Report from the Provost at the Deans, Directors, and Department Heads Retreat

October 1, 2007

My purpose in talking to you this morning is twofold. First I want to review with and for you what we’ve been able to accomplish over the past year. Second, I want to give you some insight into what we in the Provost’s Office are planning to accomplish this year.

One of the ways in which I prepared for this presentation was to review the areas on which I have focused over the past fifteen months. I then tried to ascertain whether the campus had made any progress in the areas I felt were most in need of attention. I think we have, but we are a long way from where I want us to be and from where I believe you would like us to be.

Faculty

Let me turn then first to one of the central concerns I had from the moment I stepped onto the Knoxville campus: the quality of the faculty. You will recall that I often referred to Clark Kerr’s dictum about the importance of faculty: “If you make good decisions on your faculty, and every other decision is made badly, you have a great university. You make every other decision well, but badly choose your faculty, you’ve a poor university. The quality of a university is the quality of its faculty.”  (Sometimes I forget to disclose that this statement comes from the press conference immediately after he was fired by Ronald Reagan.)  I subscribed to that statement last year, and continue to believe it is the most fundamental principle of excellence in higher education. You will recall that my reasoning last year was that to attract and retain the best faculty we need to have a level of compensation that allows us to compete with our peers. We did not have adequate compensation last year, and although we have made some progress since then, we still do not have faculty compensation that allows us to compete on the level we would like to compete. But let me briefly interrupt the bad news with some good news:

1. We did receive a total compensation package of 5% this year. It was distributed as 3% across-the-board; 1.5% was devoted to merit; and the remaining 0.5% was allocated on the basis of equity disparities.
2. In light of the equity reports from this year and from past years – and I am referring to reports dealing with women’s and men’s salaries from our own Office of Institutional Research and Assessment as well as an independent report on the same topic undertaken by the Faculty Senate – I felt it was best to address this problem directly. The entire 0.5% was devoted to salaries of women faculty members. I was unable to meet all the needs identified by the deans even in the area of women’s salaries, but I did address most of them. I leave for another year the severe problems many units have with inversion and compression of salaries.
3. This year we spent several hundred thousand dollars in retention of faculty members; we had several unsuccessful retentions as well. In spending so much money on faculty retention, I am trying to follow through on my pledge to try to retain the best faculty when they receive outside offers.

The actions from my office are intended to send a signal to the faculty that the campus will address inequities where they exist, and that it will reward meritorious activities. I also want to emphasize that we want to recruit and retain the very best faculty members. I believe that it is important for our faculty to know that we are serious about improving the quality of the campus, and that we recognize that “the quality of a university is the quality of its faculty.”

As I’ve said, there’s much more to do. The basic contours of the situation are, unfortunately, all too clear. In nearly every level of the professorate we rank at or near the bottom of our THEC peers.  As you know, I formed a faculty compensation task force last spring, and I received its draft report just a few weeks ago. Let me quote from that report:

The amount required to bring UTK salaries to parity with THEC peers is $8,182,000. The data comparing UTK salaries to Top 25 Public Institutions and to the selected AAU institutions revealed a worse picture with respect to UTK salaries; the amount required to bring salaries to parity with this group of peers is $12,738,000, and $12,277,000 respectively.

The good news about salaries on the campus is that the bulk of the money needed to raise salaries to peer levels is in the rank of full professors. We would need much less of a cash infusion to adjust the salaries of assistant professors, so that they are earning as much as their peers.

