By William Trombley
Senior Editor
Springfield, IL
For the last three years, much of the discussion about public higher education in the state of Illinois has been dominated by three initials--"PQP."
They stand for "Priorities, Quality, Productivity" and they represent a major statewide effort to reduce costs, increase efficiency and reallocate resources in Illinois' 12 senior public universities and, to a lesser extent, in the state's 49 community colleges.
Most of the senior institutions have reduced administrative costs and have eliminated many marginal academic programs. According to the Illinois Board of Higher Education (BHE), which coordinates higher education planning for the state, more than 245 academic programs have been eliminated, consolidated or reduced in size in the four-year institutions since 1992.
These actions have saved about $120 million, the board said in its most recent report on the PQP initiative. The money has been reallocated by the campuses for high priority needs, such as improvements in undergraduate education.
At the University of Illinois flagship campus in Champaign-Urbana, for instance, some of the savings have been used to provide small classes, taught by regular faculty members, instead of graduate student teaching assistants, for about one-third of the freshman class.
At Northern Illinois University, additional sections in introductory English and Mathematics courses have been added so that students can make faster progress toward their degrees. Several campuses have used the reallocated money to improve their libraries or to introduce new instructional technology.
Some observers are skeptical of the BHE's claims for PQP. They say that many of the terminated academic programs had few students anyway and that most of the faculty members involved have simply been reassigned to other academic units so that the "reallocated" dollars have been greatly overestimated.
But even skeptics agree that, whatever the numbers, PQP has changed the way people think about growth and spending in Illinois public higher education. "We have been trying to change attitudes on a permanent basis," said Arthur F. Quern, the Chicago insurance executive who serves as chairman of the BHE. "We have been trying to make it clear that this is not just another budget exercise that will eventually go away. And I think we've broken through."
Or, as Ross Hodel, the board's deputy director for public affairs, put it, "PQP has changed people's behavior, from 'more, more, more' to a more focused approach." In Illinois, as in California and most other states, budgets have been tight in recent years. Illinois is spending about $2.5 billion for higher education at all levels in the current fiscal year, but higher education's share of state General Fund dollars has declined from 13.6 percent to 11.3 percent since 1980.
Expenditures for Medicaid, the state retirement program, foster care and prisons all are claiming a larger share of state funds. There will be even less money for higher education if Illinois responds to current pressures to spend more on its public schools, whose portion of the state General Fund has fallen from 30.3 percent in 1980 to 23.6 percent last year. "Over time, I think higher education is only going to get support equal to the increase in the rate of inflation," BHE Chairman Quern said during an interview at his high-rise office on the northern edge of the Chicago Loop. "I think we've seen the last of higher education being at the top of state spending priorities."
This is especially true because Illinois, unlike California or Florida or Texas, is expecting only slight enrollment increases over the next decade.
The BHE plays a key role in the Illinois budget process because it reviews spending requests from all of the campuses before making recommendations to the governor and the Legislature.
When Quern was appointed BHE chairman by Republican Governor Jim Edgar in 1991, he was expected to produce budget requests that the governor could approve without raising taxes, and he has done so. Using PQP guidelines, the BHE has pared campus requests to levels the governor could accept--a 2.8 percent spending increase last year, five percent this year.
"The 'quid pro quo' for the PQP cuts has been fully-funded budgets for two years in a row," said Edward R. Hines, professor of educational administration at Illinois State University and a veteran observer of the state's higher education budget battles.
Quern first described the PQP approach in an October 1991 letter to top administrators of Illinois colleges and universities, but most probably thought this would amount to little more than a continuation of the BHE staff's already vigilant scrutiny of campus budget requests. They were stunned a year later when the board published a list of 192 academic programs to be recommended for elimination, consolidation or curtailment--approximately 12 percent of all the offerings on the 12 senior campuses. Even though the board could only recommend these actions, and it was up to governing boards of the individual institutions to accept or reject the proposals, publication of this "hit list" generated a storm of protest.
Sixty-five witnesses paraded before the BHE at its November 1992 meeting, to protest the cuts, and the board received at least another 1,000 written complaints. Several campus presidents were angry because they claimed to have been working on their own budget cut plans, efforts that were washed away by publication of the "hit list."
"I've never seen such blatant disregard" for campus opinion, said Tom Wallace, former president of Illinois State University, who was the most vocal opponent of the PQP process before resigning last summer after it was revealed that he had received more than $60,000 in unreported salary supplements from the university's foundation. "It was clear that Mr. Quern had no faith in the campuses to do the job."
Quern replied, "My feeling was, if we got involved in a lot of consultation, nothing would have happened; we would have been talked to death."
A few campus leaders quickly saw that PQP could be utilized to their advantage. Needed changes that had been put off for years now could be made because, as one administrator put it, "We could say, 'Springfield made us do it.'"
For example, Earl Lazerson, former president of the Edwardsville campus of Southern Illinois University, used PQP to focus campus attention on undergraduate education, and master's degrees in selected areas, and to frustrate the ambitions of some faculty members for expensive doctoral programs. Edwardsville dropped its lone doctorate--in education--and has poured $640,000 a year into its Excellence in Undergraduate Education Fund.
