Budget Narrative: Select Units Reporting to Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

A new provost necessarily enters the budget process in media res. Promises have been made over the years; patterns have been established for funding; units harbor expectations for increases based on past practices. This year I am here to learn and observe as much as to contribute. Loren and I have already discussed a few ways in which budget hearings will be altered next year. I may find during these sessions that there are other ways in which I’d like to see the budget handled. But for now we’ll proceed as in the past.

I want to speak to you first about my priorities for this year and for the next couple of years. But first I want to emphasize that I am in full agreement with the priorities that I found when I arrived on campus. Thus I support the initiative that goes under the name “Ready for the World,” and I also embrace the diversity initiative that has been started before I arrived. Since these initiatives belong to the Chancellor and to the campus, and since they include my office, but do not emanate from my office, I do not mention them here specifically as my priorities. But as campus priorities they must be considered an essential factor in determining the allocation of funding for my units or for any other unit on the campus.

After I had been at UT for two or three months, I made a list of issues and concerns that I wanted to deal with. That list became rather long, and I knew immediately that if I tried to deal with each one of these issues in my initial year, I would be expending too much energy for too little gain. Some of the items were small in scope, but they would require a great deal of effort to accomplish. I have taken on some of them nonetheless, but I very soon recognized that, if I want to succeed, I should set a limited number of goals, and that I should focus my energy and effort on these. The other items will have to wait for a later year in my tenure as Provost.

The issues I have selected for my main focus are three: faculty compensation; undergraduate education, especially as it relates to numerical benchmarks important for our efficiency and status as an institution; and graduate education. These are three large areas, but I consider it essential that we make progress in these three areas if we are to improve our profile as a research university.

Let me deal briefly with the first of these items, faculty compensation. The problem here is long-standing and obvious to all of us: the salaries of the faculty are simply too low when compared with any of the following three groups of institutions: our THEC peers, the SEC, and the AAU public universities. We would need over $8M in recurring funds to achieve equity with our THEC peers (assuming they do not raise their salaries at all), and well over $10M to be on equal footing with the AAU publics. We will not be able to make up this ground in a single year, and unless we receive support from our systemwide office, from the governor, and from the legislature, it will be difficult for us to make the type of progress we need to make. Thus I am limited in what I can do: the main responsibility for progress rests with the hierarchy above my level. What I can do is to develop strategies for utilizing the funding that we acquire, no matter how much that is. To that end I have appointed a task force on faculty compensation, which is studying this difficulty issue carefully. The task force will make recommendations to me at some point, possibly toward the end of the spring. Since none of the units I will be discussing today deal directly with the issue of faculty compensation, I will not speak of it any further at this session.

Let me state briefly what I feel are the challenges we face with regard to undergraduate education. In general we simply do not do well enough: we do not have enough programs that give undergraduates the opportunity to appreciate and participate in the life of a research university, and we do not operate efficiently and effectively with our undergraduate student population in the academic realm. Our retention rate for over a decade was below 80%, which places us near or at the bottom of the various comparison groups I use. The same holds for our graduation rate. Our retention rate is especially disappointing considering that indicators of student quality (high school GPA and ACT scores) have been rising steadily since the advent of the lottery scholarships. Also disappointing is that even the high-achieving students who come here are retained at relatively low rates. Thus less than 90% of students with a high-school GPA of 3.5-4.0 remain at UT for a second year; 93% is the average retention rate for many of our peers, such as Florida and Georgia. Perhaps connected with this poor retention rate for our highest achieving students is the state of our honors program. You will have noticed that even in the brief time he has been here Steve Dandaneau has made a big difference in the Chancellor’s Honors Program. But it is far from where we want it to be, and it lags behind similar programs at peer institutions.

Let me pass quickly over to graduate education and the situation I encountered when I became Provost. First, there was no graduate school or graduate division. As I have said repeatedly, there is no first-rate research institution in the country that does not have a location for graduate studies in a graduate school. Similarly there was no graduate dean, or at least no person devoted solely to that office. Again this situation is anomalous, even for UT, and certainly substandard for the type of institution we would like to become. I also heard during the first few months of my tenure as Provost that support had been shifted away from graduate studies in recent years. Perhaps this shift in support, if it did occur, had a logical and persuasive rationale. But it is my firm conviction that if there was a shift, we must shift back, and even if there was no shift, we must move to support graduate education at higher levels if we are going to move up in the ranks of research institutions in the United States. One of the areas in which we must improve is student stipends. Our stipends in most units are simply too low and therefore we are not competitive and unable to attract the type of graduate students we want and need. This situation cannot be remedied overnight; but it is a major concern of mine, and I plan to address it gradually but resolutely in the next few years.

