Provost's Remarks to Senate Assembly

Thank you for that kind introduction and thank you all for the opportunity to talk with you this afternoon.

I want to begin my remarks by reflecting on the mission of the University and how we, collectively, accomplish it. This is my starting point because in times of very tight budgets, we must be clear about our mission because when we do something we are not doing something else. Of course, this is even true in good times: Harold Shapiro, who was once president here, said that there is no limit to the extent of valuable projects that a great faculty can think of to do, and consequently no limit to the amount of money they could spend doing them. In short, we have to make choices, and it helps to know what we are trying to accomplish.

President Coleman has made a succinct statement of our mission, “ The mission of the University of Michigan is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving, and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” What we do here all goes back to this. We need to ask questions, help students to ask questions, and focus on the future, the business of learning and teaching. Zora Neale Hurston described the academic enterprise well when she said, “ Research is organized curiosity.”

Our commitment at the University of Michigan is to providing education that incorporates excellence, engagement, access, diversity and collaboration. I want to explore these commitments with you this afternoon, talk about some of the challenges to them, and talk specifically about some issues that face us.

Let me being by noting that what we do here is clearly a collective enterprise. It requires faculty and administration working together and understanding – perhaps even appreciating – their complementary roles. If you’ll permit me a disciplinary reference, we are in an activity where the production workers – the faculty – are highly skilled and must, of necessity, be highly autonomous. They must judge their own work and that of others. This poses special challenges for universities because faculty can’t actually do their jobs well if they are told too precisely what to do. Autonomy is critical and it’s hard to manage.

We are committed to providing a liberal education to all our students. Liberal here implies, as it says in the dictionary, breadth and flexibility of mind. Its root is in freedom. I believe that at our best we provide this kind of education to all our students: undergraduates, graduate students, and students in professional schools. Liberal education prepares our students for interesting and engaged lives in which the life of the mind is significant. Liberal education also prepares students for a future which is unpredictable but in which there are certain to be difficult and complicated problems to solve. We cannot know what the next problem is going to be, but we do know that it will take creative and critical thinking to solve it. Odds are it will require people working from different perspectives and with varying skills and approaches. Our goal is to enable our students to be effective members of the problem solving teams of the future.

To do that, we must provide them with access to excellence: to disciplinary depth and rigor and to collaborative approaches that tap the strengths of several disciplines and integrate them in new ways. The key to this is the strength of our faculty. We know that the relationship here is circular: good faculty attract bright students who, in turn, help to attract even more good faculty. But the faculty are the lynchpin in this arrangement. As I talk with colleagues, I consistently hear of efforts to recruit and retain the very best people. People want colleagues who will challenge them and help them do their best work. This leads to an upward spiral that is a tremendous strength of the university. This is a wonderful characteristic of this university. From a marketing point of view, it’s a story we need to do a better job of telling. But what’s most important is that we have such a good story to tell.

Preserving and enhancing the quality of the faculty is particularly difficult in tight economic times. When our peer institutions (whose economic circumstances are different from ours) decide to increase the size of their faculty, as NYU has recently, or decide to emphasize particular fields, they often come recruiting here. We want to be the place others look to for talent. That’s outside validation of the quality of the people here. But it stretches our already stretched resources. And we can’t afford to lose very many of these competitions for faculty without compromising quality. But let me note that we prefer this problem to its opposite – a faculty other institutions don’t want to recruit.

Part of Michigan’s excellence, what makes us a leading research university instead of just a very good state university, is our commitment to diversity in many forms. We have programs in many subjects – about 160 at last count. Each discipline houses faculty who employ different approaches. Our students and faculty come from around the world and have backgrounds very different from one another. Our long history of collaborative work gives us a strong foundation from which we can sustain a diverse community. This diversity is critical to our success and so we are committed to preserving and enhancing it. And I want to note that diversity is a property of a group, not an individual.

We’ve worked hard to bring many different kinds of people to campus. The challenge before us now is to take full advantage of this diversity. How do we do this? I think we work on creating a community where people are deeply engaged and eager to debate ideas on their merits. This is the heart of liberal education and inquiry. We want a campus in which we are able to have open conversations, in which opinions and ideas are expressed and interactions take place even if they are not always comfortable and even if there are risks that come from the existence of differences. This is not to say that we should embrace all ideas as equally valid. They’re not. But we should embrace the notion that all ideas are worth arguing and puzzling through, without feeling personally threatened. Or we need to suspend fear or go on with the process even if we are fearful.

I’d like us to recognize that active disagreement is a token of respect – much better than passive acquiescence. If we don’t argue, there is the implication that we don’t have much to say. There is nothing so dismissive as “whatever” in response to an argument you’ve advanced.

Active argument and dispute can be extremely difficult, especially when the differences among people are large. This is true within disciplines and across disciplines and positions at the University. It requires us saying, at least to ourselves, “I’m going to trust that you aren’t going to punish me for candidly expressing myself in a world where there are huge visible differences between you and me, differences that may matter but it’s not clear how or how much.” This is a risky place to be. It’s scary if you’re 56 years old and it might be terrifying if you’re 18. But it’s a place we need to get to if we’re going to become good at learning about and learning from our differences and using them to full advantage. The creation of this environment is our shared responsibility.