"A lot of the changes we made probably wouldn't have happened without PQP," said Assistant Provost David Sill.
John E. LaTourette, president of Northern Illinois University, who has been generally hostile to the PQP process, nevertheless used it to make long-delayed changes in the economics department.
Crucial support for PQP came from Stanley Ikenberry, then president of the University of Illinois system and probably the most influential figure in Illinois higher education at the time.
"At first, Ikenberry was very protective of his 'ivory tower' and didn't like a bunch of bureaucrats in Springfield telling him what to do," said a well-informed source in state government who did not want to be identified. "But eventually he realized that this was a useful tool for him to put money into some strong programs and get rid of some weak spots." Ikenberry retired last year but his successor, James J. Stukel, former chancellor of the Chicago campus, has been a strong PQP supporter.
However, others fought the PQP initiative tooth and nail, especially over doctoral programs. Illinois State, Northern Illinois and the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University were convinced that the higher education board was determined to concentrate the state's Ph.D. programs at the two University of Illinois campuses--Chicago and Champaign-Urbana--and to get rid of as many of the doctoral programs as possible elsewhere. BHE Executive Director Richard D. Wagner acknowledged that the "most dynamic tension between BHE and the institutions has been at the doctoral level."
Illinois State, Northern Illinois and Carbondale want the academic prestige that goes with doctoral programs and academic research, but the BHE does not believe the state can afford all of these ambitions.
"We don't need mediocre doctoral programs," said Kathleen Kelly, BHE deputy director for academic affairs. "You hear the argument, 'Well, if they're not doing any harm, why not keep them?' But I don't think we can afford that when we are trying to do more with less (money)." The argument has been especially intense at Carbondale, where 11 of 29 doctoral programs were on the BHE "hit list."
"Our status as a research university was threatened," Chancellor John C. Guyon said. "Nobody ever said that, but it was clearly implied by the proposed cuts in graduate programs. I can assure you we will resist that as strongly as possible."
"There was turmoil on the campus," said Graduate Dean John H. Yopp. "Faculty members who came here to do research now thought they would be required to do much more teaching." The College of Technical Careers--a collection of two-year associate degree programs in such subjects as automotive technology, dental hygiene and mortuary science--also came under fire from the BHE as more suitable for community colleges than for a senior institution.
But the college, with 3,500 students and 125 tenured faculty members, was generating a sorely-needed profit, and Carbondale officials fought to keep it.
"At first, Carbondale didn't buy into PQP at all," said Wagner, the BHE executive director. "The mindset was, 'We're just not going to do it.'"
But Ted Sanders, new president of the Southern Illinois University system (which includes the Carbondale and Edwardsville campuses, a medical school in Springfield and a dental school in Alton), has set out to change that mindset.
"I would agree that Carbondale's attitude has been almost outright hostility to PQP, and that presents a challenge to me," Sanders said. "I've got to figure out how to recover years of lost ground."
As a start, Sanders has proposed dropping many of the two-year programs in the College of Technical Careers, turning others over to nearby community colleges and converting seven into bachelor's degrees. The BHE is expected to approve this plan. At Illinois State, in Bloomington, a major battle erupted over a BHE proposal to do away with the agriculture program. "It wasn't a bad school, we just didn't need that much agriculture," said Robert Wallhaus, who was the board's executive deputy director at the time and a key architect of the PQP plan.
Former ISU President Tom Wallace resisted. "There we were, sitting in the nation's heartland, surrounded by some of the best farm land in the country, and some bunch of bureaucrats, sitting around a table in Springfield, decided our program was expendable," he said in a recent interview.
Wallace not only spoke out against the cut, he enlisted the support of local legislators, agribusiness companies and the state Farm Bureau in what became a successful fight to save the agriculture program. The former president, now a higher education consultant in Virginia, contends that the campus later was punished financially for being obstinate, a charge that is denied by BHE officials.
The PQP "hit list" also encountered bitter opposition at Northern Illinois University, a 22,000-student campus in DeKalb, 50 miles west of Chicago. The recommended cuts included the law school and six of the university's 18 doctoral programs. Three doctorates--in economics, geology and special education--were judged to be "no longer economically and educationally justified."
President LaTourette called the PQP proposals "basically high-level micromanagement" that did not take into account the "complexity of academic programs at the local level." LaTourette and other Northern Illinois administrators argued that there was a need for "regional Ph.D. programs" to train teachers for the area's rapidly-expanding community colleges and high schools.
"That argument might make sense if their 'regional' doctorates stressed teaching, but they don't," Kathleen Kelly said. "They're still structured as research Ph.D.s." So far, Northern Illinois has succeeded in keeping two of the three "unjustified" Ph.D.s but has dropped the special education doctorate, along with 11 bachelor's and master's degree programs.
The 300-student law school survived, after a member of the BHE was added to the law school's Board of Visitors--part of an all-out lobbying effort. Other Illinois senior campuses have cooperated with the PQP initiative, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Administrators at the huge University of Illinois campus at Champaign-Urbana (27,600 undergraduates, 10,900 graduate and professional students) insist that they were making major budget reallocations of their own, well before PQP came along. And they grumble about the time spent preparing reports for the BHE, but, for the most part, they have cooperated with the initiative.