Obviously we have a way to go before we have achieved our goals in terms of faculty compen­sation. We will not be able to fix the problem in one year, or even in several years. In the coming years we must adopt the following principles, in my view, if we are going to make progress in this area:

1. Continue to place faculty compensation at the top of priorities for the campus, and convey that message strongly to system officials and to the State of Tennessee.  I am committed to making compensation a priority, and I believe the campus will do so as well. I would like to believe that the state will respond in support of its flagship institution.
2. Develop some regularity in our merit procedures. In order to gain ground on our THEC peers, and in order to provide the appropriate rewards for faculty members, we need to devote a sum of money each year to merit increases; we cannot depend solely on the increases budgeted for employees by the state. In my scheme this sum of money would become part of our fixed costs and in the same kind of category as our utility bills. We might not want to accord to every faculty member access to this merit pool every year. Perhaps a three-year cycle would be best for considering merit increases, so that we can measure faculty productivity on a time-line that is more in keeping with the rhythm of faculty performance.
3. Continue the procedure of recruiting faculty at market salaries. It is important that we compete for the best younger faculty; we should not scrimp on salaries for new hires since it would only perpetuate the salary problems we currently have.
4. Maintain quality by devoting funds to retention of meritorious faculty members. It is important for the colleges in cooperation with the Provost’s Office to come up with competitive and attractive counter-offers if an excellent faculty member is recruited by another institution. We do not want to be the victim of raiding of our top teachers and researchers.

I wanted to note here for the record that we have introduced a couple of advances in our general hiring practices that may assist us in recruiting faculty:

1. Starting this fall sexual orientation will be included in our anti-discrimination statement. The campus worked long and hard to change policy on this issue, and although we only managed to bring ourselves into line with standard practices at most other institutions, we have eliminated a significant barrier to some faculty hiring.
2. We have introduced a new program this fall that will assist in spousal and domestic partner hiring. Susan sent out details of this program on August 24th. They can be found under the memoranda tab on the Provost’s web site.

We are also going to look into more effective ways of distributing materials about our family-friendly policy and about UTK in general. Tom Milligan, our Vice Chancellor for
Communication, has agreed to assist us in these efforts, which will publicize the progressive policies of the campus and thus enhance our ability to attract the very best faculty members.

With regard to faculty recruitment I want to reiterate what I told you last year: “If you can’t find a candidate who is likely to excel and achieve tenure, then you should extend the search to the following year and solve your immediate needs with temporary positions. Recruiting for quality is the most important job assigned to the deans, and in turn to the department heads. Moreover, we should not shy away from trying to attract the best. We may lose a greater percentage of battles in aiming high, but we will win some, and it is important that we set standards for the incoming faculty and by extension for the faculty already here. Recruiting quality faculty takes additional resources at times, but Loren and I are committed to raising the level of the professorate here at Tennessee, and hiring quality faculty is the best path to accomplish this goal.”

Graduate Education

Another area in which I concentrated my efforts last year was graduate education. Here I can point to three accomplishments. As you know, when I arrived we had no formal structure for the Graduate School. Linda Painter was appointed interim Dean of Graduate Studies, and she did a fine job, especially with the NRC surveys, but there was no real locus for graduate education on campus. I reasoned that if we are going to be a great research institution, we must have a graduate school, so I performed a speech act one day, and – lo and behold! – the Graduate School came into existence. I can say without a doubt that the easiest thing I’ve done since I became Provost was the creation of the Graduate School. I searched for a permanent dean last fall and was fortunate to attract Carolyn Hodges to the position, which she assumed on January 1st of this year. The third accomplishment was securing new quarters for the Graduate School, an accomplishment for which the credit really belongs to Denise Barlow, Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration; Carolyn has already moved into these quarters, and the rest of the Graduate School will join her at the end of the term. There may also be some restructuring so that we can guarantee that the Graduate School will operate effectively and be able to live up to best practices. Already the Graduate School has assumed responsibility for some functions that had been distributed to other units, such as the constitution of dissertation committees.

But there is still a lot to do in graduate education on the Knoxville campus. In a very real sense, what has been accomplished until now was the easiest part of the task. A few weeks ago we received a report concerning one of the departments that had been reviewed this past term, and it is exemplary for the way it describes the situation of graduate students. Graduate stipends are too low to be competitive is its first point. There are too few graduate positions to attract a sufficient cohort of students is its next point. And third there are too few fee waivers to support the students for whom we have graduate stipends. These same conditions apply mutatis mutandis to almost every academic unit on the campus.

