By William Trombley
Senior Editor
Richmond, VA -- Faced with the same problems that plague other fast-growing
states--rising enrollments and tight state budgets--Virginia's public colleges
and universities have embarked on an ambitious effort to reduce higher education
costs.
A "restructuring" effort, ordered by the Legislature and closely
monitored by the State Council of Higher Education (SCHEV), the state coordinating
agency, has produced these results in the first year:
Virginia has been forced to make these moves because it, like California and other growth states in the south and west, is caught in a squeeze between swelling enrollments and flat or declining state budget support.
SCHEV estimates that enrollment in the 15 public senior institutions--293,000 in the 1994-95 academic year--will increase by about 65,000 over the next ten years. But state budget support has been cut by more than $400 million since 1990. Virginia now ranks 43rd among the states in state spending per student (California is 34th), and prospects for increased state funding in the near future do not look bright.
A significant portion of lost state revenue has been made up by increasing tuitions, which are now among the highest in the land. Average tuition and fee charges at Virginia's doctoral universities last year were $4,480, eighth highest in the country and just ahead of UC Berkeley's $4,347. At comprehensive colleges and universities, tuition and fees average $3,841--second highest in the country and more than double the average charges of $1,864 in the California State University system.
"Virginia's financial support of its colleges and universities is neither what it has been nor what it should be," SCHEV Director Gordon K. Davies said. He noted that higher education's share of state spending has declined from 16 percent to 12 percent in the last decade--and that the state is spending more on Medicaid, and soon will be spending more on prisons, than on higher education.
Faculty salaries, which once were in the 60th percentile nationally, have slipped badly in recent years. Only three institutions--University of Virginia, James Madison University and the Virginia Military Institute--now rank as high as the 40th percentile.
But Virginia, unlike some other states, has passed through the hand-wringing stage about its higher education budget problems and has developed a plan for making do with less.
Key to the effort is language included in the 1994 state appropriations act, which required public campuses to adopt plans that would "effect long-term changes in the deployment of faculty, ensure the effectiveness of academic offerings, minimize administrative and instructional costs, prepare for the demands of enrollment increases and address funding priorities as approved by the General Assembly."
Each campus submitted a plan to carry out this mandate to SCHEV and to state Secretary of Education Beverly H. Sgro by last September 1. Ten plans were approved; six were not.
George F. Allen, Virginia's conservative Republican governor, proposed budget cuts for the six schools that submitted unacceptable plans, but the State Council argued that campuses should not be penalized in the first year of the new plan. The Legislature accepted this argument and rescinded the cuts after the six inadequate plans were revised.
Progress reports on implementation of the plans must be submitted to SCHEV and to Secretary Sgro by October 1, 1995. Again, if these efforts are considered inadequate, budget penalties may be imposed.
Some of the state's most academically prestigious institutions, especially the University of Virginia (where every official function concludes with a "toast to Mr. Jefferson" --Thomas, that is, the university's founder)--have not responded warmly to restructuring.
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III tried to organize his
fellow presidents in opposition to restructuring but found few allies when
it became clear that the governor and the Legislature were serious about
cutting the budgets of those institutions that did not go along.
Other campuses, such as George Mason and James Madison, which had been making changes to accommodate state budget cuts since 1990, welcomed the legislative mandate.
Some efforts to change have come to grief. A proposal to start a new College of Global Studies--to train students for jobs in international trade and commerce--at Radford University, in southwestern Virginia, created a controversy that led to the dismissal of the university's president and elimination of funding for the new college.
At James Madison University, restructuring efforts have intensified a long-simmering feud between President Ronald E. Carrier and some veteran faculty members.
Despite these problems, state officials are generally pleased with the efforts of the first year. Said Margaret Miller, SCHEV associate director for academic affairs. "A couple of institutions are just going through the motions, but I think we're seeing progress pretty much across the board."
Almost all of the senior institutions have reduced administrative costs by cutting positions, introducing technology and reorganizing the way things are done. A recent SCHEV report estimated that these and other administrative savings will amount to more than $50 million annually when all have been implemented.