In setting out to meet the challenges I encountered when I became Provost, I looked around for assistance. I found a fine group of colleagues as Vice Chancellors and a great set of deans. But the Provost’s Office was severely understaffed for any major change. The departure in the fall of the sole budget and accounting person shared by the Chancellor and me made matters worse. One of the first things to which I had to attend was acquiring a staff that could assist me with the various initiatives I wanted to undertake. Rumors have reached me that some faculty members believe I have increased my staffing too much; there is an attitude among some faculty members that administration is unnecessary for a university, and that keeping administration to a minimum serves the institution best. I do not share this view. If I were to respond to these rumored objections I would issue a challenge: show me any major research university in the country where the Provost’s Office is leaner, and I’ll be happy to reduce my staff. In fact, if you compare the present staffing in my office with provost’s offices around the country, you will find that we are the leanest by far. (I might add that the same holds true for the Chancellor’s Office at Knoxville, and very likely for the staffing in the offices of the other Vice Chancellors as well.)  In any case, I did feel that a few hires were necessary. First and foremost I’ve been most fortunate to attract Todd Diacon to be the Vice Provost for Academic Operations. In this position Todd will be in charge of unit reviews, thus allowing my Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Susan Martin, to focus on the many duties to which her office must attend. Todd is also dealing with issues of undergraduate education, helping me and the campus to meet some of the challenges I’ve already mentioned. I was also fortunate to persuade Carolyn Hodges to become the Dean of the Graduate School. As you know, Anne Mayhew had formerly held that position while simultaneously occupying the position of Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. If we hope to move forward as a research institution, however, we need someone to attend solely to the Graduate School, and Carolyn is well suited to this task. In my immediate office we have just recently hired a senior analyst who will assist me, Todd, and Susan with internal and external research projects, and with the implementation of programs for the campus. We are also in the process of replacing the budget analyst we lost so that I will have someone to work with during the year and at budget time on matters concerning the financial health of the institution. I should also mention the considerable help my office has received over the past couple of months from a temporary employee, Rahim Manji, a graduate student from sociology and former torchbearer. Since December Rahim has helped us with various projects on a part-time basis and been extremely valuable and creative in his work.

Let me now turn to the budget proper and first tell you what the principles were that I used to evaluate the various requests and needs of the units I’ll be presenting in a moment. First I want to know whether the requests contribute to one of my three priorities. But I also want to how the request contributes to other campus priorities, especially those established by the Chancellor before my arrival. The only unfortunate feature of the units I am reviewing today is that most of them are directly involved with one or more of these priorities. So my principles didn’t help me very much.

Before I turn to the units, I wanted to mention the program recently implemented from the Provost’s Office and officially thank Todd for all he has done to make this program successful. I am referring to the Freshman Seminar Program. It is meant to be part of a more encompassing initiative that will improve retention. Specifically freshman seminars address the large impersonal nature of the initial undergraduate educational experience: the large lecture courses and the graduate student instruction, and the concomitant absence of contact with ladder faculty. Freshman seminars are one remedy for this situation, although hardly a panacea. We have made these seminars one-unit courses taught on a pass/no credit basis since they will be offered as overloads to regularly assigned course loads. Every faculty member teaching a freshman seminar will receive a $1500 research stipend. We would probably need around 200 freshman seminars per year to accommodate everyone in the freshman class who wants to enroll in one. Next year in the pilot phase we are aiming for 50 each term. I plan to fund the program next year on non-recurring funds in my office. Once we can gauge the response and the costs, I will seek to fund them on a recurring basis.

Now let me present to you on behalf of five units that report to my office. The first is the Student Success Center. It is at the heart of several important campus processes and initiatives, and I am counting on it to make significant contributions to the improvement of our retention and graduate rates. The four top priorities of the Center are all in line with the priorities of my office. The first involves the transition in advising and counseling from the Geier era to post-Geier times. Ruth Darling is seeking to restructure the programs that supported the African-American Achiever students and the African-American Incentive Grant recipients. In accomplishing this transition, she requests two assistant directors to provide counseling and program coordination for the remaining AAA and AAIG students, as well as for the new recipients of the Promise and Pledge awards. I anticipate that these positions will be supported by funding we will receive for post-Geier initiatives, but at some point the campus will likely have to decide how and whether it will support these positions from our own regular funding stream. The second request would extend the successful supplemental instruction program in mathematics, implemented this past year, to other fields, such as chemistry and psychology. The SI program has been important this year and contributes directly to retention efforts. Third on the SSC list is the request for funding directly related to retention initiatives such as workshops for students at risk or on probation. And fourth is a request to improve the communication of the SSC with the student and general campus population, an effort that is obviously essential if the SSC is itself going to succeed.

I include the Thornton Center here for your information only. As I understand it, the Center receives its funding directly from Athletics and is not submitting these items as requests from my budget. You can see for yourself that the Thornton Center wishes to improve the Special Needs Program for students with learning disabilities, to enhance the VOLScholar Program (which has met with considerable success), to establish a smart classroom for better instruction, and to improve the reception area of the center.