One way to make progress here is to get people working together in small groups. We need to pose tough problems - problems that can’t be solved alone – and get people working together on them. Michigan’s tradition of collaborative, interdisciplinary work serves us well here. We can find real problems that matter in our research and pull together people who will approach them from different perspectives and generate new ideas. As we work together in this way, we come to value the perspectives of others and become more comfortable to taking risks and exploring our differences. And we learn, (and we really always knew this) that there is tremendous value in being wrong. We need to be willing to take risks and be wrong. Indeed, when children are young, we applaud them for doing so and help them learn from the experience. As we get older, we seem much less willing to risk making mistakes.

Two places that demonstrate how to derive collective strength from difference are the military and athletics. Both of these sets of institutions have dealt with difficulties around difference fairly effectively. In each case, there is a common problem to be solved and to solve it you have to work as part of a team. As part of the team, you come to appreciate the skills, insights, and ideas that complement rather than conform to your own and help the team achieve its goal. In universities, which stress learning and understanding, collaborative work is an entirely natural way for us to create that teamwork.

I want to digress for just a moment on a theme that was the focus of the Provost’s Seminar on Teaching this fall. How do we help undergraduates recognize and explore the collaborative, cross-disciplinary work being done on this campus? It’s pervasive here and I think our graduate students know that, indeed it is the reason many of them choose Michigan. Our professional schools are, by their nature, interdisciplinary. Undergraduates could reap great benefit if they became cognizant of the richness this campus offers. One way we can help them with this is to think about how we teach introductory courses. Some of the best advice I got as an assistant professor was to teach my introductory courses as if it were the terminal course in the field. Most students in introductory courses are not going to go on in the field, so the first course is the only chance you have to introduce them to the exciting and engaging work of your discipline.

We can also accomplish a good deal by doing more team-teaching. Our colleague Eliot Soloway has noted that team teaching sounds very 1960ish and that today we describe this approach as “problem solving’. By either name, the point is to bring together faculty with different approaches to share their points of similarity and difference with students, to argue about theories, methods, and outcomes, and to draw students into the conversation. This requires a commitment of time and energy and a willingness to cede and claim ground – but it is a terrific way to communicate the joy of intellectual engagement and the richness of this campus to our students. It is, in many ways, the fun part of what we do. We should convey it and model it.

To remain a university in which excellence prevails requires that the administration create the space for this to happen. In keeping with the decentralized model that has served this university so well, this administration has a strong preference for creating the environment in which things can happen rather than dictating specific programs. To put it simply, when the right people come together, good stuff happens. Centrally, our focus has to be on providing the essential ingredients – bright students, infrastructure, the resources to support them – that bring talented people to campus and enable them to interact. We want an environment in which faculty are eager to recruit colleagues who will challenge them, in which there is open and lively dispute of ideas, and in which people are comfortable in taking risks.

As I indicated at the beginning of my remarks, there are a number of challenges that face us as we pursue our mission. At the national level, there are efforts in Congress to endorse an “academic bill of rights” which is purported to protect students from political indoctrination by faculty members. But what the effort really does is undermine the independence of universities and their faculties. It would substantially limit something that is fundamental to the academic enterprise, judgment based on professional knowledge and argument. The proposal argues for a requirement that, “ academic institutions…maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within…their fields of inquiry.” Our work as academics is about making judgments of quality on academic work. We cannot be neutral or accept the notion that all research is of equal quality and importance. There are additional and equally troubling provisions in this proposal and I recommend the AAUP’s website to you for a full discussion of them.

This “academic bill of rights” or its relatives is also being pushed at the state level in many places across the country. In Michigan, we know from recent experience that some legislators are quite interested in the content of specific courses. All of this is part of a broad effort to exert legislative and judicial control over higher education. These proposals would undermine our ability to foster the full and open debate that is essential to the education we provide.

As you know, we also face severe budget issues. You are well aware that we have absorbed significant general fund reductions, over $45 million in two years. I’ve now been on this faculty long enough to have some historical perspective and the trend is worrisome. In the 1960s, the state provided about 80% of our general fund revenues. In the 1970s, it was still a healthy 66%. In 2001, the state provided 35% of these revenues. This year the figure is 28%. I don’t expect we’ll see 35% again, even if the economy substantially recovers. History indicates that when there is a recovery, the line stays flat. We don’t recover ground, we just stop losing it. And this last year, reduction in aid from the state has been coupled with restrictions on tuition increases. That we are under ideological and fiscal attack belies our role as the engine of innovation and of good lives, examined lives, as Socrates put it.

The outside challenges are significant. It is the job of those of us in the administration to address these concerns, to create and protect the environment that enables you, as faculty members, to carry out the real business of the university, learning and teaching.

