Fiction in the Space Between III: A Reaction to an excellent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Assembly NC

My theme in my past blog posts was based on Tracy Chapman's song "Telling Stories." In the last post, I changed one of her lines in the song to, "You use data but it doesn't mean, you're not just telling stories." 

An extraordinary story published today by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Assembly NC (not the picture is cut and pasted from the articles- I hope they don't mind), written by Erin Gretzinger and David Jesse, presented a fascinating probe into the evolution of program cuts at UNCG and the relationship of UNCG administrators with rpk, consultants. The story was very fair, filled with detail, briskly written, and included the very human side of the story. Linked to the report are 600+ pages of emails between rpk and university administrators.

There isn't an email that makes one aghast. But, in total, the story and the attached emails clearly indicate that there was a lot more fiction in the space between the entire academic portfolio review process and what faculty knew at UNCG than I even imagined. And, the story points to some really bad campus leadership. Oh, it also more than reinforces the line I revamped from Tracy Chapman's song as theme for my last blog- "you use data but that doesn't mean, you're not just telling stories."

My simple take away:  I think vision should drive strategy. Strategy should drive tactics. And the results of the tactics should connect back to the vision. Based on the story, that clearly did not happen at UNCG. A supposedly objective process to "cut fat" and "change culture" was turned into a chaotic and seemingly biased subjective process to cut academic programs with no clear goal other than to reduce costs, and even that was not clear.

I hope this story is read by other university leaders of an example of exactly how not to lead a reshaping of a university. Please read the story carefully.  This story is packed with information. If you slow down and read, I have hard time thinking you would disagree with me. 

The Chronicle/Assembly started the story with a quote from the CFO "Most everyone here believes we have no fat to cut. I believe otherwise,” wrote Bob Shea, the university’s vice chancellor for finance and administration, in a January 2023 email to associates from the firm [rpk,]. “Culture change is our biggest hurdle, and that is from the chancellor’s council all the way down to our most junior supervisors."

The statement by the CFO based on a loose narrative from what I think is personal bias based on my time working with him as provost at UNCG, morphed into  badly run and a chaotic process launched by the chancellor to reshape academic programs and streamline administrative functions. A lot of money was spent on rpk. A tremendous amount of faculty time was spent and ultimately wasted, all to create a quantitatively designed rubric that was essentially ignored in the end, as where some of the recommendations of the consultant on both the administrative and academic side. 

It is also abundantly clear in the story and attached materials that the data used in the academic portfolio review were flawed and that was known by UNCG leadership, deans, chairs and faculty.

rpk, believed early on in the process that the message that would be sent to the campus was that no programs would be cut from the quantitative analysis but that the data would lead to better decisions It indicated that programs identified with low rubric scores would get deeper dive program reviews (page 121 in attached materials). That supposed deep dive was done in just a couple of weeks fueled by nothing but a 1,000 word context statement from programs, at least in the largest unit Arts and Sciences, and mysterious other factors that were never articulated, at least to the faculty. 

Program cuts were ultimately made with no clear justifications. Some programs that scored highly in the rubric were cut with no real explanation. A high scoring PhD program in computational math was cut by the provost at the last minute based on what seemed like her subjective hunch, with no evidence, that faculty would teach undergraduates better if they did not have a PhD program

More importantly, there never was a link articulated from how program cuts will lead to a thriving university in the future, with the chancellor deferring to faculty led strategic planning committee to provide that link in a report that has not yet been released. How can a chancellor and provost implement a process to fundamentally reshape UNCG's academic offerings without a strategy, let alone a vision?

I have never seen a Chancellor hand off the development of strategy for an uncertain future to a faculty committee that does not include the chancellor, provost and CFO. Nor, in my 25 years of administration, have I seen a faculty led, not chancellor led, strategic planning committee create effective strategic plans. In the end, strategic plans involve assigning individuals to action items and to resources, which faculty don't have the authority to do.  I have heard it said that "vision without implementation is hallucination." In my experience, faculty are great at thinking up visions for their department, college and university, but not so good at implementation, not because they aren't good at implementing (many faculty  run effective and sizeable small businesses in their labs, that are funded from really competitive grants awarded from proposals that are basically a strategic plan- many faculty are quite good at implementation of a strategy aimed at a research vision within specific timelines and a fixed amount of resources- perhaps the best at it in any university), but because faculty don't have any alignment of authority with responsibility to implement on a university campus. I worry that the strategic plan will be "Hallucination", but I am open to being wrong to worry. I respect the faculty chair of the committee.

Many, many faculty who were upset about the process (many of us were upset well before the outcomes in contradiction to the chancellor's quote which is clear in earlier posts in my blog), were ridiculed and dismissed, as this one quote from the provost (out of many in the essay referred to) infers, “This attack from a minority of faculty members was part of increasingly personal, desperate maneuvers that distracted focus and energy from an unambiguous truth: Our status quo is no longer tenable,” Storrs wrote in the essay."

I think the Chronicle/Assembly story vindicates the many, many of us that were concerned about a messed up process (and the outcomes), that the program cuts were not really based on the data, and that there was never a very clear articulation of how the programs that were cut were going to lead on increased net revenue, let alone the quality of UNCG's academic programs needed to attract students.  In fact, we still aren't clear how much money will be saved. This quote from the story reflects the reality for sizeable portion of the faculty

 "For those who observed and participated in the process at UNC-Greensboro, it remains frustratingly unclear how the university went from seemingly straightforward data points to rubrics filled with data inaccuracies and defined by contested metrics, ultimately deciding on cuts that felt disconnected from everything in the process that came before."

