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Dean Linda Maxson

The State of the College, Spring 2003

Delivered at the May 5 DEO meeting, Iowa Memorial Union

This afternoon I will report to you on the state of the College as the 2002-03 academic year draws to a close. This has been a year of uncertainty, as we faced first the prospect and then the actuality of a war that took students and staff from our campus community into armed conflict. It has been a year in which a new University president was invested, and in which the University has attempted to forge a stronger relationship with its state-wide constituency. It has been a year of unprecedented stringency in our instructional budget, yet with opportunities created by the promised restoration of faculty lines to our budget and by our increasing success in fundraising.

Self-Assessment and Planning. The storm we have been weathering through three years of budget cuts has abated but not passed. The state economy is still faltering, and--whatever the outcome of the special session of the State Legislature that the the Governor has called--we know we can expect rough times during the next year as well. But we are resolved to plan a course that will safeguard our strengths and our essential mission. The University’s review of the College, which began this spring, will inform this planning and allow us to make our case for University support.

The College’s self-study for this review will assess our strengths and weaknesses and outline the resources needed to support our mission. The College has agreed with the Provost’s Office on a focus for the review: how best to support the College’s aspirations for visibility, distinction, and growth in resources. The review will help us assess what things we must continue to do and how the resources currently available to the College can best be marshaled. The review will also identify how our resources should be enhanced through growth in faculty size, support for and improvement of infrastructure, and adaptations in our administrative structure and collegiate self-governance.

Two-thirds of our faculty responded to a survey that the College’s self-study committee put on the web, a very healthy and very gratifying response. The observations, perceptions, and recommendations obtained from the survey will help ensure that this is truly a College-wide planning document. I thank the members of the self-study committee who have worked so hard on constructing the survey, analyzing its results, and formulating the first draft of the self-study. They are Vicki Grassian (Chemistry), Randy Hirokawa (Communication Studies), Brooks Landon (English), Judith Liskin-Gasparro (Spanish & Portuguese), Michael Lovaglia (Sociology), and Alan MacVey (Theatre Arts).

In our self-study, we can claim with pride that we are doing better each year at using the resources we have in service to our faculty and students. But it would be wrong to pretend we haven’t also lost over the past three years--not in the quality of our teaching but certainly in our ability to give individual attention to each student and, in some departments, in our ability to offer the range of small graduate courses that we were able to offer in the past. We have responded creatively and accountably to our budget challenges, showing ourselves to be good stewards and making extra space in our classrooms for the record-breaking influx of students to our College.

• We have used instructional technology and course web pages to teach more effectively.

• We have made good on our historic commitment to teach skills courses such as rhetoric, General Education literature, calculus, and introductory and intermediate languages in small sections rather than in large lectures. But we have had to increase by 10 to 15% the number of students taught in each section of these courses. If the choice were ours to make, we would not have done this, and we will not further increase the size of these sections, in spite of projected increases in fall 2003 enrollments.

• Our faculty have been inventive in converting some small-section courses to medium-sized lectures, and some medium-sized lectures to larger lectures. They have worked very hard in mentoring teaching assistants who can extend our teaching power in discussion sections of these courses.

• More and more of our departments are co-sponsoring courses with the Division of Continuing Education, in order to bring flexible funds into departmental budgets and extend more opportunities to non-traditional students.

Yes, we are doing a better job with what we have--but to my deep regret we have considerably less than we did. The state’s ability to support us in the current budget climate continues to decline--in the fiscal year that begins this July, the University as a whole will have nearly $65 million less in State appropriations than it had in July 2000. Some of this loss has been offset by large tuition increases our students endured in two successive years, but even with larger tuition revenues the University and the College have lost significant resources. Moreover, these tuition increases were in significant part premised on re-investments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The State Board of Regents approved the tuition increases in order to provide more opportunities and better resources for students: more faculty-taught courses, more intermediate and advanced courses in our majors, fewer very large lecture courses, and increased access to high-demand majors that are now capped. Instead, the University has been forced to use the increased tuition monies to fund needs that could no longer be covered by the decreasing state appropriations.

The University’s general fund (composed of tuition and state appropriations) will shrink next year because state appropriations will again decline. The University has been unable to fulfill promises made to the Regents in conjunction with the fall 2002 and fall 2003 tuition increases. I am certainly advocating vociferously on behalf of the College, but it will take an improvement in the state’s economy, and a renewal of state appropriations for higher education, and/or changes in how we fulfill our mission, before those promises can be fully met.

As the College faces this deepening challenge to its essential mission, the review of the College will significantly affect the choices we make for the future. The review provides an opportunity for serious assessment of how we are doing our job and how we should re-orient ourselves to face the changed external environment, at the same time that it allows us to advocate with a new University administration for our continuing needs.

Successes. Nevertheless, we do have successes to report for the academic year now ending, including the support we have directed to our faculty and the support our alumni and friends have given us. An important marker of our success is the accomplishments of our colleagues, celebrated last week at the College’s annual Faculty Honors Assembly. In the course of the program, more than 10% of our faculty members were honored.

