U Tulsa to cut 40% of academic programming: CHE article

[mahagonny]

And don't you live in a country with socialized medical care?

I think you are assuming that anyone not enamoured of unions must be a "libertarian-get-rid-of government" type. I'm a centrist. Universal medical coverage is a great thing, as is universal education, and I don't mind taxes going to support all kinds of services. Mainly I find most unions' apocalyptic over-the-top rhetoric and dramatic posturing as foolish and unproductive. We don't have to say the sky is falling to realize that an umbrella is a good thing in certain situations.

You missed the point. What is obvious is that you don't mind being the recipient of universal medical coverage, while seeing it as a sign of your own responsible choices; then you cast aspersion at someone whose government does not provide that benefit because they have difficulties.

This is what I would see as evidence you're NOT the kind of person Polly is speaking about. Lots of us who teach part-time take pride in our work, as you do, but the media chooses to report the endless stories of people basically grabbing any course available and talking about how they can't afford medication, etc. because of their situation. (That kind of desperation is even expressed on here from time to time.) The problem is that the desperate people skew the whole discussion so it's basically impossible to have rational discussions about how the system can be reasonably improved since their personal situations would need a miracle to fix.

[marshwiggle]

And don't you live in a country with socialized medical care?

I think you are assuming that anyone not enamoured of unions must be a "libertarian-get-rid-of government" type. I'm a centrist. Universal medical coverage is a great thing, as is universal education, and I don't mind taxes going to support all kinds of services. Mainly I find most unions' apocalyptic over-the-top rhetoric and dramatic posturing as foolish and unproductive. We don't have to say the sky is falling to realize that an umbrella is a good thing in certain situations.

You missed the point. What is obvious is that you don't mind being the recipient of universal medical coverage, while seeing it as a sign of your own responsible choices; then you cast aspersion at someone whose government does not provide that benefit because they have difficulties.

1. My understanding is that in the US, full-time workers are entitled to health care, and so getting a full-time job outside academia is the best route for people to get that coverage.

2. Even here, where everyone has health coverage, a bunch of part-time jobs doesn't take the place of a full-time job.

3. As I've said in numerous posts, I support things like pro-rated benefits for part-time workers so that employers are not incentivized to break up full-time positions into part-time ones to avoid having to pay benefits. Again, this is true with or without universal healthcare.

[Caracal]

1. My understanding is that in the US, full-time workers are entitled to health care, and so getting a full-time job outside academia is the best route for people to get that coverage.
2. Even here, where everyone has health coverage, a bunch of part-time jobs doesn't take the place of a full-time job.

I've said this before, but the personal and the institutional get hopelessly mixed up in these discussions and I can't help feeling like it is mostly by design. I assume adjuncts are as capable as anyone else of understanding and navigating the absurdly complicated US healthcare system. They also are capable of figuring out their own financial situation. I think it is fair to say that people who are adjunct teaching aren't usually trying to maximize their earning power, but that's true of lots of other people as well.

I wish there were actual surveys of adjuncts, because as it is, we really can only go on anecdotal evidence, but based on that I don't see a lot of evidence that most adjuncts are actually in particularly dire financial straits. I have a spouse with a decent paying job and a young kid. My income is supplementary and spouse's job provides healthcare for all of us. I think a decent number of adjuncts are in similar situations. Other people are making different sorts of trade-offs. I sort of admire people like Kay who are willing to work a retail job part time just because they really want to teach. I don't think I could do that, but it isn't inherently nuts. I'm sure Kay is a reasonable person who can figure out how to make this work financially and would probably eventually figure something else out if it became apparent that it wasn't going to work anymore. We're big kids and can take care of ourselves.

But, just because we are ok, doesn't mean that employing large numbers of adjuncts is some wonderful strategy for colleges, or is a reasonable and fair way for non-profit institutions to operate. Among other things, it is just a terrible way to try to attract and retain good instructors. The logic is basically that it doesn't matter, that adjuncts are all "interchangeable cogs" as Poly says. Of course, that isn't true. Teaching is a skilled, professional job and if you don't compensate people well, both monetarily and in other ways, you aren't going to consistently keep good people around or get the best out of them.

[mahagonny]

It's pretty easy to let standards slip when the staffing is done term-by-term with the armies of whomever is willing to accept a pittance to keep the wolves at bay outside their personal abode this month.  Handing someone a syllabus for Course 18 in Area D and hoping for the best out of an interchangeable cog is not nearly the same as having people who have personal ownership of their courses with strong motivation to do their best to support students to learn and grow as part of a shared learning endeavor.