I move now to the Center for International Education. This Center is pivotal for our efforts to implement Ready for the World and thus almost everything it undertakes is in line with a high campus priority. As you probably know, Yang Zhong is currently serving as the interim director while we search for a new director. The top priority of the CIE is a full-time clerical staff person who will serve the offices of International Student Service and the International Scholar Services. This position would enable other shifts beneficial to the functioning of CIE. The second and third requests involve technology: CIE requests funds to purchase, install, and populate an on-line application program for the Programs Abroad Office; the software identified (Studio Abroad) will enable that office to operate more efficiently. CIE also wants to purchase and install FSA Atlas, a program that is Banner compatible, to replace i1440 for batching required SEVIS data; there is a small annual maintenance fee associated with this program. Finally CIE requests the restoration of the third graduate student employee to the International House Staff.

Next up is the Graduate School, a unit that is obviously central to my plans to improve the status of graduate studies on the Knoxville campus. Carolyn has taken the past two months to survey the terrain and finds that her first priority is additional staffing: she is requesting as her highest two priorities: a staff person to assist with accounting processes and fee waivers, a half-time associate dean who will be dedicated to graduate studies in the natural sciences and engineering, and two new graduate assistant lines devoted to thesis/dissertation consultation and to enhancing teaching, research, professional development, and recruitment. The third prioritized request from the graduate school is increased operating funding for recruitment, retention, and overall unit visibility. The final request is for equipment needs. I’m not sure whether these needs couldn’t be met in the future through other programs on campus dealing directly with technological improvements.

I turn now to the Chancellor’s Honors Program, which again is a unit dealing with a high campus priority. The requests forwarded to me involve recurring funds for programs related to honors students. The highest priority is the funding of undergraduate research; the second request is for enhancing the first-year experience. Part of the latter request matches the freshman seminar proposal. CHP will run a special freshman seminar for honors students; this program will operate with parameters identical to those in the campus-wide program. But the funding would also go to other purposes, such as university honors seminars and the Honors Community residing in Morrill Hall.

The final unit I present to you is Institutional Research, a group that has just recently returned to the Knoxville campus. IR is essential for the management of the campus; unfortunately it has been directed in the past more toward reporting for the system and to external agencies than toward campus activities, and I will be working with it in the coming year to make certain it is useful to campus administrators. Like CIE, IR is currently in the midst of searching for a new director. Its requests were restricted to increases in the operating budget to match the actual expenditures and funding for staff professional development. However, in examining the budget for this unit, I note that with the arrival of a director IR will require additional expenditures in staff salaries. Even if we compensate the new director at the same rate as the old director, which is an unlikely scenario, the campus will very need to supplement the budget of this unit in the next academic year.

In my recommendations for funding I do not address the specific needs of the units and their priorities; rather, I make suggestions for overall increased allocations, but leave the decisions on where to use the funding to the units themselves. In general I am able to do more in the area of non-recurring needs than recurring funding. The Chancellor and I have discussed the CHP, and we agree that it should receive a substantial increase in base funding. It is possible that this increase will come from donor funds currently being solicited. But at least initially I would recommend an increase of $175,000 in recurring funds for this unit. For the Graduate School I am recommending an increase in recurring funding of $75,000; this funding will not cover all of its priorities. But it will help Carolyn in transitioning the Graduate School from a unit with few aspirations to one that will be the focal point for graduate studies on the Knoxville campus. I will also fund the equipment that she requests, but will ask her to inquire whether these requests can be funded elsewhere, and I will certainly expect her to seek funding from appropriate sources in the future. I am recommending an increase in the recurring budget for the Student Success Center of $50,000; I expect that SSC will also receive a good portion of post-Geier funding for its highest priority. In addition I will fund $10,000 in non-recurring needs requested in the various priorities. It is possible that there will be other non-recurring needs requested by SSC in connection with the current retention initiative. I have asked Ruth to make an additional request out of cycle for non-recurring funding of activities connected with retention and the retention task force if she is unable to fund them from her budget. For the Center for International Education I will support their two data base needs and recommend raising their recurring budget by $25,000; with CIE I prefer to take a more moderate approach since I anticipate that the new director may either negotiate for additional funding, or in the budget presentation next year have different sorts of requests. Finally, although I expect we will have to increase the salary budget for IR substantially once we have a new director, I recommend an increase of $15,000 to the base budget to cover some of its operating and professional development needs.

The programs whose requests I have presented today are important to campus priorities. They serve not just one unit, but the entire campus. If they are working effectively, they make us a better campus. It is essential that they receive the support that they deserve, and I will be looking carefully at what they accomplish during the coming year to determine whether further budget augmentations would be money well invested.

Posted: March 1, 2007