UMass Crossroads

As the spring semester wraps up at UMass Amherst, a few big changes introduced by the current chancellor are looming. One is the move to join the Mid American Conference for football and another is a plan to "fix" faculty salaries by giving out a few really big raises to faculty for "extraordinary merit". Both are terrible ideas.

One member of the Board of Trustees has been pushing the move for football for years. I remember attending a meeting with the previous UMass chancellor in which he remarked that it would never happen under his administration, mainly because the numbers didn't add up. And because it seems like a joke to have the games played nearly 100 miles away from campus. The numbers still don't add up and now people are joking that maybe UMass should also start offering its classes 100 miles away too.

Another bad idea is the "extraordinary merit" program the chancellor has proposed. The chancellor gets a lot of bad ideas by studying how UMass Amherst compares with our "aspirant peer institutions". Rather than looking at the situation on the ground and trying to actually improve things, he looks for where he could spend money that might make us look better. One way in which we don't look good is average faculty salaries. Rather than trying to fix that, he got the Trustees to let him anoint a small number of tenure-system faculty with really big raises, which will increase the average. My take has been that, as long as there's a problem that he cares about, we have the potential to get meaningful action but, if we let him fix his problem this way, the rest of us will get no meaningful support at the bargaining table.

It was sobering to attend the open forum for the chancellor's evaluation and to read the comments that were submitted to the survey by the MSP about the chancellor's performance. The campus is really demoralized -- especially the non-tenure-system faculty. I had a sense that my experience was not unusual: that workload has increased dramatically at the same time that trust and confidence in the leadership has diminished. The first question I asked the chancellor when he arrived on campus was to ask about the trend toward systematic disempowerment of the non-tenure-system faculty by increasing barriers to participation in university opportunities and programs -- and he unambiguously stated that this was his goal. Mission accomplished.

In 2001, Aaron Lazare (then the Medical School chancellor) headed a task force to study the Future of UMass Amherst. It's fascinating to look back at it ten years later and see how it influenced (or failed to influence) our direction. The thing I remember best from when Lazare presented it was when he lauded the faculty, indicating the faculty was significantly better than any of the other criteria for the institution would lead you to predict. At the time, I though that meant that the faculty represented a particular strength that warranted protection and a focus upon which to build. Instead, the institution has invested everywhere else: new buildings, new infrastructure, new marketing campaigns, but not new faculty.