Despite all the faux engagement with faculty, it is clear that there was never a serious intention to work with faculty governance. Here is an example from the story- "For example, a couple of weeks into February, rpk drafted an answer to a proposed question for a website that would explain the program-review process to the public: “Is this project focused on the elimination of programs?” Rpk’s proposed response was “no,” explaining that any decisions about programs “will follow UNCG’s established governance procedures.” Storrs responded with edits that kept the answer as “no” but removed rpk’s line about shared governance and added that the dashboards could directly inform decisions."

There is so much more in the story that reflects very poorly on leadership (the email from the provost to rpk asking them to hide recommendations on her favored programs is almost laughable). There are even quotes that are embarrassing to read like this one from the chancellor (that has been published many times) to a talented undergraduate student in a forum. “I’ve published a lot of peer-reviewed articles. In fact, the president of Harvard was accused of plagiarizing my papers,” he [Gilliam] said. “So I think I maybe know a little bit about data. When you do that, let me know.” Not only was this an egregious thing for a chancellor to say to a exceptionally talented undergraduate student in physics, a weird way of self-aggrandizing via bragging about being plagiarized as opposed to being cited, but the student published a research paper in a physics research journal. 

I hope others can take this story as a warning regarding processes for redesigning academic portfolios to face the "headwinds" facing higher education. Vision should drive strategy. Strategy should drive tactics. And the results of the tactics need to connect back to the vision. Based on the story, that clearly did not happen at UNCG. 

​I don't know how one can read the Chronicle/Assembly story and not also take-away an impression that there was a serious failure of leadership, a truly messed up process and way too much fiction in the space between narrative and reality.
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​Epilogue 1: Moving Forward
The message from the chancellor and many colleagues will be it is time to move on, "the past is the past." We have an uncertain future to deal with and we need to come together and address a plan to overcome the uncertainty. I completely get it. And I want to move forward, partly because I hate writing these blogs as a way to deal with anger. And, because I love UNCG.

Personally, though, I am tired of a political, social, corporate and media culture where it is absolutely fine to fuck up your job, because nobody hold leaders accountable to the mistakes they make, the lies they told, the destruction and pain they caused, or their overall failure as leaders. And, it appears there is no longer any presumption that leaders have an ethical obligation to hold themselves and their teams accountable or even apologize.

The leadership culture of the time seems to have morphed into a strategy that can be summarized this way: don't reflect on criticism; never sincerely apologize; defend; ridicule and attack those trying to hold a leader accountable, while at the same time complain vigorously that the ones who have little power are treating the leader uncivilly and unfairly.

Sound familiar? It might, but I am not talking about that national figure.

There is so much on the record last year in emails, recorded speeches, op-eds and news stories including  exceptional investigative reporting of The Chronicle of Higher Ed/The Assembly and others that can make one's head spin. That record shows to me that the chancellor, provost and VCFA adopted the strategy above.

The chancellor offered an "olive branch" to faculty at convocation, promising to be a better teammate. His State of the University address, based on the title, will be a focus on the accomplishments of the institution and the campus coming together move forward, most likely trying to keep the past in the past with an admission, "we could have done it better." I hope my colleagues demand a little bit more of the chancellor than an olive branch - I would ask that he exhibit a genuine willingness to hold himself and his vice chancellors accountable for the complete mess they made last year and the terrible way they characterized so many faculty and divided the faculty into "good" and "bad." Doing so, and articulating a vision and strategy, is what will  fuel the campus' journey towards a new sunrise.

With respect to the phrase "don't look back", it makes me think of a song by Kasey Anderson that I love.
The last few lines of the song feel like a metaphor. I can view the "I" in the song as the many, many faculty who questioned the process. I can see the "you" in the song as the chancellor.

"And I said, I said
You left me for dead
But there was never any truth to that
I could breathe just fine
We both know damn well once you start lying to yourself
You're trapped
And you don't look back"

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Epilogue 2: Is time infinite and free?

I actually agree with the chancellor's quote in this story that it is not that hard to identify underperforming programs. I did that yearly as provost in program viability reviews and cut and put programs on notice annually. Although I didn't need to for the purpose of cost containment when I was a provost, using university data and peer comparative data, it wouldn't have taken me very long (hours or days) to identify programs that need serious review.

One of my own personal reactions to the APR process is that it wasted oodles of money, and squandered an extraordinary amount of the  most valuable resource to faculty, time. One of my pet peeves is that universities tend to view faculty and exempt employees with the assumption that their time is infinite and free. 

My wife managed large electronic medical records projects in several hospitals. She would often tell me about her projects and she would use "resources" specifically to mean the time of individuals allocated to the project. Of course, being in universities too long, I always thought she was referring to money and space. She taught me that in hospitals  (and businesses, and non-profits) that time is equivalent to money when resourcing a project.

During my time as a senior administrator at a soft-money research institute, time and money were almost synonymous.  Grant funded faculty literally had to ask what account they should charge to go to a meeting, because their grants could not pay for that time. Of course, they had no service commitment of any kind unless the institution paid for their time.

Universities would be very different places if the time of of all exempt employees was not viewed as infinite and free, but that is another story.

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