Washington, D.C.
October 16-18, 1996
Mark Emmert, Chancellor and Provost for University Affairs
University of Connecticut
Paul Kobulnicky, Director of Libraries
University of Connecticut
MR. KOBULNICKY: I am pleased to introduce Mark Emmert, the Chancellor and Provost for University Affairs at the University of Connecticut. It was Mark’s arrival about a year and a half ago that prompted us to move from a Vice President for Academic Affairs model to a Chancellor model. So, although Mark reports to the President, all other aspects of the University report through Mark, which gives us another opportunity to get synthesis going with respect to all programs at the University of Connecticut.
Mark came to us from Montana State University, where he was Provost. Before that, he had several positions in Colorado, among them, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Colorado, and Assistant to the President of the University of Colorado.
Mark did his undergraduate work at the University of Washington and then earned his Ph.D. in Public Affairs at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.
From a personal perspective, Mark has brought an incredible amount of energy, vision, and humanity to the University of Connecticut. He has started us off on the kind of programs and processes that are critical for change.
We are looking forward to really great things happening in Connecticut.
MR. EMMERT: I will take a path slightly different from the conversations that have been going on here today, and that is to move from the broad and philosophical down to the relatively specific. I’ll give you a mini-case study of one institution that is in the midst of grappling with all of these issues by talking a bit about what is happening at the University of Connecticut.
About two years ago, a new Board of Trustees was put in place, and they set as their goal the establishment of the University of Connecticut as one of the finest public research universities in America.
That immediately prompted an interesting debate: What in the world does being “the finest public research university” mean today? Many people were on the verge of laying out a great vision for creating a perfect university, but according to a 1970s or 1980s definition.
The question, “What does the great public university look like in the first half of the next century, instead of in the second half of the last century?” changes the debate about what we are trying to do a great deal. Over the past 20 or so years, if you said you were going to make a serious incremental set of developments in the university, we would know what that meant. We would have done a sort of Lego-block additive construction, focusing on quality, and building more and more of everything. But now, of course, to say that you are going to try and build or create one of the best research universities in the country, you need a new model, because you are really talking about transformation, reallocation, and refocusing.
At one level, though, at the University of Connecticut, we are still building with Lego blocks because of something quite extraordinary that happened. We launched a legislative strategy to rebuild a very tired infrastructure and to address some of the technology issues that Martha and everyone has been raising today. We invented a program called UConn2000, went to the legislature with an absolutely ridiculous notion and said, we want capital funding guaranteed for ten years, and we want no less than a billion dollars. And, to our absolute amazement, they agreed.
We now have an extraordinary opportunity to invest $100 million each year for the next ten years. It provides us with an exceptional, extraordinary, and, in some respects, quite unbelievable opportunity for a public institution to think about capital investments years from now and to know that the money is going to be there to do it.
So, with Paul and all our campus colleagues, we will spend about one-third of the funds on new buildings, and about one-third on renovating old buildings. The final third will be earmarked for instrumentation, telecommunication, and infrastructure investments.
So, we actually do get to keep working with Lego blocks, which is perhaps the easiest part. What we are also trying to do, though, is to engage in systemic reforms of how we do business, what we are, how we educate, how we conduct scholarship, and how we perform outreach and other services. That’s the really hard part. Then, of course, bringing the physical and the programmatic elements together is both challenging and great fun at the same time.
I am fond, and Paul is probably tired of hearing me saying it, of talking about the notion of the tyranny of our traditions in the academy. I like the term or I wouldn’t use it so much. It seems to me that we in the academy have a fixation on the means and the mode of doing what we do at the expense of what we are trying to accomplish, of our relationships with our communities and our citizenry, even of some of our values, and surely at the expense of some of the trusts that our patrons, supporters, and citizens have given us. Let me personalize that a little bit with two very brief stories that are perfect case studies in comparison and contrast.
About a month ago I was asked to give a presentation to our Foundation Board. They had heard about our budget problems. We have a billion dollars in capital and we have about a $15 million operating deficit this year, so we are going to have wonderful but empty buildings here pretty soon. That’s not a joke.
We are struggling on the operating side while moving forward in other areas. So, I went to the Board and I did what every chief academic officer does, I whined about the three percent budget deficit and hoped they would save us.
