CONTEXT AND EPILOGUE -- C.R.B. Wright, July 2002

The archived materials here include a nearly complete set of the reports and working documents generated by the University of Oregon Productivity Planning Committee and its subcommittees during the 1993-94 academic year. In 1994 the Worldwide Web was in its infancy, and the UO Web posting capability was limited to text files retrievable by gopher, so materials consisting of spreadsheets or graphics are not included here. In particular, the key graphics in Appendix B are omitted.

In addition to the official process archives, these files include two letters from me to the faculty describing the aims of the process and its progress as we went along. These letters help to convey a sense of the forces at work at the time, though that was not their original intent. It seems to me that those who might want to revisit our work and build upon it could find it useful to know a little more about what was taking place simultaneously both in OSSHE and in the nonacademic external community. That's the "context" I have in mind for this note. The "epilogue" is a brief account of what happened in the year after the plan was submitted. Both parts are based upon my recollection and what correspondence I could locate nearly a decade later. I have tried to be unbiased, but am limited to presenting the facts as I recall them.

The UO's productivity planning did not happen in a vacuum. When Myles Brand was hired as president, one of his assignments, which I believe he looked forward to, was to conduct a full-scale strategic planning process. That review had already led to the creation of The Oregon Model before the political drumbeat began in Salem to increase faculty workloads, interpreted as contact hours in the classroom. By and large, workload increase was a Republican issue, with House Speaker Larry Campbell and Rep. Carolyn Oakley two of the more prominent promoters. Campbell was fairly shrewd and was being supplied with ammunition by a few Republican faculty members. Oakley was less astute, and found it hard to process information that did not match her preconceptions.

I first heard rumblings about the workload issue at a Faculty Advisory Council retreat in the fall of 1992. As chairman of the FAC, I was able to persuade my fellow members that workload was likely to be the most significant issue we could tackle as a continuing project for the year. We determined to try to alert our colleagues to the external threat by a series of four letters to them dealing with different aspects of the problem and building up to a campus-wide convocation in April with Vice Chancellor Richard Sisson from UCLA as keynote speaker. He had drafted the Pister report, which was the culmination of a University of California study of the possibilities of rewarding teaching with dollars, a fairly radical idea at the time. Here is an excerpt from the letter we sent inviting him.

"This year's FAC has taken on the agenda of examining faculty workload and productivity issues, with a view to having some faculty influence on our own fate. In Oregon, as elsewhere, we are under intense legislative pressure to be more 'efficient,' and it seems plain that the state system of higher ed will be forced to adopt some sort of new way of doing business. What that new way will be is not at all clear at this point, nor will it probably be all that clear even in April.

"In any case, the FAC has begun a campaign of letters to our colleagues to alert them to the need for action, describe some of what has been done elsewhere, frame some of the key issues, and suggest ways they can get into the act. The campaign is leading up to the spring convocation, at which we propose a distinguished outside keynote speaker, followed by small group sessions led by facilitators. Our plan is to mix the participants in the small sessions by a random scheme and to assign, rather than invite, faculty to attend. We shall see how well that works.

"Our overall agenda is to change the academic culture here, in such a way as to recognize and reward excellence (or simply superior performance) in areas other than research. This won't be easy."

Meanwhile, the 1993 legislative session had begun, and there was intense pressure on the Chancellor to increase faculty workloads. We at the UO had already been working to change the focus from "workload," an input measure, to "productivity," a measure of output efficiency. The Chancellor bought into this idea and appointed a workload/productivity task force, which I chaired, to show the legislators that OSSHE was mightily concerned. This task force, consisting of faculty and administrators from throughout the system, worked assiduously and put out a final report sometime in early May, after it seemed that the pressure was mostly off.

Also during this time the State Board itself wanted to get into the act. They put together a committee of a handful of Board members and a smaller handful of faculty, chaired by Les Swanson and staffed by Gerry Kissler. While they were trying to figure out what to call the outfit, I put forth the name BCAP, for Board Committee on Academic Productivity, and they bought it. They may not have liked the two alternatives I proposed, the Board Academic Review Force and the Faculty and Academic Task Force for Real Educational Economy. Something about the acronyms, perhaps. I served on this group as well. It seemed that we spent most of our time trying, without much success, to convince a woman from Ashland that tenure was not evil. BCAP kicked out its final report in the fall of 1993.

Meanwhile the UO productivity planning process was getting set. The Chancellor had sent all of the OSSHE institutions an August directive to produce progress reports by mid-December and final plans by the spring. At the UO we developed the mother of all committees, with a steering committee, which I chaired, and various issue-centered subcommittees. It's the material from that process that you'll find here.

Now for the epilogue. We left matters in the hands of the administration during 1994-95 to devise implementation strategies with the assistance of faculty. The idea was that after a year of getting set up and taking some easy first steps the university could begin to implement the plan in dead earnest by fall of 1995. Myles Brand left for Indiana after spring term 1994, I went away on sabbatical during the 1994-95 academic year, and with all of the other things Dave Frohnmayer had to think about that spring and summer the productivity plan took a back seat. I have seen no evidence that Dave has ever read it. Certainly he and many others in the administration have recognized, though, that the planning process was successful in heading off attacks by the legislature, and perhaps that was indeed its most lasting contribution.

Provost John Moseley was the architect of Appendix B, the financial survival plan. In his mind, that was the part of the plan that really mattered, and he set about making sure it was carried out. A number of early decisions by him and some of the deans led to the belief by many on the faculty that the plan had become nothing but a straight dollars-for-credit-hours deal, and later denials failed to change many opinions. Faculty support for the plan rapidly declined, despite Moseley's presentations to the University Senate. Faculty members who had taken an active part in the planning process felt particularly let down, as I discovered when I wrote to them after returning from sabbatical.

As it has turned out, the university is still here. The survival plan worked, without anybody's having to implement most of the ideas generated by the planning process.

There was one scare, and I don't know how it was finessed. Assessment of results was a key element in the Chancellor's charge. The UO proposed an innovative and apparently quite workable scheme, the University of Oregon Portfolio, to be submitted annually as a report of progress on various listed fronts. The UO promised to send in these portfolios, but then didn't do it. Apparently the Chancellor's office called us on this after a couple of years. I don't know what happened then.