I actually had to stop myself from using writing a short profane phrase after reading this garbage. This really is not civil discourse and it doesn't promote civil discourse. I'm not working as an adjunct to try to keep the wolves at bay, if I was in desperate financial straits, I'd go get a job that paid better. I like my job and I take pride it in, which is why I find this personally offensive.

Would I do a better job if the conditions of my employment allowed me to work more closely with other faculty in a more permanent capacity. Yes it would, but you can express that sentiment without using insulting language about other academics. I appreciate the work you've done on this forum and sometimes you have interesting things to say, but this is just uncalled for and I'm not interested in participating in more discussions with you when you can't seem to manage to treat others with respect and professional courtesy.

The administrators on this forum, the old CHE forum,  and beyond already know this. They don't care. They are looking for people to blame for myriad shortcomings in today's learning outcomes. Otherwise they are getting rich off a system that isn't well designed to work, and everybody's saying 'why?' Their jobs self-select for...let's just say the kind of people we've been hearing from.

[fast_and_bulbous]

It's pretty easy to let standards slip when the staffing is done term-by-term with the armies of whomever is willing to accept a pittance to keep the wolves at bay outside their personal abode this month.  Handing someone a syllabus for Course 18 in Area D and hoping for the best out of an interchangeable cog is not nearly the same as having people who have personal ownership of their courses with strong motivation to do their best to support students to learn and grow as part of a shared learning endeavor.

I actually had to stop myself from using writing a short profane phrase after reading this garbage. This really is not civil discourse and it doesn't promote civil discourse. I'm not working as an adjunct to try to keep the wolves at bay, if I was in desperate financial straits, I'd go get a job that paid better. I like my job and I take pride it in, which is why I find this personally offensive.

Would I do a better job if the conditions of my employment allowed me to work more closely with other faculty in a more permanent capacity. Yes it would, but you can express that sentiment without using insulting language about other academics. I appreciate the work you've done on this forum and sometimes you have interesting things to say, but this is just uncalled for and I'm not interested in participating in more discussions with you when you can't seem to manage to treat others with respect and professional courtesy.

The administrators on this forum, the old CHE forum,  and beyond already know this. They don't care. They are looking for people to blame for myriad shortcomings in today's learning outcomes. Otherwise they are getting rich off a system that isn't well designed to work, and everybody's saying 'why?' Their jobs self-select for...let's just say the kind of people we've been hearing from.

I am an administrator on this forum. Speak for yourself. Getting rich? That's a laugh. I spend most of my time writing proposals and worrying about being able to scrounge up enough funding to pay my own salary to support my family. Sound familiar?

[mahagonny]

It's pretty easy to let standards slip when the staffing is done term-by-term with the armies of whomever is willing to accept a pittance to keep the wolves at bay outside their personal abode this month.  Handing someone a syllabus for Course 18 in Area D and hoping for the best out of an interchangeable cog is not nearly the same as having people who have personal ownership of their courses with strong motivation to do their best to support students to learn and grow as part of a shared learning endeavor.

I actually had to stop myself from using writing a short profane phrase after reading this garbage. This really is not civil discourse and it doesn't promote civil discourse. I'm not working as an adjunct to try to keep the wolves at bay, if I was in desperate financial straits, I'd go get a job that paid better. I like my job and I take pride it in, which is why I find this personally offensive.

Would I do a better job if the conditions of my employment allowed me to work more closely with other faculty in a more permanent capacity. Yes it would, but you can express that sentiment without using insulting language about other academics. I appreciate the work you've done on this forum and sometimes you have interesting things to say, but this is just uncalled for and I'm not interested in participating in more discussions with you when you can't seem to manage to treat others with respect and professional courtesy.

The administrators on this forum, the old CHE forum,  and beyond already know this. They don't care. They are looking for people to blame for myriad shortcomings in today's learning outcomes. Otherwise they are getting rich off a system that isn't well designed to work, and everybody's saying 'why?' Their jobs self-select for...let's just say the kind of people we've been hearing from.

I am an administrator on this forum. Speak for yourself. Getting rich? That's a laugh. I spend most of my time writing proposals and worrying about being able to scrounge up enough funding to pay my own salary to support my family. Sound familiar?

Impressive that you can make such an admission. Struggling to keep the wolf from the door is a badge of shame, aren't we finding out.

