Provost calls for individual colleges to make cuts

The cuts can not be made across the board—they must be made in a differential manner, taking into consideration the size of each unit and its mission. A 20% cut in a small college with little chance of securing large grants to “off-load the general funds” (i.e., a non-science related unit, such as the College of Arts & Letters) will create much more damage than a similar cut in the sciences, engineering or medicine—units that already depend largely on external support to fund their research efforts.

A 20% cut in a small humanities oriented college is pretty much a death blow. The administration will need to decide what kind of university we are going to be in the years ahead—MSU A&T or a comprehensive, world class institution.

Last time I checked, MSU was started for the purpose of agriculture and technolgy. LouAnna and others are the ones trying to railroad out ag to create the worlds largest liberal arts school.

Actually, no one wants an A&M or anything like that. Not even faculty in those fields, not because of the academic area itself, but because it changes the atmosphere of a University.

Its like that with every field of study. A U wants to have as much academic diversity as possible because it fosters better campus atmosphere, academic cooperation between units, helps attracts grants for research and that sort of thing.

Even though, MSU was founded on the basis of agricultural studies, the Land Grant mission is not on agriculture itself, but in the accessibility of not financially elite students to a world class education.

So, I do agree with the faculty member. Also, academic programs usually develop slowly and for the very bottom, but with time and dedication they evolve and the gain an identity that makes them unique. I think MSU doesn’t have a limit in what it can achieve as an institution with students, faculty and the community since the University is starting to emphasize inter departmental collaboration that can lead to great academic programs, attract great faculty, and great research.

Why not start with throwing out the CLS crybabies? Toss the whole program and focus on majors with real, employable degrees.

I love how the article on the main page talks about spending a whole bunch of money each year to hire a professional chef to put “MSU on the cutting edge of dining services” and here the Provost is talking about making cuts to save money. . .

Gotta love MSU Corp.

MSU has been a stalwart employer in the mid-michigan area for generations. Any cut in personnel at this economic time is simply a shame. Though the state is going through a total restructure it is only necessary that the University would have to do the same. My wonder is how the foundation and the university can look at cost cutting when some departments seem to be bleeding money. How about a cut in upper administrative pay and a “no raise” policy until the economy turns around next 5 years.

All these cuts are going to negatively affect students and reduce the quality of an MSU degree. Fewer faculty means larger class sizes and reducing the number of course requirements to get a degree in certain majors, relying more heavily on grad students and online courses. Too bad.

Actually, the purpose of raising tuition is to keep the faculty. There are no suggestions that the faculty will be severely affected. There is a commitment to sustain the current faculty:student ratio.

HabisY, not all the salaries come from the same sources of the budget. Its not like MSU will stop hiring because of budget reductions. MSU keeps generating revenue and creating new revenue sources but the impact comes when you have to keep improving, like all universities. Look at the U’s around the country, they are all the same. The only thing is that the state of Michigan has been the worst in providing support to higher ed in the last 5 to 10 years.

Also, all the universities in the world run like corporations because they need to. As corporations, universities need money to attract the best, be the best and provide all the services and resources they do. The difference exists in terms of how much does the administration has to care about short-run and long-run financial issues. For example, I think that Harvard has the largest endowment in the U.S., if not in the world, with around $27 Billion. If you consider the small size of their student population and how high the tuition is, they are extremely financially secure. On the other hand, if you look at one of the MAC universities in Michigan, they are all struggling and their financial needs are extreme to the point of admitting more under qualified students and sacrificing quality to have those revenues from students.

Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard if it wasn’t for its endowment. Or do you think professors decide to work in Harvard because of X o Y reason? On the other hand, if these MAC universities had the endowment that Harvard has and Harvard would have an endowment of 100 millions, the MAC universities would be the elite schools.

But, again, they all run like businesses. The difference is that some are more discrete because they are financially secure than others, like MSU, that have above average endowments but not big enough to secure all the areas of the University.

Now, I’ve been to Harvard and other Ivy League schools and if you think that MSU is a bureaucracy and has an inefficient administration, you don’t even want to be in those schools.

student,

you make a good point about MSU’s original mission — it was not to teach agriculture (there was no such thing) but rather sciences (especially) and liberal arts to economically disadvantaged kids, esp from the farms, to make them “thinking” persons — but when these kids had access to the famous science (and others) profs here, they often left the farms for the “learned” jobs so MSU created agricultural extension for practical info for farmers…

Point being, this has always been a diverse school but faculty member makes a point: cuts must be made with a scalpel, not a meat cleaver. Liberal arts must be nurtured to the max extent possible while sciences (where we’re getting things like the FRIB, electromagnetic spectrometers, auto labs and IBM tech facilities) can sustain a bigger hit… MSU must be smart about what it cuts, also the school MUST seek out private funds from wealthy donors, esp alums…

Check the grants awarded to the various units on campus, what colleges have the most support staff, and how much each unit pays their faculty and graduate teaching assistants. You won’t see agriculture getting the short end of the stick as compared to the arts and humanities.