Carolyn and I have talked frequently about a course of action. First, of course, we must gather information to see what the extent of the problem is. Accordingly she has set up a task force to examine graduate stipends, an area that is baffling for the central administration because of the different way they are treated and administered in units across the campus. Once we have this information, we will develop together a course of action. As with faculty salaries, we will not be able to redress this situation in one year. We will have to formulate a strategy that will eventually get us to a place where we are both competitive with peer institutions and providing a sufficient number of stipends to fuel graduate programs at reasonable levels. In the meantime we have devoted more recurring dollars to graduate student support in the current budget. We hope that Carolyn will use this money wisely to increase our competitiveness for graduate students and to enable us to attract a larger and better cohort.

I have also thought that we should provide flexibility in budgeting what I would call TAS or Temporary Academic Salaries. These funds are distinct in my mind from salaries for tenured and tenure-track faculty, since we cannot easily rededicate those funds to other teaching categories. If a lump sum of TAS is given without further designation, and if the creation of GTA lines or lecturer lines is facilitated by Human Resources, departments and colleges can make decisions themselves about the kind of person they want teaching. They are in a better position to know what’s best for their programs. In any case, departments may well decide that they want to focus more on support of graduate education – a decision I would personally welcome – and we in the administration would then have to help figure out how to supply an increased number of graduate students with appropriate fee waivers.

Undergraduate Education

During the past year we have had a great deal of activity in the area of undergraduate education, especially with regard to undergraduate retention. I would like to take credit for this activity, but really the credit goes first and foremost to Todd Diacon, the Vice Provost for Academic Operations, and Ruth Darling, the director of the Student Success Center.

Before talking about our progress in programs and policies, I first wanted to report to you about our latest class of undergraduates: I am delighted to let you know the good news: they continue to get better. This year the incoming class has an average ACT score of just under 26; a third of the incoming freshmen have a 4.0 GPA or better. The average GPA for the incoming class is over 3.65. Statistically this class is our best ever.

Better students, however, means that we as administrators have to do better as well. More is expected of our faculty, our support staff, and of us.

Before turning to how we are trying to reshape and rethink our first-year programs for the improved incoming class, I would like to mention a special group of students, those that are invited to join the Chancellor’s Honors Program. For a variety of reasons we have made CHP students a special focus this year and next, devoting significant resources to this program for educational opportunities and enhancement.

A few years ago UT Knoxville might have been a safety school for many high achieving students. But there are good reasons that it is increasingly becoming a first choice. Much of the credit for the turnaround in honors at UTK belongs to Steve Dandaneau, the director of the program, who has contributed immensely to coordination of honors opportunities on the campus and to enhancing opportunities for students enrolled in the CHP.

We are giving more to these students, because they deserve it; they are among the best students we have ever attracted to this campus. Their average ACT score was 31.1, which is in the top 2% of scores nationally and equivalent to a 1380 SAT. The typical high school GPA for honors students is a 4.0, owing in part to the large number of advanced placement courses in which they are enrolled and in which they perform so well. These students compare to the top admits anywhere at public institutions of higher education. This year we will be providing opportunities in almost every discipline for an honors concentration and for enhancements, such as undergraduate research and travel abroad, that make this program a real asset to the campus in its endeavor to attract the best students.

For the very best students entering UTK next fall we will be starting a special program: the Haslam Scholars Program. This program, supported by a generous gift from Jimmy and Dee Haslam, as well as from Jim and Natalie Haslam, will support annually a group of 15 of our most outstanding students selected by a blue-ribbon committee to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime educational experience. During the course of their careers on campus each student in the Haslam Scholars will receive a laptop computer, a study abroad experience and up to $5500 in support of research and its presentation. They, along with the other honors students, will also have access to mentoring and advising on prestigious external scholars such as the Rhodes, the Marshall, the Goldwater, the Truman, and the Fulbright. This advice and counseling will be part of an external scholarships office that we will establish during the course of this year.