The work the administration does in creating this environment should be largely invisible to the faculty. While you are focused on research and teaching, the administration will be working to provide the resources you need to do your work. To speak candidly, most faculty members don’t see much of me or of my colleagues who are vice presidents. For the most part, this is OK because what we do is not directly relevant to your real work of teaching and learning. Faculty don’t know a lot about what we do on a day-to-day basis. Our job is to make sure it stays that way, not because it is a secret, but because it doesn’t come very close to research and teaching. The main work of the university is done by you, the faculty, with support from others. The administration works on compliance with federal and state polices or on the provision of the wide range of services our students need, issues that the majority of faculty would be happy never to learn about, I suspect. But I think that this distance between us in terms of what we do is part of what drives the interest in evaluation to which I’ll return in a moment.

I want to turn briefly to some campus concerns. We have, in the past year, made some significant progress in our efforts to create a family friendly environment that makes Michigan attractive to all faculty, including those we are trying to recruit or retain. We are doing this to preserve a feature of the community we value and as a recruiting device. We talk about work-family balance, but if things were in balance, this wouldn’t be a topic of conversation. What we really mean is the cruel tension between work and family life. It’s a real problem that we are working to address. There has been a significant increase, about 30%, in the number of tenure and tenure track faculty who have received dual career assistance. The SACUA childcare task force has developed a set of recommendations for us to consider.

There are, of course, many other campus issues that require attention. Let me mention just a few.

Grade inflation: Harvard first identified this as a problem over a century ago. In 1894, the Committee on the Raising of the Standard at Harvard wrote, “Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of no very high merit and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity…One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades with sham work.” So it is not a new problem and I think we can invest some time in finding the right solution to it. In approaching this issue, we need to behave like academics and do some research. Rather than assuming that there are more “A’s” being given or that such grades are undeserved, we need to back up a bit and talk about what we want to accomplish with grading. Do we want to measure individual progress, the individual against some absolute standard of knowledge, or the individual compared to the rest of the class? I suspect there is considerable variation in how we approach grading and we need to sort that out before we make policies about it. We know, too, that there is a link between expected grade in a course and evaluation of the instructor. We also know that our students, particularly those who want to go on in a field like law, where GPA matters a lot, often choose courses that are likely to give a high grade. Valen Johnson, a member of the faculty in Public Health, has written a book on grading issues. In it he recommends campus-wide discussion of issues about grading. The administration would welcome and support Senate Assembly/SACUA efforts to have such discussions.

Faculty composition: There continues to be discussion of the make up of the faculty, particularly the percentage of tenure, tenure track, and other appointments. We are in the first year of the LEO contract and none of us know what its impact will be. We continue to monitor this set of concerns.

Evaluation of administrators: I interpret this set of concerns as deriving in part from a sense of alienation and from a sense that the faculty used to be fully in charge. And that might have been. I know that some faculty members long for a “golden era” when the faculty and administration were much closer to each other, were not alienated from each other. In this era, departmental chairs worked to aggregate the preferences of their colleagues and communicate them to the dean. They were the crystallizing first-speakers for the faculty. The dean was quite accessible, not just to chairs, but to all faculty members. I don’t know if this era ever really existed or existed beyond a few small colleges. On this campus, we have a vast research enterprise, extensive teaching, and many auxiliary units. We need to work with legislators and conduct some of our work in a businesslike fashion. To do so effectively, we need to have workers whose expertise is quite different from that of the faculty. These concerns require the full time attention and expertise of people who are not also doing research and teaching. We do generally draw administrators from the faculty.

And, crucially, the faculty are in direct charge of the most important work of the university – the day-to-day decisions about academic programs, curriculum, admissions, and hiring.

In terms of evaluation, what I want to know most is how well I’m doing, not how much people like how I am doing it. I think that evaluation through simple questionnaires may conflate the views of the person and the state of the institution. I also think that although administration and leadership matter, it matters much less who the dean or provost might be than who might be in the office next door or the classroom down the hall.

That said, I don’t think these groups – faculty and administrators – need to or should be alienated from one another. We need to find ways to strengthen the relationships between us, to recognize the value and legitimacy of each other’s work and have honest conversations where we explore and learn from each other.

Let me conclude with a bit of Michigan history. In 1911, Branch Rickey received his law degree here. He served as the University’s baseball coach from 1910 – 1913. His record was outstanding, 69-31-4. When he left Ann Arbor, he went on to a distinguished career in baseball management. He is best known as the owner who brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers and thus began the integration of major league baseball. But Rickey was an innovator in many other aspects of baseball as well. He developed the modern minor league system and implemented effective scouting programs. He said something I have always liked, “Luck is the residue of design.” Near the end of his life, he wrote about baseball, observing, “ It is really a game of individuals…. The men on the field perform uniquely alone and face their responsibilities alone most of the time….Only in baseball can a team player be a pure individualist first and a team player second.”

Rickey could have been describing the academic world. It is the individual work – research and teaching – that leads to the greatness of this university. But that individual action requires the support of a full and talented team, colleagues who share ideas, students who provide fresh challenges, and administrators who deal with issues that would otherwise get in the way.

Branch Rickey, as one of the most effective general managers in baseball, built very successful teams in St. Louis, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh. His goal was to make the individual players and the team better. That’s our goal here as well. Thank you.