[polly_mer]

New info on U Tulsa: free for now link from Twitter
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-a-radical-restructuring/247542?key=j_DIeWIUtJsVs9ToXQRavvw0c41GIvaC_bMShKC7q3CIfksUHOaWQt7YnJcyva3WdktaRU15OVRpTDRRQS15OXFyVER2ZWRCc0g4ajRPUEY3bDJhZnFURjZGSQ

[spork]

New info on U Tulsa: free for now link from Twitter
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-a-radical-restructuring/247542?key=j_DIeWIUtJsVs9ToXQRavvw0c41GIvaC_bMShKC7q3CIfksUHOaWQt7YnJcyva3WdktaRU15OVRpTDRRQS15OXFyVER2ZWRCc0g4ajRPUEY3bDJhZnFURjZGSQ

I took a quick look at U. of Tulsa's Form 990s. Something is weird. Pre-recession FY 2008 it had positive net revenue of $103 million off total expenses of $193 million. In FY 2009, it had negative net revenue of $117 million off total expenses of $203 million. So basically a $200 million swing, with $160 million of that caused by the stock market crash (change in investment income from one year to the next).

Since then its annual net revenue has been positive except for 2012 and 2016. Total expenses have climbed to more than $300 million. Salaries and benefits are about 40% of expenses. Since 2012, regardless of whether the budget has been in the black, contributions have comprised 20-27% of annual revenue. Is this money coming from trusts? It's not recorded on the Form 990s as investment income.

A lot of money flows in, a lot of money flows out. But not in what looks like (to me, at least) the usual pattern.

[polly_mer]

Does the required independent audit provide additional information?  https://35ht6t2ynx0p1ztf961h81r1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/utulsa-audit-report-2017-18.pdf

I see sales of educational services as well as conversions from restricted to unrestricted and distributions from beneficial interest in funds held
by others.  The "beneficial interest in funds held by others" translates to trusts.

However, I also found interesting this note:

The accompanying consolidated financial statements include the accounts of The University of Tulsa, The Gilcrease Museum Management Trust (the Trust) and The Oak Company (collectively, the University). The Oak Company is currently inactive, i.e., no activity in 2018 and 2017, but has been used in the past to purchase property. Effective July 1, 2008, The University of Tulsa formed the Trust and entered into a Management Agreement with The City of Tulsa and The Board of Trustees of the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art to manage and operate the Gilcrease Museum. The University has agreed that it will incorporate fundraising for the endowment and operations of the Gilcrease Museum into its fundraising efforts and will separately account for such funds and manage the investment of such funds within the University's policies. The Trust is consolidated due to The University of Tulsa's control and economic interest in it. All material intercompany transactions and balances have been eliminated in the accompanying consolidated financial statements.

Other parts of the audit report are also interesting in the watching the train wreck kinda way.  The discount rate is not huge, but  https://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/oklahoma/university-of-tulsa/ indicates few full-pay students even at the highest income level.


Their net cash used in operating activities is less of a loss in 2018 (only $9M), but that still seems bad to me.  That figure includes:

    * increase in net assets that is only half as big in 2018 as in 2017.  It's a positive number, but it's still alarming to watch it go down that fast in one year.

    * negative $40M in net realized and unrealized gains on investments (an improvement from the negative $60M in 2017)

    * negative $20M in change in fair value of beneficial interest in funds held by others (an improvement from negative $35M in 2017)


An April 2019 article published around the time of the first announcement of the huge cuts to the academic programs states

But it became clear some years ago that TU was in financial trouble. Faculty have had no raises since 2015. That same year, President Steadman Upham (whose compensation in 2014 exceeded $1.2 million) informed the campus community that the university was providing athletics with a $9 million annual subsidy. The total deficit in 2016 was $26 million. For nine months in 2016–2017, the university ceased to contribute to faculty retirement accounts—effectively, a 9 percent cut in pay. In September 2017, 5 percent of the nonfaculty workforce was laid off. In December 2017, Moody's downgraded $89 million of TU's parity revenue bonds and $57 million of student-housing revenue bonds. Around the same time, it was revealed that TU had for years been running a structural deficit of about $16 million. Athletics accounted for most of the total loss; TU's law school and Tulsa's Gilcrease Museum, which the university has managed since 2008, made up much of the rest.

...

At his first meeting with TU faculty in late 2016, by contrast, Clancy [new TU president] announced that he was turning the ship around: we would now focus on recruiting first-generation college students and offering them job-ready programs. This is the sort of modest goal a public college of local stature might set for itself, not the best private university in the region. And such students cannot possibly afford TU's tuition, just raised 3 percent to $41,698 for 2019–2020. (Little wonder that Oklahoma's public universities are now considering competing with TU in Tulsa, news that caused a former trustee to tell me "we're fucked.") Clancy hopes to plug the structural deficit and raise scholarship funds through a $500 million capital campaign—but how many first-generation college students know to look beyond the sticker price for financial aid? Still more implausibly, Clancy plans to continue to market TU as a private university of national significance.

