disucssions
ACADEMIC CUTS PLANNED FOR MISSOURI DRAW FIRE By Gene I. Maeroff
COLUMBIA, MO., May 28--Budget conscious administrators at the University of Missouri's main campus here have proposed dropping some programs and sharply curtailing others. But the plan has brought a flood of protest letters, emergency hearings in the State Legislature and criticism from three of the University's nine board members.
"More people have talked about the University of Missouri in the last 30 days than in the last 30 years," said Dr. Wilbur Miller, Associate Dean of the College of Education, which would lose one- third of its $3.6 million budget under the proposal, jeopardizing many of its undergraduate programs.
Provost Ron Bunn has proposed abolishing two of the university's 14 schools and colleges and sharply reducing the operations of seven others over a period of three years. The money freed by those actions could then be reallocated to the remaining programs to improve faculty salaries and buy equipment for research.
--The New York Times, May 30, 1982
It was June 1, 1982 and Ron Bunn, the Provost at the University of Missouri's Columbia campus, faced several questions. He wondered how the administration's effort to develop a long-range response to financial pressures had led to such a political maelstrom. He wondered whether there was anything the administration could have done to prevent events from careening out of control. Most important, he wondered what, if anything, he could do now.
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This case was written by Jacqueline Stefkovich, Chris Harris, and Lee Bolman, for the
Institute for Educational Management, Harvard University, and is based in part on the research of Professor David Kuechle, Harvard Graduate School of Education. The case was developed for class discussion, and is not intended to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. © 1986, Institute for Educational ManagementNineteen eighty-two marked Ron Bunn's second year at the University of Missouri. He was new to the state, but not to higher education. Before coming to Missouri, he had been a full-time faculty member at the University of Texas and at Louisiana State University. He was a graduate dean at the University of Houston for seven years and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the State University of New York in Buffalo from 1976 to 1980. He had directed long-range planning efforts at the last two institutions, but neither involved program reductions on the scale contemplated at Missouri.
From the beginning of his tenure, Bunn was aware of the university's fiscal problems. He knew from the outset that cuts in programs would be difficult, but he also wanted to help a university that he believed "was beginning to enter a period of protracted financial stress". He had been optimistic about his reallocation proposals. He felt they had the potential to save several million dollars and to strengthen the programs that were most central to the mission of the university and most needed by the citizens of Missouri.
The University of Missouri
Founded in 1839 as the first state university west of the Mississippi and approved as a land-grant institution in 1870, the University of Missouri at Columbia is part of a four-campus system (the other sites are Kansas City, Rolla and St. Louis). The University is governed by a Board of Curators whose nine members are appointed by the governor to serve six-year terms. State law requires that each curator come from a different Congressional district and that no more than five be members of one political party. Most of the curators were alumni who served on a part-time basis while maintaining full-time commitments in law, business, agriculture or other professions. In 1982, the membership of the board included eight men and one woman who was also the only Black member.
Reporting to the Curators was the President of the University and system-wide chief executive, James Olson. Each of the four campuses was headed by a Chancellor. The Chancellor at Columbia, Barbara Uehling, was regarded as a strong and vocal advocate of higher education.
Columbia, Missouri is a classic college town. The 90,000 residents include 25,000 students at the Columbia campus. The streets carry names like College and University and the 75,000- person football stadium dominates the southern edge of town. The university's teaching hospital is a major health facility for Columbia and central Missouri. The university operates half a dozen museums and galleries, and fields surrounding the town are sites for university-based agricultural experimentsThe local visitor's brochure proudly proclaims the institution as "one of the most comprehensive universities in the world", a university that "belongs to all Missourians".
Beside the nation's oldest School of Journalism, the campus includes Colleges of Agriculture, Arts and Sciences, (with twenty-five departments), Business and Public Administration, Education, Engineering, Graduate Studies, Home Economics, Public and Community Services and Veterinary Medicine and professional schools of Law, Medicine and Health Related Services, Nursing, and Library and Informational Science.
The University of Missouri system is the only public institution in the state to offer Ph.D. and professional degrees, and the Columbia campus, with its 100+ Ph.D. programs, confers most of these. Administrators at the Columbia campus emphasize the important research in areas such as plant biochemistry and genetics, arthritic disease, hazardous waste management and the effects of diet on cholesterol levels. Students and community emphasize the school's excellence in teaching.
