
At ISU, we are losing sight of our stated mission to offer students “a small college experience with the
resources of a large university.”
To be sure, ISU and the other state universities face real, financial problems, but jeopardizing or
eviscerating our standards to cut costs or to retain paying students is surely not the answer ISU must
continue to assert and defend the incalculable value of the humanities and liberal arts. That task must
be led by the leaders of our institution.
Key to a remedy is also a return to state funding of our state universities. That remedy not only requires
a budget for the state of Illinois, but also a restructuring of how much the state funds its public
institutions of higher learning, certainly one of the great treasures of the democratic, American
educational system.
Not so many decades ago, the state of Illinois funded ISU at above 70 percent which did not lay any
unbearable burden on Illinois students and their families. Now, however, our state funds ISU at below
20 percent (soon to be much less) and places huge financial burdens on our fellow citizens.
True support for our students from the state of Illinois benefits them individually and all the rest of
Illinois in countless ways, as those students become knowledgeable, responsible, and humane citizens
who give back to their Illinois communities, strengthening both society and the state economy.
