Testimony to the Ways and Means Committee
Mina Carson,
Associate Professor of History, OSU
President, OUS Interinstitutional Faculty Senate (IFS), 2007
April 24, 2007 Thanks for the opportunity to talk with you today. I have three major points to make: 1. our faculties' national competitiveness DOES matter; 2. OUS is rapidly moving across the line that divides extreme efficiency brought on by financial hardship from simple starvation; 3. public higher education must be viewed as an investment, not an expense.
My colleague in Russian history tells me that after he read the national salary report compiled by the American Historical Association, he realized that he'd been making a $20,000 annual donation to Oregon higher education - without benefit of a tax credit. A full professor, hired at OSU in 1985, my colleague has published three substantial and well regarded books. He has been rewarded with a salary equivalent to an average associate professor in rank for three or four years.
Now you may ask, well, what's keeping him here? Surely he can leave. And dozens of OUS faculty are indeed heeding that advice. The recent chancellor's office study of faculty compensation discovered that between 1994 and 2004, the number of full professors in the system declined by 26%, while enrollment system-wide increased by 30%.
The answer for my colleague is that cynic that he is, he loves and is devoted to public higher education. A working class boy, a Navy veteran, he attended public universities through the masters degree level and then handily won admission to Princeton for his doctorate. He chooses to teach in a public university. Many of my colleagues system-wide feel the same dedication to the floundering system we serve.
We are floundering because we have been forced to become too efficient. It doesn't matter which indicators you study in the system - it could hardly be more efficient if efficiency means fewer heads driving the process, fewer hands performing the tasks, fewer dollars parting company with taxpayers in service of the system's needs.
There is a new research finding that suggests that among rodents, at least, lifespan may be significantly prolonged on a calorie-restricted diet. Mice that eat 30% fewer calories than mice on a normal diet live up to 40% longer. Scientists have suggested that trying this on humans without appropriate safeguards could be dangerous, and I would suggest that the same caution applies to systems of higher education. Disinvesting in higher education since Measure 5 has given us exactly what we've paid for - a less expensive system. Unfortunately, the system is now starving to death.
For years faculty and staff have picked up the slack. As my colleague suggested, we have been making donations of our time and skill and potential earnings to a system that does not pay back. Faculty at Western Oregon University offered several social science courses for free last summer because there was no money to pay them, but the students needed the courses to graduate. Professors in the College of Liberal Arts at OSU are being asked to teach an overload to give freshmen an additional chance at retention through teaching targeted to academic skills. Department chairs at Western are not paid for being chairs, nor do they take a reduction in teaching load.
But these heroic self-sacrificing measures are not working. We are not competitive in the national marketplace, though many of our programs are excellent. We cannot attract brilliant young scholars, and that matters. The OUS edifice is crumbling, literally and figuratively.
When investors buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway or Vanguard Emerging Markets, they don't think of that expenditure as an expense, but as an investment. Investors don't rebuff those companies for coming to them with their hands out. On the contrary, canny investors seek out promising companies, and hope these companies will succeed, because their success will fund investors' retirement, their children's education, their hopes and dreams. By the same token, higher education is not a luxury expense, but a necessary investment in a happy and profitable future.
The regional campuses of OUS are sporting the bloodiest wounds from almost two decades of budget cutting, but the larger universities hide the battle scars better because their individual units are bleeding behind the fortress walls. The colleges at Oregon State University, the land grant university, are imploding. I talked with a colleague in another OSU college a few days ago. She was almost weeping as she told me about two younger colleagues being wooed by prosperous universities and receiving no assurance at OSU that their jobs are even secure, much less offers of raises and research packages. One of these tyros has published seventeen articles since he came three years ago. In my own OSU college we have been urged to combine departments administratively to cut costs. Well, sure, that might cut costs, but it would not be an efficiency in most ways, and it would depress our national profile even further. Such clustering does not conform to Best Practices in the liberal arts, and this reorganization would not be recognized as innovative, but rather as a stopgap measure taken by a rinky-dink institution. That is not the profile we should be presenting at national meetings where we recruit our new people.
Too often in the Oregon University System, ideas for administrative restructuring do not emerge from expectations of growth, prosperity, and orientation to a changing world, but from externally imposed fiscal limitations. In other words, administrative restructuring in OUS institutions does not conform to Best Practices in any of our disciplines, and this depresses faculty morale. Our system is held together with thumbtacks and chewing gum, and the gum is rapidly being replaced by spit, since gum is beyond our means.
Professor Scott Burns in Geology at Portland State University points out that one of the main losses we have experienced as professionals and as a university system is that we cannot adapt to a changing world. We are not light on our feet, although heaven knows we are lean - to hark back to the mice. Again, when you invest in a company, one of the things you ought to be looking at is unencumbered cash on hand. How nimbly can that company respond to an unexpected and fleeting opportunity? OUS has no cash on hand. We have steadily eroded our fund balances to pay for vital services. Administrators have next to no discretionary money. I am losing a young colleague in European history because her husband teaches in another city and OSU hasn't got the money to insure the dual-career consideration that our hiring statement promises. Her first book, on Vienna during World War I, was awarded the 2005 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize by the American Historical Association and the 2005 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. These are not minor recognitions. We are losing a prominent scholar and a popular, brilliant teacher. You know what else? She wants to stay!!! She wept for days over the decision she feels she has to make for her family's sake. But we don't have the resources to keep her and her husband, who have both now been plucked away by a small liberal arts college. We don't have agility. Oh, and by the way, what a lucky break for the system because it means a warm body won't have to be FIREDÉ.we just won't fill the position. Can't afford it. Is this any way to plan for the future? It's planning by default. The vacancies are random, and so growth and development, as well as attrition and recession, are random.
That scholar won't be around to mentor another young colleague who was our first choice in a position search that yielded upwards of 200 applications. She is now watching and waiting as her husband, who followed her to OSU and was given lab space for his significant zoological research, applies to Cornell's veterinary college because OSU can't accommodate him beyond the lab space. If Pat gets a job offer, what will Marisa do? They have an eight-year-old son. They have lived on different coasts before. They don't want to do it again.
I've been in Oregon for eighteen years. I have watched my fellow citizens open their own veins and bleed out, and I don't understand this. The less higher education we make available to our citizens, the less informed their choices become. We are not just investing in the high school graduates of today, we are investing in their children and the kind of world their parents describe to them and model for them in their homes. Right now that promises to be a world of cultural and material poverty, illiteracy, lack of sophistication, parochialism, and truncated opportunity. With an undereducated workforce, we are on the road to losing our self-determination. Increasingly our technical and professional services, our meaningful investment, will come from out of state. We will be colonized by individuals and corporations from regions more enlightened than we are, and why? Because we looked upon higher education as a cost and not an investment.
Thanks for all your hours of work on this budget, and your patience and intelligent listening. We know your choices are dire and unrewarded. But we must do the best we can for the institutions we love, and the higher education to which we have pledged our professional lives.