Virginia State University--one of the state's two historically black colleges--has saved more than $2 million a year by reducing the number of vice presidents from six to three and by eliminating other high-level administrative positions, said President Eddie Moore, the former state treasurer.
Privatization--contracting with private companies for services once provided by the institution--is saving an additional $5.7 million a year, according to SCHEV.
Private companies now provide food service at 12 of the 16 four-year campuses, run the bookstores on eight, handle travel arrangements at four. At George Mason University, private contractors handle more than 50 campus services and manage the sports arena as well. Many services at the University of Virginia Medical Center have been privatized.
Virginia's restructuring efforts depend heavily on technology to trim higher education costs, both in administration and instruction.
At the University of Virginia, a bewildering array of administrative computer systems has been combined into one, improving efficiency and saving money. Much of this has been accomplished since Polly McClure, vice president for information technology and communication, was hired form Indiana University to coax the tradition-steeped Charlottesville campus into the modern information age.
But McClure despairs of making similar changes in the university's academic affairs.
"I think there has been fundamental rethinking on the administrative side," she said, "but in terms of our core business--teaching and scholarship--I don't believe people here are thinking very deeply about that."
"The culture here is small classes, with regular faculty teaching undergraduates," McClure added. "That's very nice and it's very expensive, but faculty members don't want to hear about reaching more students through technology. Their view is, 'that's what we do here, and if students don't want that, let them go someplace else.'"
On several other Virginia campuses, however, technology has received a warmer welcome. It is generally understood that the state can only accommodate the additional students who are expected over the next decade by employing technology, as well as increasing class size, hiring more part-time faculty and paying somewhat more attention to undergraduate teaching than to research.
At Virginia Tech, about 20 percent of freshman English classes at the university are taught with Daedalus--computer software that, according to Professor Len Hatfield, has doubled the amount of writing that students do, and is less expensive than conventional classroom instruction.
Other Virginia Tech faculty members are developing a computerized approach to teaching introductory biology to the 1,200 students who take the course each year.
Old Dominion University offered 80 upper-division courses to 13 community colleges in remote parts of the state last year. The system, called "Teletechnet," makes it possible for a student to earn a bachelor's degree while still attending a community college. Three more community college sites will be added in the coming year.
Academic changes have come more slowly, especially among the faculties at the state's more prominent campuses.
At the University of Virginia, suggestions from the State Council of Higher Education that faculty members might teach a bit more and pay somewhat less attention to research met with widespread disapproval. For the first time since the United States invaded Cambodia in 1970, the all-faculty Assembly of Professors met to denounce the proposals.
However, tempers cooled after a series of informal meetings between faculty leaders and SCHEV officials. The university has decided to combine restructuring with the self-study that is required for reaccreditation every ten years. To accomplish this dual task, 67 committees, with 856 members, were created. So far, this massive apparatus has generated vast amounts of paper, but whether any real reform is taking place remains unclear.
"The jury is still out," said Margaret Miller, SCHEV associate director.
The university has made at least one concession, however. Enrollment will be increased by about 1,500 (from the current 21,400) over the next decade, a move that will require some trimming back of graduate enrollment.
So far the Charlottesville campus has not dropped any academic programs, but elsewhere in the state 47 degree programs have been eliminated, for an estimated annual savings of more than $2.5 million. Even the prestigious College of William and Mary, the oldest chartered higher education institution in the land, has jettisoned six master's and three doctoral degree programs.
At Old Dominion University, 25 degree programs and more than 500 courses have been dropped since 1990. Old Dominion also claims to have increased the average faculty teaching load by 8.5 percent, in part by requiring department heads to teach at least two classes each semester.
At Virginia Tech, which has suffered $45 million in state budgets cuts in the last five years, seven degree programs have been eliminated, offerings in the education school have been trimmed by 20 percent, and 115 faculty members have accepted early retirement buyout offers.
One of the goals of restructuring is to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching. On some campuses, teaching skill has become a more important criterion in promotion and tenure decisions. On a few, rigorous post-tenure reviews seek to weed out professors whose careers are running on empty.
Most campuses have reduced the number of credit hours required for a bachelor's degree from 128 to 124 or even 120. This will save $6.5 million a year, SCHEV has estimated.