Reference: https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa

There are some additional interesting side notes in that article:

Incoming Honors students, half of whom are enrolled in the engineering college, read the Iliad in the summer before they matriculate; in their first semester, they read the Odyssey along with Greek tragedy, comedy, history, and philosophy. They go on to study classic books from the medieval period to the present.

...
[but]
Between 2012 and 2017, Dutton [Honors program director] increased the size of the program fourfold, from 65 to 255 enrolled students—but the yearly budget for Honors decreased by 70 percent over the same period. This meant that the program could no longer host visiting speakers, support dinner or lunch conversations between students and faculty, or even pay for snacks at shared events; Dutton took to baking cookies and purchasing refreshments on her own dime. More than 400 students applied for admission to Honors this year. Levit nevertheless slashed its budget, effectively reducing the number of incoming Honors students in the fall of 2019 by 50 percent.

Reference:https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa

255 students divided by 4 cohorts is 65 students per year.  Thus, the increase appears to be the result of having the first cohort be joined by one more cohort every year to result in the expected one-cohort-for-each-admission-year-spanning-four-years-to-graduation.  Phasing out the program seems reasonable if the goal is to switch to serving needier students in specific majors.

The author of the April article writes:

There will be no assistantships for graduate students entering English and anthropology in the fall of 2019. Arts and Sciences will become a service college. All programs will be combined into four divisions, including one called Humanities and Social Justice. The default course load for all professors at TU will shift from 3/2 to 4/4. Yet somehow, TU found money to announce the creation of a new office, the vice-provost for research—little of which will be accomplished with such heavy teaching obligations.

Reference:https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa

Other sources indicate that TU is a research university with an emphasis on undergraduate experiential learning, which seems to play well with the idea that the national prominence will be in certain research areas, not primarily classroom-based undergraduate education.  That seems to indicate that few people doing significant research will have a 4/4 load.  Instead, perhaps the current 100 part-time faculty will be reduced to fewer as a result of less research-active faculty members teaching more without buying out of their increased load.  After all, if the graduate programs have been eliminated, then it's hard to remain research active in fields where graduate assistants do much of the day-to-day heavy lifting.

I am hugely amused at how the following paragraph is set up to be a negative for Tulsa and TU:

The facts illuminate TU's radical overhaul. Clancy's priorities dovetail with GKFF's areas of focus: early childhood education, delivering health care to indigent families, and making Tulsa more vibrant and economically robust. Key parts of TU's strategic plan could just as well have been written by GKFF: "Who will lead improvements in our K-12 education systems? Who will guide the growing number of first generation students to go to college and help them succeed in college? Who will champion health equity? Who will assist in improving our police relations and criminal justice system? Who will lead Tulsa's efforts to develop, recruit, and retain young, creative talent? . . . The faculty, staff, students and graduates of the University of Tulsa will." The new TU will serve the same social and economic mission as the Kaiser Foundation, and Clancy is evidently banking on substantial GKFF funding. Why shouldn't he? In 2008, after all, he secured a $50 million grant from Kaiser to establish the University of Oklahoma College of Community Medicine at OU–Tulsa. 

Reference:https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa

[polly_mer]

My favorite comment on https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa is

The position presented is actually, if the public can't be sold on your church, then your church will remain empty.

There is no value in being right if you suck at communication.

I am telling you nobody believes "critical thinking" and they are very probably right - not to.

Poster Otherway replying to poster FtzWW

[Hegemony]

1. My understanding is that in the US, full-time workers are entitled to health care, and so getting a full-time job outside academia is the best route for people to get that coverage.

Just to note that this is erroneous.  In many (but definitely not all) full-time jobs, workers receive health insurance as part of their compensation package.  There is no entitlement; it is at the whim of the employer, and smaller employers frequently cannot afford insurance for their employees, and many larger employers, like Wal-Mart, either do not provide it or provide bare-bones coverage that leaves most things uncovered. Even the premium insurance does not cover every expense.  There is usually a deductible: for instance, you pay the first $3000 or the first $5000 in expenses — and this can be levied on multiple categories, for instance, you pay the first $3000 in doctor's visits, and if you are hospitalized you pay the first $3000 in hospitalization charges.  There is also often a co-pay: for instance, the insurance pays 80% and you pay 20% of every expense (in addition to the deductible).  The insurance company may also disallow certain expenses.  For instance, if your doctor tells you to get a $2000 scan, you go ahead, but the insurance company may declare that that scan was unnecessary, and so refuse to pay that $2000.  There was the recent case of a woman whose company disallowed nearly a million dollars of her expenses for complications in childbirth. And so on.  So having insurance is not the same as covering comprehensive healthcare. Many of the medical bankruptcies that happen in the U.S. are for people who have health insurance. The seriously ill ones who don't have health insurance often don't go bankrupt because people won't give them healthcare in the first place.  They just die.  The key is that the health insurance companies are for-profit companies, so their incentive is to disallow claims. The bureaucracy and the profit motive means that Americans pay around twice as much for healthcare, per capita, as people in other developed countries.