The university distributes an information brochure, stylishly dressed in the school's black and gold colors, that sums up the institution's philosophy with these lines:
There are few earthly things more splendid than a university. In these days of broken frontiers and collapsing values , when the dams are down and the floods are making misery, when every future looks somewhat grim and every ancient foothold has become something of a quagmire, wherever a University stands, it stands and shines; wherever it exists, the free minds of men, urged on to full and fair inquiry, may still bring wisdom into human affairs.
--John Masefield
Administration, faculty and staff are proud of the University. As the Dean for Community and Public Service, a former mayor of Columbia, said, "I came to this university as a sopho- more in 1945 and have stayed ever since. I like it here."
The Financial Context
Missouri was operating on a narrow tax base and ranked next- to-last among the states in its per capita appropriations for higher education.
In 1980, droughts had hampered the state's agricultural economy and national economic trends were hurting other major Missouri industries. The governor had withheld three percent
The University of Missouri cannot do everything. It is important to remember that the University is only one of the segments of public higher education in Missouri and should maintain its historic role of strength in research, advanced graduate and professional programs and extension. The University should do well whatever it does.
In August 1981, President Olson asked the chancellors to consider salary increments in light of the state's withholding of ten percent of the university's funds. Uehling, described by the press as a tough administrator, an iron fist in a velvet glove, assumed what she considered to be a hard, but fair and reasonable stance. She responded to Olson's request:
To plan for next year and beyond, we will be developing a process to identify entire programs that may be substantially reduced or eliminated, thereby supplanting our need to spread reductions throughout the campus. The early planning that we have done, at your suggestion, indicates a need to reduce our commitments by 10 to 20 percent in the next three years. After years of expansion, a reduction of that magnitude will be very difficult to achieve. But we must do it. . .
To paraphrase Philip Brooks who spoke of individuals: 'Greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.' As this is true for human life, so is it true for education, with programs depending on their inherent quality rather than size. The success of this endeavor depends on the cooperation and good judgment of all.
On the Columbia campus, some faculty feared Uehling's hard line, while others felt it was long overdue. A majority appeared to support her convictions, at least in principle. On November 19, 1981, the Faculty Council reaffirmed its long-standing "opposition to additional budget cuts applied uniformly to all academic units". That same month, the campus paper conducted a non-scientific opinion poll. It reported that eighty-seven percent of the faculty who responded answered "yes" to the question, "Would you be in favor of dropping entire programs on the Columbia campus to preserve and strengthen othersAt the Columbia campus, Barbara Uehling was ahead of the game. She had spent the previous year encouraging President Olson to take action. Anticipating that some action would be mandated, she had, in October, 1981, appointed a sixteen-person committee to develop criteria to be used in the event that cut- backs were needed.
Uehling later described her perceptions in the following terms:
The rationale and the data for the whole effort were supplied by the campus Institutional Research and Planning Office, working with me. The model for the need to take these steps was based on some very basic assumptions regarding needed revenue to reach Big 8/Big 10 salaries and to meet inflation on the base budget in ensuing years. Projected revenues from the state fell short.
The committee consisted of faculty, professional staff, two deans, and two students. Uehling selected the faculty members and students from panels nominated through the Faculty Council and Student Association, respectively. Each committee member was to consult with the groups they represented.
After Olson's December announcement, Bunn realized that programmatic decisions would have to be made soon. Anticipating these moves, he discussed possible strategies at two of his weekly meetings with Academic Deans. He also initiated a meeting with the executive committee (officers) of the Faculty Council. He proposed three possible ways to proceed. The first was to organize a committee, provide them with the criteria and necessary information and let them make the decisions. The second was for an officer, possibly Bunn, to gather all the data and make the decisions. Third, the deans could suggest programs for elimination or reduction based on the criteria.
Both groups suggested that Bunn should make the decision. Twelve of the fourteen deans favored the approach. There was some hesitation among members of the Faculty Council, who felt that this should be a long, carefully planned process. But they concurred that the second option was the most feasible in light of time constraints.
Bunn discussed his plan privately with several faculty members. These individuals were not on the Faculty Council Executive Committee, but they were people whose opinion Bunn respected. He felt "their achievements placed them in an especially good position to speak with some authority about evaluating academic programs". They agreed with the others