Let me turn now to what we have been doing for the new undergraduate students in general. You will recall that we have done poorly historically in retention as compared to our THEC peers, our AAU aspirational peers, and even the SEC. Since we are now accepting a first-year class with such high academic credentials, I believe more than ever that it is our obligation to make certain that every student succeeds at Knoxville. If a student fails, or fails to return, we should consider this failure in large part a failure on the part of the institution, its faculty, and its administration.

Our focus during the last year has been retention of students from the first to the second year. I am pleased to announce that we are moving in the right direction: Two years ago our retention rate for first-year students was below 80% at 79.6%; I received word a few days ago that the retention rate for the current year is 83.8%, a jump of over four percentage points from 2004-05. This remarkable achievement redounds to the credit of Ruth Darling and the Success Center, which has been at the forefront of promoting student success even before I began to emphasize its importance.

But we cannot be satisfied with these gains; we must and will be doing more in years to come. As you probably know, I appointed last academic year a retention task force to look at the multifaceted topic of retention, and, under the leadership of Ruth Darling and Tammy Kahrig, this task force did a wonderful job. In fact they have done such a good job, that their first recommendation was that they be charged with continuing to meet. I am happy to accommodate that recommendation, and I will endeavor to support financially many of the other recommendations in their fine report.

In the meantime, however, we were not idle; we took action calculated to improve retention while awaiting the task force’s report.

1. Many of the initiatives we undertook during the summer and this fall were grouped under the “Light the Torch of Academic Excellence” program, which was administered by Todd Diacon. Included here were the passport to excellence, a sort of scavenger hunt for new students, where they were encouraged to find the buildings in which they have classes; college open houses, which occurred in every college and allowed students to meet faculty and administrators; and the “how-to-succeed” mini lectures, given by instructors in large first-year courses during welcome week.
2. As you also know, we started a freshman seminar program this fall to enable first-year students, often stuck in large enrollment courses to have direct access to at least one faculty member and to have intellectual exchange with their peers. We have 48 seminars this fall and around 550 students. Reports from students and faculty alike praise these courses. We are currently recruiting for the spring term.
3. We are expanding and refining several programs that started last year. We are now providing supplementary instruction in many of the most difficult courses in which first-year students are enrolled. We have continued the probation workshops for students who experience academic difficulty in their initial term at UTK. And we are looking at new possibilities for learning communities, partnering with student affairs to create a welcoming, yet academically challenging atmosphere for new students.

Let me mention three areas in which we will be implementing new programs during the course of the coming year:

1. Teaching-Learning Center: The campus evidently did away with its teaching-learning center during budget cuts of the 1990s. Although I do not know the exact reason for its elimination, the campus needs such an office. Most campuses have a center to assist faculty members in communicative strategies and best practices in the classroom. We have therefore decided to move forward with the creation of a teaching-learning center, which will report to Todd Diacon, and which should be operational at some point in the spring.
2. Advising on campus:  Advising is one of the areas on campus that needs attention. Students frequently complain about advising, and although most of our professional advisers are very competent and extremely well prepared to deal with students, they are often overwhelmed by the number of students they must see and the advice they are called upon to give. I am going to take the cautious route and try to find out more about what the problems are before developing strategies for solutions. This year we will ask two professional advisers from the national organization dealing with advising issues to come to the campus and consult with us. When we find what we need to do to improve advising on campus, we will try to find the resources to address the issues brought up by the consultants.
3. Undergraduate Research: As a large, state, flagship institution, we have many disadvantages: large classes, the potential for alienation of students, and impersonal treatment of undergraduates. But we have one decisive advantage over other types of institutions of higher education: we have a great faculty doing pioneering research in fields across the academic spectrum. The best way to take advantage of this feature of large, flagship institutions is to integrate more thoroughly undergraduate research into our curriculum and into education. We are fortunate that Bard Fenwick and Greg Reed in the Research Office are similarly enthusiastic about the need to present undergraduates with increased opportunities to work along with faculty members. Undergraduate research will be run out of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, but we will be promoting it as part of best practices from the perspective of Academic Affairs as well.

