The following materials have been received from faculty on the OUS campuses dealing with ``critical issues" the faculty wish to raise with the State Board of Higher Education at the meeting in June. Part of the list was presented to the State Board in May. Other entries have been added subsequently.

Peter B Gilkey

Your draft is right on and covers the critical issues we have with the exception of the salary freeze.  As far as the quality/transfer issue goes, you might point out that departments at each of our institutions develop articulation agreements all the time with individual community colleges and that these discussion often take a year or more before the quality issues are satisfactory resolved.  Rushing this deliberative process may provide a service to students in help with access, but streamlining a student into a program for which he/she is not prepared will not be a service to the student and will not help our universities with retention and graduation rates. Hope that helps, Dan

Peter,

I fear I have been a bad correspondent on the OUS issues. To be blunt, I am overwhelmed and beyond capacity, which is a systemic problem with many of our faculty these days. What concerns me most is the pace of the progress at OUS, which moves beyond our capacity to think about the concepts in a manner that is inclusive of the university community or allows times for contemplation. But given that the pace will be not be changed, the issues of top concern to me at UO:

• 1. Preservation of the liberal arts system of training people to think, not to be specialists for a vocation. I fear the business model is driving us fast and furiously towards the more easily conceptualized and implemented vocational school approach to life at all the OR universities.
• 2. We are being asked to do more with less. Scholarships for students does not in any way fundamentally affect our ability to offer a better learning environment once the students are here. Nothing on the table that I am aware of addresses increasing class sizes, re-equipping and maintenance of classroom and lab materials (as contrasted to building new class rooms), staffing needs, etc. We are getting "Faster" processing of students and "More" students, but with no resources to support them.

Hi Peter,

Jim and I have gone through a vast list of faculty "critical issues" and organized responses into a few topic areas, some of which are specific to this campus, but most of which generally apply to all the campuses, I imagine. I hope critical issues for faculty at EOU ratify those from the other campuses, and that you are able to help the Board "hear" our chorus of voices in your speech. Here it is, loud and clear: BECAUSE OF CONTRACTING RESOURCES TO HIGHER EDUCATION, faculty are facing new problems that impact an institution's ability to claim "quality" and "excellence" in their publicity materials.

• 1) CURRICULUM OWNERSHIP/OVERSIGHT : including agenda-driven outcomes, cutting programs that impact recruitment and retention of students and faculty and that erode quality and excellence, infusing "diversity" into the curriculum to prepare students for a global workplace, raising enrollment caps on courses that violate national standards, "shadow" curricula developed through DDE programs that have little assessment and oversight for quality, and the somewhat contested terrain of curriculum ownership--who owns it? the faculty? the Legislature? the administrators? i.e. the gen ed core, and the legislative-driven literacy education curriculum (a la Starr?) that may oust the literacy curricula in Colleges of Education.
• 2) LEADERSHIP: communication vacuums, decisions without consultation with faculty at all levels--from local campuses to state offices.
• 3) SALARY AND COMPENSATION: Workload issues, two-class faculty system driven by resources rather than qualifications, the expectation of more with less. These issues impact recruitment and retention, and affect quality and excellence, as well as access if faculty cannot be found to take positions. Other issues seem either too particular to this campus--like the Union/anti-Union sentiments--or endemic on all campus--like morale (very low).

Peter:

Items that came out of the meeting at WOU this afternoon:

• 1. Strong desire for a statement assuring us that there is a 4 year or 12 term minimum when "faster" is being discussed. One of my colleagues points out the developmental difference that occurs, which is apparent when comparing a conversation with an 18 yr old to one with a 22 yr old.
• 2. the totally transferrable "gen ed" laundry list of courses AND the totally transferrable learning outcomes of the 1st two years of the major are both seen as redefining the 1st 2 years at a 4 year school as being not needed. This equation fails to take into account that the community colleges are serving 3 populations - adult ed, voc ed and those seeking admission to a four year school - which have very different goals, but are assumed to all be sitting together in the same "gen ed" and "pre-4 year school" classes. It also does not consider that not all students are ready for university, and that there's no minimum HS GPA for admission to cc. Of course, institutional distinctiveness is lost when these two proposals are adopted
• 3.. advising needs to be improved by making it a job of the faculty, because they best know their discipline and curriculum, with release time from teaching given for advising.
• 4. Data is needed on the % of students who complete their program, learning assessment, and the CC student population that is being served by distance ed is needed before distance ed can be realistically evaluated for cost and faculty load.
• 5. the semester system will save time and money - so why is it not being discussed? We all understand the pain of planning for this conversion the last time around, but keep bringing it up because is makes sense and may now be more saleable.
• 6. budget cuts to the campuses have reduced support staff and made it more difficult for students to make progress on their nonacademic tasks such as financial aid, course substitutions, etc.

Cheers! Bob

Tue, 04 May 2004 12:06:18 -0700

Subject:Re: Critical IssuesPeter,

Dear Peter:

I think faculty salaries is a key issue. The other thing I worry about lately since the Dave MacDonald talk at IFS is the "More Better Faster" initiative. More and more that seems to me to be a thicket from which we'll emerge inworse shape than we went in. I am particularly concerned about the common curriculum model they want to adopt. PSU, with its unique University Studies general education program, will be especially vulnerble to difficulties if this comes to pass.

Thanks for doing so much.

Craig

Dear Peter,

I would simply stress how important it is to recognize that the University of Oregon is a AAU university and that puts it in a different category from the other OUS institutions and the community colleges. This needs to be taken into account with regard to any discussion of the transferability of core courses, etc.

Thanks for all your work on this.

Lowell

Peter,

Our Senate meets this Thursday so we haven't had a chance for a broad discussion of issues. However, the following are certainly on our faculty radar screens:

• 1. Compensation - this is our second consecutive year without pay raises (and next year promises to be the third). Salary compression is particularly problematic especially for full professors.
• 2. Increasing enrollment without increasing resources. Class sizes continue to grow and we are strapped to offer enough sections of writing, math, physics labs, anatomy labs, etc. Retiring faculty have not been replaced in some departments (including communication and math) and few additional faculty positions have been authorized even in departments with strong growth in enrollment. Faculty also advise the majors in our departments; some faculty have seen advising loads double or triple over the past few years.
• 3. Curriculum "ownership" and gen ed. This is a particularly sore point at OIT following the former Provost's unilateral decision to change two components of gen ed at the end of the 2002-2003 academic year (despite the fact that faculty committees were in the process of reviewing gen ed at the time). Watching the express train running toward "common core curriculum" at the Board's initiative is "deja vu all over again" but at a scale we feel helpless to impact. (Our Senate did protest the lack of process in our former Provost's decision and it is unlikely to happen in that way again on this campus. This does not, however, protect us from an external decision.) Faculty feel curriculum is ours and they resent the incursion by others (Board, legislators, campus administrators) into this domain.
• 4. Common core does not work with our inverted curricula. Students do not spend their first two years taking gen ed at OIT. They usually start taking courses in their major as first term freshmen. This works extremely well for students who know their preferred major because they can really get into the core of their discipline immediately. For students who think they know their preferred major, an early exposure to the field can confirm this choice or convince them to seek another major right away, before investing too much time in pre-requisite courses that they may end up not needing. We encourage the "undecided" students to explore the majors we have and land on one quickly (or transfer to another college/university that offers what might be a better fit for them).
• 5. Transfer students, even those with an associates degree, almost always need to take 3 years at OIT (full-time equivalent) to complete their BS because of the highly specialized courses we teach (and the relatively light load in humanities (9 hours) and social science (12 hours) compared to most other colleges and universities). We do not want to increase our humanities or social science offerings nor do we want to decrease our 18 hours of communications or the many hours of specialized courses within our technology-focused majors. We are not a liberal arts college and we do not feel it is in anyone's best interest to move in that direction (not that we feel there is anything wrong with a liberal arts college; it's just not who we are at OIT). Pushing for faster degree completion for transfer students would necessitate major upheaval of associates' degree curricula (unlikely) or our own without any clear beneficiaries. Our students are extremely successful in their chosen fields so why tamper with what isn't broken??
• 6. The speed of the Board's decision-making and the lack of faculty input is very disturbing.
• 7. Distance ed is another troubling area, especially in terms of offering courses to HS students. We do offer some of our courses currently to HS students (some come to our campus but others are taught by their own teachers at their HS sites) with mixed success. We have tried a few distance offerings in business (on-line) and environmental science (CD-ROM) with poor results. In most cases, the HS students are not mature enough to follow through on assignments unless there is a live teacher prodding them. It's hard enough to keep college students motivated and on-track in distance courses (because they can procrastinate more easily than in a face-to-face class); the challenge increases exponentially with HS students. We see possible pressure not only to expand HS offerings but to find ways for these students to succeed (watering down the course? grade inflation? extended time to complete the course?) that do not support quality education.