In the last three fiscal years, about $70 million has been realized from program eliminations, consolidations and reductions, and from other cost-cutting measures, on the two University of Illinois campuses--Chicago and Champaign-Urbana--according to campus reports. This is more than half of all statewide PQP savings to date. Although administrators say many of these changes would have been made anyway, others believe the cuts would have been difficult to achieve without the external pressure of the PQP initiative.
At Champaign-Urbana, 20 academic programs or units have been eliminated, including Ph.D. programs in mining engineering and psychology, while 17 others have been reduced or restructured. Course offerings in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the largest academic unit on campus, have been pruned. The College of Agriculture has been reorganized. And the teaching part of an aviation institute has been turned over to a community college.
Forty percent of the money saved by these and other cutbacks has been used to raise faculty and staff salaries, 20 percent to make up for state budget cuts, and 18.5 percent for improvements in undergraduate education. The freshman "Discovery" program, which provides a small-class experience with regular faculty members for one-third of the first-year class at Champaign-Urbana, will cost more than $300,000 this semester.
"We can show numbers that look very good," said Sylvia Manning, system vice president for academic affairs, referring to the academic program changes and the $70 million in reallocations. But many of the programs that have been dropped had few students and the faculty members, if any remained, either retired or were shifted to other academic units. Few, if any, were fired.
"Essentially, what we did was offer up a lot of empty coffins," said Susan Gonzo, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at Champaign-Urbana. But BHE staffers pointed out that retirements provide savings that can be used for allocation to higher spending priorities. And if a professor teaches more undergraduates, instead of spending time on graduate students and research, that, too, meets PQP goals.
PQP has had little impact on the large University of Illinois medical center in Chicago, or on any of the state's other medical schools. But on the general campus, a mile away from the medical center, there have been significant changes.
The 1992 BHE "hit list" included 25 academic programs at the Chicago campus. Since then, 22 programs have been dropped, for a savings of about $11 million. In some cases they were not the same programs but the result has been more or less the same.
"The things that were dropped were cuts we were looking to make anyway," said John Wanat, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs. "But we probably would have let some of them drift on forever if it hadn't been for PQP."
Some of the savings have been used to start a "Great Cities Program," an effort to make the university, which sits on the edge of some of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, into what a news release calls the "nation's leading urban public research university."
"To me, that's what PQP is all about," Bob Wallhaus said, "a whole new focus for the campus, instead of trying to be all things to all people."
Although Illinois private colleges and universities were not required to participate in PQP, and some of the more prestigious campuses like Northwestern and the University of Chicago did not, others paid attention to the initiative for political reasons.
Don Fouts, executive director of the Federation of Independent Colleges and Universities, pointed out that the State of Illinois provides a significant amount of student financial aid money to private college students--$112 million last year. "We did not want to appear to be uncooperative or ungrateful," Fouts said.
Federation member colleges have identified about 250 "productivity increases" in the last three years, he said.
Entering its fourth year, PQP shows some signs of stalling. Some administrators and faculty member who were interviewed seem to think of PQP as a "project" that now has ended.
"PQP needs a shot in the arm," said Molly D'Esposito, a member of the Southern Illinois University Board of Trustees. "People are getting sick of it." But much of the pruning of outmoded, duplicative or low-quality academic programs has been completed and some other PQP initiatives--defining faculty "roles and responsibilities" in a technological age or looking for ways to increase student retention and graduation rates--have been slow to get started.
A vigorous effort by Quern and others to terminate state financial support for intercollegiate athletics ran into strong opposition from some campus administrators and also from David Downey, a member of the BHE and a former University of Illinois basketball star.
When Quern and the BHE asked for legislation that would have given the board authority to terminate academic programs, set tuition charges for all public institutions and also audit the books of private university foundations, they were strenuously opposed by the University of Illinois and the bill failed
Another reason for PQP's slower pace was the amount of time the board and the staff spent on governance issues last year, when Illinois abolished two of its four higher education governing boards. In addition, an acrimonious dispute developed between BHE and the state's community colleges, which tried, unsuccessfully, to break away from BHE supervision. But Quern, while conceding that the momentum behind the PQP initiative slowed last year, insisted that "the process has been absorbed, even by those people who don't acknowledge it."
If Quern is wrong and PQP has run its course, its record of accomplishment remains formidable. Of the 192 academic programs on the 1992 "hit list," more than half are gone and most of the rest have been restructured. The total of 245 programs eliminated or restructured in the senior institutions is more than even optimistic planners at the BHE could have hoped for.
The budget reallocations have helped to raise faculty salaries, reduce undergraduate student-teacher ratios, improve libraries and finance minority student fellowships, among other useful purposes.
Governor Edgar has accepted the BHE's budget recommendations for the last two years and has not been forced to raise taxes to do so. The process "got the Legislature off our backs," said President LaTourette of Northern Illinois University.
"I guess you'd have to say that, academically, PQP has had very mixed results," Bob Wallhaus said, "but it certainly has been a political success."