Faculty concern over the climate of popular opinion regarding support for higher education led Professors Teresa Mangum and Kim Marra, with co-sponsors ranging from the Provost’s Office to academic departments to student government, to organize a series of Chautauqua-style events that celebrated who we are and what we do as a broad college of arts and sciences in a public research university. The Chautauqua, entitled “Public Universities, Citizenship, and the Liberal Arts and Sciences, began in late February with an afternoon of information and entertainment that featured a public panel and discussion by various members of the University community, moderated by President Skorton. Other Chautauqua events continued until nearly the end of the semester, fostering a campus-wide conversation on the significance historically, philosophically, and financially of the term “public” in our university identification.

Faculty and Staff Strength and Diversity. A crucial way in which we fulfill our mission is by fostering and supporting the visibility and leadership of our faculty in their teaching, scholarship, and creative work. Over the past year, we have made progress on this goal in spite of the decrease in resources available to us. The College successfully protected faculty and staff from the effects of the budget cutbacks and used such flexible funding as it has had in support of faculty teaching and research.

• Competitive salary increases have been--and continue to be--a very high priority of the College for the past five years. Last year, we argued for a 3% average merit salary increase, and we reallocated funds in addition to those the University gave us, in order to ensure that this increase could be achieved. This coming year we will inescapably be faced with more difficult decisions about how to reward faculty effort.

• Providing our current faculty and staff with new colleagues is also a high priority. We prevented layoffs in 2001-02 and have now restored staff lines that went unfilled for a time. We could not prevent a decline in the number of faculty lines in 2002-03, due in part to budget uncertainties but also to a very large number of unanticipated faculty retirements in spring 2002. We began the fall semester with an all-time low number of tenure-track faculty, and we responded by authorizing more than 40 faculty searches this year and pursuing many special opportunities. As a result, our new faculty appointments will exceed our faculty losses this year, resulting in a fall 2003 tenure-track faculty size of about 640 FTE.

• Diversification of our faculty and our curriculum is a very high priority and one that Dean Curto, department chairs, and departmental search committees devote a great deal of energy to achieving. This year, with your help, our diversity record is even better than the very successful record we had in the past. Of more than 40 new hires this year, at least 10 will be made in cooperation with the Faculty Diversity Opportunities Program. When these 11 awards are added to the 11 continuing awards from the last two years, the College will be a partner in two-thirds of all new or continuing FDOP awards--a record that is disproportionately large even for our large college. Although the College’s tenure-track faculty decreased between fall 1998 and fall 2002, our number of minority faculty members held steady. Next year, as our faculty size increases, our number of minority faculty will also increase.

• This year, we were able to use a one-time budget windfall to provide special support for our faculty and their academic mission. Last fall, under the University’s plan for reinvestment in the College, the Provost added to our permanent budget the funds that will support ten of next year’s new hires. In the current year, while searching to fill these lines, we have used the funds to competitively award an unprecedented number of additional travel grants, which have gone to over one-fourth of our faculty. We have allocated nearly $400,000 in professional travel funds, an increase of nearly 50% over last year. We also were able to grant 12 summer awards to pre-tenure faculty, in addition to the 15 Old Gold awards funded by the Provost’s Office, and 32 summer scholarships to tenured faculty. We used the remaining one-time funds to make improvements in facilities across the College--concentrating on refurbishing student lounges and other public spaces.

Control of our Budget. We have worked successfully with Central offices to establish budgeting mechanisms that allow us more certainty about our instructional budget.

• The Office of the Provost has moved to our base budget $1.3 million in teaching assistant funds that were formerly allocated only on a year-by-year basis. This is not new money, but it is now more secure money. This addition to our base increases our ability to plan for the next academic year.

• We have also worked with the Office of the Provost on a method of increasing our instructional budget with non-recurring funds as the size of the entering class becomes known over the summer. The Provost’s Office will make an allocation to the College to support each first-year student who enrolls beyond a base-line figure of 3,750 new students. This is another very important step that gives the College the ability to plan for fall enrollments. In fall 2002 our agreed-upon baseline enrollment was exceeded by more than 400 students, and in fall 2003 the baseline may be exceeded by as many as 750 students. As higher enrollments are confirmed, the guaranteed allocation gives us the ability to make needed visiting faculty and TA appointments.

Success of our Divisional Structures.

• The Division of Interdisciplinary Programs has been very successful in reaching out to serve students. Enrollments in courses offered by the constituent programs have increased dramatically. Since academic year 2000-01 (the pilot year of the Division), enrollments in LS&A and Sexuality Studies courses have doubled, and course enrollments in Aging Studies and Museum Studies have quadrupled. Student interest in the individualized Interdepartmental Studies major has grown dramatically. These are all signs of the Division’s success in making its programs more visible to students.

• The Division of Performing Arts, for the first time this year, coordinated the marketing of its mainstage theater productions, opera performances, Dance Gala, and symphony orchestra concerts--with benefits for the visibility of all these events in our community and region. In addition, starting in fall 2003, a new BA program in Performing Arts Entrepreneurship will be offered cooperatively by all the departments in the Division.