I went through my speech, and I thought it was pretty darn good. But, as I did, a good friend of mine who is on that board, and who is also a very successful owner of a construction company, was getting madder and madder, with all the wrong body language coming out. He finally sat up and said, “Mark, I want to understand this. You have a three percent operating deficit.” I said, “That’s right.” I was thinking, “Good, he got the message.”
And he said, “You have control over what you do, how you do it, who does it, how much you pay the people to do it, who will take all those classes, when they take the classes, and what you are going to charge them for it, yet you can’t figure out a three percent budget deficit?”
He was absolutely beside himself that we couldn’t manage what to him was a manager’s dream.
A few days later, I was having a meeting with one of the department task forces on program assessment in order to figure out how to make the department better, and to do some trimming and pruning, like many people are doing. But, in the midst of this conversation, one of our better department heads said, “There is no point in engaging in this process.” I asked, “Why?” And he said, “Because, what if, out of this process, you came to me and said, we need to do this and this and this. I can’t possibly do any of those. I have no resources.” I then asked him, “What do you mean you have no resources?”
He has 40 faculty members, two buildings, about a dozen post-doctorates, and I couldn’t even begin to count the number of graduate assistants. And he is a very bright and able guy. But in his mind he has no resources because the only way he could think to solve a problem was by getting something new to address the problem. The notion of simply reallocating anything — money, people, time, technology, or a physical plant — was a complete disjuncture for this department head.
So, on the one hand, my Foundation Board manager friend doesn’t understand why I can’t deal with a three percent deficit, while on the other hand a department head was telling me that he couldn’t deal with improvement because he has no resources. It was a perfect juxtaposition.
So the question for the University of Connecticut, and for all of us, is how to deal with this tyranny of our traditions, and how to engage in cultural change. One point where I disagree with some people is that I think settling on the huge vision of the future and then moving everything forward in lock-step is a recipe for paralysis. We need to carve this problem up into manageable pieces and processes to engage in and think about so, when we move forward, it will have a catalytic effect, triggering other reactions inside the institution. Let me briefly give you a couple of examples.
First of all, we decided that in order to make some of these changes happen at our university, we had to have a more facile, responsive, and integrated managerial structure at the most senior management levels. One of the things we did right away, with the President’s and the Board’s support, is that we actually gave control over the budget to the academics, placing the chief financial officer under the chief academic officer. So when we talk about financial decisions, we consider the academic implications, and vice versa.
We are almost through with a task force on changing the way we allocate resources, trying to move away from incremental budgeting and toward a much more responsibility-based management model, one that promotes innovation and risk-taking.
We also need to recognize the blurring of the marketplace for educational products, and how it affects our students. It is getting more complicated. The advent of technology is changing it, and I believe we will see a rapid segmentation of that market. Up until the advent of technology and distance-learning delivery, we were able, relatively, to force site-bound students to mold themselves to what we had to offer because they didn’t have a lot of other options. But they are rapidly getting lots and lots of options. What we are going to see is dramatic market segmentation of the educational marketplace, and there will be many types of students who will respond to people who are willing and able to provide them with educational services.
One of the things we are trying to do to get at that problem has to do with our five regional campuses. We have tried to transform them around some of those market-demand services. We need to make those services much more flexible, and we hope to make the campuses places where we can experiment programmatically, administratively, technologically, and in the way we deal with different segments of the market. We are trying to integrate our physical setting with our programmatic activities through the facilities master planning process in which we are now engaged. We are trying to sharpen our focus on research in graduate education. Every one of us knows that the world is awash with mediocre graduate, particularly Ph.D., programs. The old model believed that a proliferation of Ph.D. programs made a university comprehensive and great. It is a very bad model; it consumes resources, and, in some cases, it is even intellectually dishonest. We have to find some way of addressing that. I think it will be one of the hardest debates at our university.
We need a more comprehensive approach to information technology management and to better define what that means. We have intentionally lagged behind in this area because, until we get a better sense of where we want to go and what this great university of the future looks like, we don’t want to start shaping new models of what information technology will look like. Therefore, we have made a semi-conscious decision to let a few others of you blaze some trails for us. We have conceded that we want to be on the leading edge in some areas; in others we don’t. We are quite happy to let other universities experiment. That is one of the interesting notions that comes about when working with associations like ARL.
Thank you.
Copyright � 1998 by Mark Emmert