Data

I would like to mention briefly a couple of areas in which we are making strides toward best practices. Data on this campus has long been a problem. Those producing data have done a good job in many cases, but data, as far as I can tell, was not produced and directed toward the management of the campus. I am trying to change that culture. I have encouraged a DATA group to meet (Data Accessibility for Tennessee Administration) to discuss various issues pertaining to the collection and dissemination of data at Knoxville. This group consists of managers of data from the campus and the system, and they are proceeding to meet on a regular basis to improve communication and coordinate their activities. Linda Broyles, a senior analyst in the Provost’s Office since January, has helped sort out the complicated coding of departments, academic areas, and majors/concentrations with the help of the relevant data base managers. We are on our way to having unit profiles that we can use to help us make judicious decisions about all sorts of matters, including resource allocation. The Business Warehouse group from the system office has been extremely cooperative and is now in the process of integrating student systems data into the warehouse to provide us with better information. Finally, I have undertaken in my office a pilot study of faculty activity using Digital Measures, an external company that specializes in the collection of this sort of information. I hope that my efforts will assist not only my office, but all administrators on campus, in dealing with issues of central importance to managing the campus.

Staffing Essential Functions

I want to go over briefly the staff that I’ve hired in the past year so that you are informed about activities in my office and in other offices reporting to me and essential to the operation of the campus. In my immediate office I have hired three individuals since I arrived: Todd Diacon, the Vice Provost for Academic Operations, who is in charge of academic program reviews and a host of items having to do with undergraduate education; Terrell Strayhorn, the Special Assistant to the Provost, who works mostly with retention issues; Linda Broyles, a senior analyst, who has been working on several important projects, including the freshman seminar program, the aforementioned crosswalks data project, and enrollment management. And finally, Betsy Adams, who started at the beginning of September as my budget analyst. I believe that the Provost’s Office is just about where it has to be to provide an adequate level of service to the campus – although I anticipate that I may reorganize some reporting lines and responsibilities in the next couple of months.

The two most important hires outside of my office yet within my purview are Pia Wood, who will assume the directorship of the Center for International Education next week, and Richard Tucker, the new director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, who begins the Monday after Thanksgiving. Pia comes to us from Wake Forest, where she performed a similar function; Richard has been working in the institutional research unit in Northwestern’s graduate school. I believe both will be fine additions to our campus, and I now that you will enjoy working with them.

Communication

One final item I’d like to mention is communication. I’d like to have more of it coming from my office. Sometimes in the hectic activities of daily life in the Tower, we tend to forget that it is our obligation to inform students, staff, and faculty about what we are doing, and to solicit from them their concerns and suggestions. Last year I tried to start on the path toward better communication by establishing a web page that contains all memoranda from my office, as well as short pieces I compose on sometimes controversial topics. I also met in groups of eight to ten with all new faculty on campus to learn about their experiences on campus and to find out what we can do better for them – and by extension for other faculty members as well. I will continue these meetings this spring. In addition, I formed a small group of 18 junior faculty members as a kind of advisory group, and I meet with this group twice a term.

This year, however, I’d like increased contact with the world outside the Tower. Susan will be setting up a more accessible page for faculty that will give them better information on what they need to know most about policies and their careers. Todd will also have his own page describing his initiatives. We will also have a web page devoted to our retention research. I will be meeting with groups of faculty three times a term: I have invited 150 this term to a Provost’s Roundtable (they select any one of three possible dates for lunch), where I discuss anything and everything on their minds or on my mind. Finally, I am meeting monthly with students in their dining commons to hear what they have to say about the campus and their own experiences in Knoxville.

There are several other projects on which my office is working. When I had my annual review with the Chancellor, I listed close to 50 items on my “to-do” list. I’m not sure I’ll get to all of them, but my feeling here is its better to fall short of expectations than to limit expectations. I hope you are as enthusiastic as I am about the campus and its future. I think great things lie ahead for Knoxville, and I want to join with you in assisting the campus to realize its immense potential.

 

Posted: October 2, 2007