Fund-Raising and Building. Our fund-raising continues to increase in success. We have reached 55% of our $81 million goal in the University’s Comprehensive Campaign. Giving to the College and its departments and programs amounted to over $9.6 million in 2002, an increase of 26% over 2001. Our unified annual fund campaign with our departments increased the total number of donors to our College to over 7,300 (an all-time high), brought much-needed flexible funding into departments, and raised nearly $500,000 in commitments to departmental and collegiate scholarships.

Our alumni and friends have generously supported the College’s aspirations, including those made possible by the history-making renewal of our facilities. The Regents and Legislature have lent strong support for capital projects, and we have raised private funds in support of new construction. The College will benefit from five new buildings that will be completed over the next two years, all of which will have high-quality teaching and learning spaces supported in part by generous gifts.

• The Philip D. Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building will be completed by the end of 2004.

• The new building for the School of Art & Art History will be completed by early 2005, to be followed by restoration of the historic Art Building.

• An addition to the Dey House, home of the Writer’s Workshop, is expected to be completed by July 2004.

• Groundbreaking for the Pomerantz Careers Center will take place later this year.

• The new Blank Honors Center will be occupied in spring 2004.

Moreover, the College has proposed that three additional buildings for our faculty be given highest priority on the University’s new capital list.

We have also received generous donor support for student, faculty, and departmental development.

• The Dewey Stuit Fund, initiated by emeritus faculty in honor of our dean emeritus, has provided support for undergraduate research in four departments.

• The Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics officially opened in April, with renovation, equipment, and seed funding for research supported by the Carver Charitable Trust. The Carver Center is a truly innovative enterprise, one that establishes our College as a leader in studying the inter-relatedness of life forms.

• We have also received major gifts in support of the College’s new Excellence and Innovation Funds, including a major commitment from UI head football coach Kirk and Mary Ferentz and another from Edgar A. and Nancy B. Strause. A special gift of $25,000 from friends of the College allowed us to solicit proposals for seed grants this spring. I expect to receive many highly competitive proposals this week that are based on the recent discussions of how, individually and collectively, departments can move to the next level of quality and distinction.

Excellence--Broadly Conceived. I would like to conclude by celebrating an important way in which all of our faculty and departments reaffirmed the mission of our College: through their responses to the Report of the Task Force on Excellence. Four mid-career faculty members generously gave of their energy and talent to produce this position paper on how to define--and how to achieve--excellence in our scholarly and artistic mission. I had asked the Task Force to focus on this one aspect of our work, rather than on our entire mission, in order to make their discussions manageable and their report focused. Acting sometimes as a goad, sometimes as an irritant, and always as a challenge, the Task Force report stimulated lively--not to say, heated--discussion among our faculty and DEOs. The faculty debated and expounded on the nature of excellence and the ways in which our scholarly and artistic work interacts with and shapes the other aspects of our mission.

The report stimulated departments, individual faculty, and the Faculty Assembly to respond to the College. Collectively, these responses will strengthen and broaden the original Report, yielding guidelines for building departments of distinction throughout the College. The responses contributed additional ways of characterizing excellent departments and many strategies for ensuring intellectual vitality and high aspirations. Moreover, the intensity with which departments engaged the document confirmed my confidence in the essential health of our faculty and College. The faculty’s articulation of their role and their ambitions for their departments has been energizing and reassuring.

The departmental responses emphasized that distinction is judged within many domains in which our faculty engage themselves: creative teaching, shared responsibility for academic programs, artistic collaboration and dynamic scholarly interactions, leadership in pursuit of intellectual goals, and challenging personal goals set by each faculty member. Success in all of these is necessary for building departments of the highest distinction--departments that are greater than the sum of their constituent parts. Above all, the departmental responses emphasized that our excellence is founded on collaboration, community building, and collective goal setting.

The College intends that the dialogue continue through our collegiate review process and its follow-up. The associate deans and I will weave the departmental responses with the original task force report to create a new document, one that all those who contributed their observations and perspectives can feel proud of. This new document will be a part of our Collegiate self-study, and we will ask our internal and external reviewers to comment upon it.

Even as DEOs and the Deans' Office stretch our funding to cover the essential aspects of our mission, we know that our most crucial reserves are our faculty's intellectual leadership, their energy, their collective creativity, and their passion for their work. If we can marshal the strength and skill of our faculty, we won't founder in today's rough weather, and we will move forward in spite of heavy winds. We must remind ourselves and our colleagues of our good fortune to be faculty at a state research university--a profession unlike any other! With the privilege of setting our own agendas and timetables comes the responsibility of using our resources wisely to advance our shared mission. I ask all of you present, as faculty leaders, to remind your colleagues that, even with reduced funding, departments have resources at their command and the strength that comes from collaboration and from academic community. Those of you who are DEOs need more than ever to share strategies that will help all our departments move forward collectively.

It is easy to lead in times of abundant resources; in times of shrinking resources and increasing demands, true leaders emerge. I am confident that our DEOs will step up to that challenge and provide that leadership. I pledge that those of us in the administrative offices of the College will continue to do our part to provide all the support possible to facilitate your work.

linda-maxson@uiowa.edu