MSU has clearly diversified and broadened its mission since its inception as an agricultural school, but I’d be surprised to hear that the faculty and staff in agriculture share the view that they are being “railroaded out.”

faculty member, I understand what you are saying but we also must remember that many of the academic accomplishments that led to transformations of the University into what we have today was due to the effort of researchers and professors in the CANR. I mean, look at their building, it is what it should be. Eventually, MSU will continue developing the arts and humanities and those areas. If you look at it this way, I think that the arts and humanities at MSU have surpassed the rest of the units in terms of developing national award winning students for the Truman, Marshall and other scholarships.

Also, remember that MSU is working hard to create the arts and humanities district by moving Music to the area around Snyder Phillips and the Broad Museum.

A lot of things are going on back stage. Its just that the economy is bad and things are taking longer to materialize.

to student: I appreciate your support and positive attitude about the arts—which I share—but a 20% cut made in a non-differential way across units will disproportionately impact units like music and the humanities in devastating ways. A 20% cut won’t put the arts and humanities at MSU on the “back stage.” It will eliminate the stage altogether.

As much as I support the arts and humanities at MSU, that unit has to be productive in terms of development. For example, if we take a look at the political science department, they have great graduate programs and great combination of teaching and research. So, I consider that the arts and humanities at MSU should involve, not only teaching, but they should foster their students to pursue external University opportunities. Instead of working in a retail store, he/she could be at other academic/professional activities.

I don’t doubt the ability of the faculty, but I think that in general the faculty of arts and humanities should be more proactive and expose its students to the outside world. I know funding is needed for this and that external opportunities are highly competitive but that’s what you got to do when you want to be great.

Maybe the unit should take this opportunity to reorganize, evaluate what they want to do and what they want to be, be more aggressive in approaching alumni, and other things that foster a culture of involvement in the arts and representation of the program outside of the college.

The University is evolving into this but the units themselves should be proactive too.

The problem is that we are using a one-size-fits-all approach to determining “quality”—the ability to procure grants and other forms of external funding. And these opportunities simply are not available in the same way and to the same extent in the arts as they are in the sciences. This isn’t whining, and its not an excuse—its just the truth.

To say that “ the arts and humanities at MSU. . . has to be productive in terms of development” is applying the sort of metric used in the sciences to the arts—we may as well say that the sciences and engineering will need to produce more novels and symphonies—you can’t apply the standards in one domain to productivity in another domain.

I agree with faculty member that the ability to procure grants and other forms of external funding are not equal among disciplines. CANR and Social Science have an easier time than Humanities or Business for that matter. Publishing articles in a finance or accounting journal doesn’t help MSU as much as bringing in a large grant. The difficulty is that Admin is placing significant pressure on everyone to increase grant activity. Add to that the fact that the infrastructure needed to handle such increases, along with the complexity of newer, less established international grants, is simply not there. In my opinion, Contracts & Grants is at the breaking point with no relief in sight, forcing faculty to spend ever increasing amounts of time trying to process a grant. They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t, yet the mantra is “More grants!”

I guess I read Provost Wilcox’s comments a bit differently than others. I read calls for fundamental change, not nibbling away 20% and trying to keep as much as possible just the same.
Fundamental change might involve a top to bottom assessment of each academic program and the ELIMINATION of some. Low or declining enrollment programs, from whatever College, should receive the greatest scrutiny.

The notion that MSU needs to maintain each of the 316 programs (yes, I counted them) on the Academic Programs and Areas of Study list is a non-starter. No faculty member ever wants to see programs in their area cut, someone’s ox is always gored.
I hope the Provost means what he says and that he will insist on fundamental changes.

In the last days I’ve seen that there are various grant opportunities in NEH, NEA and other non profit and private organizations.

There are indeed NEH and NEA grants, and many arts and humanities faculty members are applying for these opportunities. But there simply are not enough granting opportunities in the arts to provide a significant alternate funding source as there are in the sciences. If universities persist in attempting to measure all units with the same yardstick in respect to funding, we’re looking at the end of liberal arts education. No drama, just the facts.

Yes, faculty member, it is drama. Perhaps a better term would be hyperbole. Cuts are not equivalent to ‘end of liberal arts education’, sorry. You can’t really be suggesting that there are no marginally useful programs in Arts and Sciences. It just doesn’t wash. There is no reason why MSU has to have every program it has now.

And there are “marginally useful” programs in the sciences and medicine. I’m not arguing the usefulness of programs, or that there are not areas or programs that could, and will, be cut. Just that making cuts in all areas based on the same criteria is unwise if we are concerned with quality.