The ACA requires employers with more than 50 full-time employees, which of course includes universities, to provide health insurance to people who work 30 hours or more per week, basically i.e. 75% of full-time.  This covers less than half of our adjuncts; and as I say, even the ones who have health insurance still have a great deal to pay out of pocket, especially for any serious illness.

[marshwiggle]

The ACA requires employers with more than 50 full-time employees, which of course includes universities, to provide health insurance to people who work 30 hours or more per week, basically i.e. 75% of full-time.  This covers less than half of our adjuncts; and as I say, even the ones who have health insurance still have a great deal to pay out of pocket, especially for any serious illness.

As someone said, "Breaking Bad" was a truly American show.

Virtually anywhere else in the world:

"You have cancer."

"Oh"

"Your treatment starts next Tuesday."

"OK"

THE END

[pepsi_alum]

(Just as an example, two of my former colleagues--both tenured before the internet was even a thing--scream bloody murder about the department offering any online classes, and the dean has gone along with their heckler's veto. The result is that students are simply voting with their feet and taking classes elsewhere, while the department's numbers continue to shrink). 

What is really the argument for online courses except that they are "the future?" Is there actually evidence that offering courses online provides real benefits for most students? I know the argument is that it increases access for students with jobs and busy lives, but often those are the very people who will do better if they have to come to class twice a week and stay connected to their schooling.

Perhaps, my perspective is skewed because teaching a course online seems awful to me. It takes away the part I like the most about teaching, interacting and engaging with students in a dynamic setting, and replaces them with the parts of the job I dislike, grading and fiddling with CMS software.

I know I'm late, but I just wanted to reply here that I agree online classes aren't always the "right" answer and that we should be concerned with student success rates in those classes. But in the case I mentioned upthread, what happened is that a few senior faculty members are blocking online classes even when there's a specific and demonstrable rationale for offering them. Two quick examples: (1) my former colleagues blocked the department from offering in an online interdisciplinary degree aimed at nontraditional students working in a specific professional field, and (2) my former colleagues insist that summer courses must be offered in-person rather than online, even though undergraduate students at that university pretty much only take summer courses online anymore. What's happened is that students figured out they could get the equivalent class online at a local community college and automatically transfer it in. As a result, my old department at Former U no longer offers any summer courses whatsoever, because the in-person classes don't make minimum enrollment numbers. Thus nearby CC gets the extra revenue instead. 

[spork]

(Just as an example, two of my former colleagues--both tenured before the internet was even a thing--scream bloody murder about the department offering any online classes, and the dean has gone along with their heckler's veto. The result is that students are simply voting with their feet and taking classes elsewhere, while the department's numbers continue to shrink). 

What is really the argument for online courses except that they are "the future?" Is there actually evidence that offering courses online provides real benefits for most students? I know the argument is that it increases access for students with jobs and busy lives, but often those are the very people who will do better if they have to come to class twice a week and stay connected to their schooling.

Perhaps, my perspective is skewed because teaching a course online seems awful to me. It takes away the part I like the most about teaching, interacting and engaging with students in a dynamic setting, and replaces them with the parts of the job I dislike, grading and fiddling with CMS software.

[. . .]

my old department at Former U no longer offers any summer courses whatsoever, because the in-person classes don't make minimum enrollment numbers. Thus nearby CC gets the extra revenue instead.

I have no idea what U. of Tulsa is doing with online instruction in its arts and sciences programs, but pepsi_alum describes the university I currently work at. Meanwhile one of my previous employers invested in undergraduate online education about a decade ago and increased its FTE enrollment by about 40 percent. Every rigorously designed study of online education I have come across shows that student performance is the same in online and F2F versions of courses once college preparedness/readiness (often measured via college GPA) is accounted for.

If students at your institution happily transfer in credits earned from summer online CC courses to knock out arts and sciences gen ed requirements, that signals that students regard those courses as interchangeable commodities.

Maybe U. of Tulsa saw some of this among its own students and decided to focus its resources on academic majors that had strong enrollments, thinking it could reduce opportunity costs by outsourcing some of its gen eds and killing upper-level courses needed for certain majors. The programs being eliminated (both undergrad and grad) affect only 6 percent of the university's current students. Sounds like a decision was made to stop trying to be all things to all people.