On some campuses, the academic changes have been accompanied by faculty grumbling, but at James Madison University, an 11,500-student school in the Shenandoah Valley town of Harrisonburg, grumbling has turned to angry shouting between longtime President Ronald E. Carrier and a group of veteran faculty members.
President for 24 years, Carrier has been the driving force in changing the institution from a small liberal arts school once known as Madison College to a comprehensive regional university that attracts large numbers of students from the northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C. As new buildings rose and state dollars flowed from Richmond, few minded that "Uncle Ron" Carrier ruled the campus with an iron hand.
But restructuring, especially Carrier's decision to open a new College of Integrated Science and Technology, has triggered opposition. The new college, described as an attempt to "integrate the study of science, mathematics and technology with principles of business," is seen as a "Mickey Mouse" curriculum by some faculty members. They were especially irked when Carrier's son Michael was named assistant provost.
Last January, a few days after Dorn Peterson, a physics professor, told the local newspaper about Michael Carrier's appointment, university administrators announced that the physics major was being dropped and that Peterson and nine other tenured physics professors would be dismissed.
Although Bethany S. Oberst, vice president for academic affairs, said the physics changes were made because "the department was severely underenrolled and overstaffed" and had "resisted academic review," it is widely believed on campus that criticism of President Carrier by several physicists, especially Peterson, led to the action.
Since then, the faculty has voted "no confidence" in Carrier, by a vote of 305 to 197, and a group called Faculty for Responsible Change has raised $50,000 to sue the university and the governing Board of Visitors to prevent the physics department firings and other curriculum changes. Members of the Board of Visitors have refused to talk to the complaining faculty members and have shown their support for President Carrier by extending his contract to the year 2000.
Reviewing these events in an interview, Carrier at first seemed remorseful. "I'm not sure we handled that as well as I'd like to have handled it," he said. But then the president launched a verbal assault, laced with expletives, against his faculty opponents.
Said Carrier, "My friends in the business world tell me to run this place like a business, make business decisions. I decided to do that. We've had committees and studies and nothing was happening, so I decided to take the advice of my friends in the corporate board rooms and run the university like a business. And now look at all the goddamned trouble I'm in."
Cooler heads from outside the campus are trying to negotiate a settlement of this power struggle. Recently, James Madison announced that the Physics professors would not be fired, though some may be transferred to other departments, and that the Physics major might be retained in a modified form. Also, it is widely expected that Carrier will announce his retirement in the not-too-distant future.
Davies, the SCHEV executive director, said the events at James Madison demonstrate that "change does not come without a price."
For the most part, though, restructuring has gone fairly smoothly. In part, this is due to Virginia's manageable size. The state has only 15 four-year public institutions, compared, for example, with California's 31.
The State Council of Higher Education has played a major role in planning and implementing the changes. With authority to make higher education budget recommendations to the governor and to the Legislature, and to review new academic programs, the Council is able to reward campuses that have taken restructuring seriously and penalize those that have not.
"Our stick is that we recommend the budgets," said Council Chairman Val S. McWhorter, a Northern Virginia attorney. "All we have to do is issue a report saying that this campus or that one isn't making a real restructuring effort, and there would be real budget consequences."
Davies has been the council's executive director for 18 years, building up a set of relationships with campus leaders, key legislators and several governors that have smoothed the sometimes rocky road toward restructuring. However, recent clashes with Governor Allen have threatened the role of both Davies and the state council. (See sidebar.)
Perhaps the most important reason that reform has taken root in Virginia higher education is the 1994 legislative decision that restructuring should take place and that SCHEV should supervise the process, along with the state secretary of education. Without that mandate, many campuses would have produced mountains of reports without making many real changes.
Two years ago, after a blistering series of articles had appeared in several of Virginia's newspapers, "higher education was on the spot," McWhorter said. "There was criticism of fat in university administration, that faculty members weren't teaching enough, that students were paying high tuition but weren't getting their money's worth, and plenty more. Restructuring has forced the universities to examine the way they provide services, and has enabled them to respond to this criticism."
