According to reports, Bill Powers, the president of the University of Texas at Austin, has been given a deadline to resign or be fired by the Board of Regents. It is unclear as I write this whether Powers will resign. Yet, it seems more likely to me than some of the previous attempts to get rid of Powers (and there are many).
AAU President Hunter Rawlings has called Texas “ground zero” for attacks on public higher education. For this reason, everyone in higher education needs to pay attention to what happens in Austin. Many of the attacks that Governor Rick Perry and his allies have used to attack the University of Texas have been used by governors in other states.
There are five aspects of the controversy at the UT that warrant consideration by everyone concerned about public higher education.
1. Trustee micromanagement. Rick Perry became governor following the resignation of George W. Bush after his election as president. By serving so long, Perry has had an unusual ability to appoint trustees that agree with his view of higher education. These trustees have often followed many of the recommendations of Perry and his policy advisors. This has allowed the governor to have more input into university operations than a typical governor. In the most egregious example, Trustee Wallace Hall harassed UT staff and requested hundreds of thousands of documents looking into university operations. Hall contends these requests were part of fulfilling his trustee responsibilities. A House committee has recommended 7-1 to impeach him for his actions. Trustee micromanagement causes many problems for an institution and its leaders. First, trustees can undermine the campus leadership which intentionally or not hurts the campus. Second, trustees often lack an understanding of the details and standards by which one should properly manage a university. This is often particularly the case for trustees with a heavy corporate management background. Finally, if trustees are in the weeds of the university then no one is managing the big picture. In order to view the long term progress of the university, trustees should have the benefit of avoiding small management details that might cloud or confuse an issue.
2. Attack on the liberal arts. Only valued research is hard sciences. Like Tom Coburn, Rick Perry believes that research outside of the hard sciences is a waste of taxpayers money. The liberal arts are especially wasteful because of the lack of a clear vocational outcome. Many of the reforms that Powers has fought against have sought to increase the vocational emphasis of the university. Rather than understanding the unique power and advantages of a research university, Perry and his allies instead seek to increase the university’s vocational emphasis. Rick Scott in Florida and Pat McCrory in North Carolina have attacked their public higher education systems in similar ways. The difference in those cases is that the governors haven’t been around as long to install allies on their respective university boards as Perry has been able to do.
3. Faculty productivity can be measured in dollars. Since the university is simply about getting a job and efficiently using tax money, it makes sense to measure faculty based on revenue. The University of Texas was forced to release faculty productivity data. Opponents of the release argued the data was complicated and would lead to improper analysis painting the university’s faculty in a bad light. I would suggest that this was one of the intents of the release. Either way, just as any company would measure the revenue created by an employee, so the logic goes, the university should measure the revenue of faculty. The calculation is alluringly simple:
Tuition Paid by Students Taught + Grant Money Received – Faculty Salary and Benefits = Net Revenue
Of course, the problem is that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the mission and reality of higher education. Take the grants component of the equation for example. Grant money availability varies widely among disciplines. Does that make a faculty member more valuable or productive? Would comparing English and mechanical engineering professors tell us anything about those individuals? Or simply the differences in grant money available in those disciplines? And is the English professor less valuable because of the lack of grants?
4. Excessive accountability and productivity. One of the few issues there seems to be bipartisan agreement on is accountability. We might be hard pressed to find another issue where President Obama, Secretary Arne Duncan, and Governor Perry agree. In Texas however, the push for accountability and productivity seems to be more of an assault of the mission of the research university. For example, measuring the revenue generation of faculty and the way faculty are discussed seem more of an anti-intellectual attack on faculty than a true attempt at improving efficiency. The same could be said for attempts to raise tuition and rhetoric about affordability. Many in higher education are worried about the affordability of college, but the denial of tuition increases seems more motivated by an attempt to reign in spending in areas where the Governor and his allies disagree. In isolation, many of the accountability and productivity reforms and measurements might be taken as an attempt to improve the university. When considered together, there certainly appears to be a pattern of attempting to weaken the state’s public flagship universities.
5. Non-academic successor. If Powers ends up resigning, the fight for his successor will be an interesting and significant one. In line with the attacks on faculty and research noted above, Perry has advocated for non-academics to serve as presidents. When Bowen Loftin resigned from Texas A&M, Perry suggested Guy Diedrich, who was the Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives with the A&M System, be named as interim president. Diedrich came to the university from a corporate background with no major academic experience. Ultimately, a campus dean was selected and Diedrich left the university system. However, Perry has a clear desire for non-academic presidents. If the majority that fires Powers falls in line with replacing him with a non-academic, a significant fight will likely break out between Perry allies and the university’s faculty, students, and alumni. I think this is unlikely to happen because these kinds of deals often happen outside of the limelight or at smaller institutions, but it is worth watching.
The fight over control of the University of Texas or at least Bill Powers term as president may come to a head this week. Whatever the outcome of the next few days, Texas will likely remain ground zero for continued attacks on higher education generally and public research universities specifically. As a result, everyone in higher education should keep an eye on Texas. What happens here may reverberate throughout all of American higher education.