Dear Peter and IFS members:

Peter requested a critical issues list, i.e. concerns of faculty during these tumultous times. I apologize for being so tardy with my list as I have been out of the country. Since I will sadly not be present for the June IFS meeting, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share some long held views. These should be added to the excellent list of 'critical issues' written up by other IFS and faculty leaders and posted on the IFS website. I hope there will be time at the June IFS meeting to discuss these issues and those raised by my IFS colleagues.

• 1) A quality education for Oregonians. Every prognosis of Oregon's fiscal future emphasizes the importance of a college educated populace. Despite this obvious need, each of the 7 OUS institutions for the past 20+ years has been pummeled by financial difficulties imposed from the outside. Class sizes are significantly larger, we have much less supporting staff, educational services once thought essential are decimated or totally gone, and every university employee from our Presidents to our food service workers are working harder than ever. Individually we are running faster than ever, yet institutionally we are going backwards. No one is publically saying the obvious - that our overall quality has declined, using nearly any metric available. As long as the public assumes and our elected officials assert all is well with higher ed in Oregon, there will be no impetus to reverse this downward trend. Better institutions of higher ed = better education = better lives for the people of our state. As we have sadly observed, the reverse is also true.
• 2) Differentiation of OUS institutions. It is clear that each OUS institution is not better than the other but that each is different,. Each serves a different subpopulation of students and does as good a job as time and funds allow. However there is little discussion about maintaining and indeed encouraging institutional differentiation. A one size fits all approach, the current course of the state board and OUS, cannot possibly serve our increasingly diverse population. We must convince OUS and the board that maintaining our institutional individuality is crucial to Oregon's economic and intellectual vitality.
• 3) Faculty governance. Over the past 2 decades, the nation has seen the emergence of a university adminstration 'class'. Decisions about the future of our institutions are increasingly being made by those with precious little experience as teaching and/or research faculty. Our most recent Chancellor, whom I personally like very much, is an example of a person who chose an adminstration track very early in his career. If we faculty do not insist upon a seat at the decision making table, decisions about the future of our institutions are going to be made by outsiders who do not understand or appreciate the differences between the academy and corporate world. Our faculty governance system works. The U of O has been around for 128 consecutive years. How many Oregon businesses can claim that longevity? Perhaps the university model of faculty governance is not as outdated as many outside the university world might think. However if we do not make strong, cogent arguments supporting the primacy and success of faculty governance, it will surely go as extinct as the dodo.
• 4) Political saavy by faculty. Because the IFS is the only statewide body representing faculty, it falls to us to provide the much needed faculty voice in the current discussions. Whatever we do, we must make certain we do not shoot ourselves in the foot politically. I humbly suggest that we consider abiding by the following: a) that we do not air our private differences to anyone outside the IFS (solidarity); b) that we develop consensus among ourselves before we make any public statement about "what faculty want"; and, c) that we do not alienate state officials.
• In my short tenure on the IFS, I have been very impressed by the energy and thoughtfulness of the current IFS membership. Because of this, I have great faith in the IFS to make a difference in the current public and private discussions about the future course of higher ed. Good luck in June with the Board. I will be with you in spirit.