Each spring, following the adjournment of the Maryland General Assembly, I typically include in my Convocation remarks an analysis of the State of the University as it reflects the State of the University System and the State of the State. Unfortunately, as I prepare this address, the only State that I can reliably report is a State of Confusion. An editorial in The Gazette,
a Montgomery County newspaper, likened this session to Kabuki Theatre, in which “carefully scripted movements . . . create bizarre re-interpretations of real life.” (March 26, 2004, p. A-10)

The Assembly is still in session, and the final outcome of its deliberations as they affect higher education is still unclear. Nevertheless, as indicated by various actions of the legislature and by various comments and initiatives from other policy-making bodies, one thing is unmistakably clear: there is an ongoing battle as to who should “control” public higher education in Maryland. Let me give you just a few examples, presented in the form of a True or False test.

True or False:

1. A Commission appointed by the Governor recommended that governing boards appoint only presidents with experience in business, RATHER THAN (not in addition to) academia.
   
   
2. A group of legislators from one of the counties drafted a bill that would dissolve the community college governing board and give those legislators the authority to appoint a new board, as well as the college president.
   
   
3. The supporters of one of the community colleges introduced a bill authorizing the college to issue an RFP to senior institutions, both in-state and out-of-state, and to dictate the curriculum to be offered. Further, if in-state institutions did not respond, out-of-state institutions could offer programs without the approval of the Maryland Higher Education Commission.
   
   
4. Despite the law giving the Board of Regents sole authority to set tuition in our System, a member of the Maryland legislature introduced a bill that would limit increases in tuition for the next several years to the Consumer Price Index (about 2-3 percent), with no additional funding coming from then State. On the national front, a member of the U.S. Congress (not from Maryland) introduced a bill that would “punish” (i.e., fine) institutions of higher education that increased tuition more than that amount. Another bill introduced by delegates in the Maryland General Assembly would prohibit mid-year tuition increases.
   
   
5. Other pieces of legislation would roll back the tuition increase approved by the Regents in December, but would substitute state money for that revenue stream. These legislative initiatives would limit tuition increases in the next several years to 4% or 5% while guaranteeing an annual increase in state appropriations of not less than 5%.
   
   
6. Believing that the State should not have to carry the major burden of funding public higher education, one policy maker has suggested doubling tuition at our institutions.
   
   
7. A legislator introduced a bill that would dissolve the University System, sell off its assets, divide the proceeds equally among the eleven campuses, regardless of size, and create separate governing boards for each campus.
   
   
8. Persuaded that institutions in the USM should have more flexibility in managing their budgets, lawmakers in both the House and the Senate, with the support of the Governor, have crafted bills eliminating position control by the State. The Senate has passed its version of the bill; the House is still considering it. In the meantime, language in the budget bill removes position control for the USM, and that would take effect for next year in case the bill should get stalled in the House. In other words, the policy change would mean that the State could not cap positions, freeze them, or eliminate them so long as budgets are balanced by the institutions.

If you have concluded that the answer to each of the above is “True,” you have scored 100% on this examination. Fortunately, most of the bills that would exert strong control over our budgets have failed and some of those reflecting strong support for higher education have passed. The fate of those bills, among others, is still uncertain, pending final approval or veto by the Governor.

Lest I appear to demonize or mock the members of the legislature who have introduced some of these bills, let me underscore the difficult position in which they find themselves. They are responding to legitimate constituent concerns about the spiraling cost of tuition, and they are seeking ways to contain or reduce those costs. At the same time, many legislators have expressed a clear understanding that higher education has experienced a disproportionate reduction in State appropriations and that efforts should be made to restore funding at an increased, appropriate level as soon as possible. A similar view has been expressed by representatives of the administration. Now the challenge is how and when that may be accomplished.

Unfortunately, the administration and leaders of the House and the Senate are, once again, at loggerheads over the slots versus taxes debate. This is the same impasse that has brought us to our current situation, in which operating budgets have been slashed and positions lost, and it is one which fails to resolve the structural deficit in the State budget that, without some resolution, is predicted to rise to about $1 billion next year. The headline of an editorial in the March 31 issue of the Sun described this impasse as “Doomsday Cometh.” (p. 3A)

To underscore the need for restitution of funding to our institutions, I have attempted during my testimony before four legislative committees this year to put into some sort of perspective the impact of recent budget cuts here at Frostburg and, by extension, at all of the campuses in the University System of Maryland. When you arrived this afternoon, you received a handout to which I would now like to direct your attention. As you can see, despite the myth that has been widely circulated in the public and the media and accepted as truth even by some legislators, our institutions have not been lavishly funded over the past decade. It was not until 1999 that we returned to a level of state funding that was initially approved in 1991, when Maryland was in the midst of another recession. That year, budgets were subsequently cut several times, so that the actual budget Frostburg received in 1991 was nearly $2 million less than the legislature had approved. Now, if you look at the next column, you can see that, when inflation is factored in, we are now receiving approximately $9 million less in constant dollars than we actually received in 1991. Furthermore, because of a modest increase in enrollments during that period, the per capita state support in constant dollars at Frostburg is $1,000 less than in 1991. So much for the notion that we are rich or fat because of the infusion of State support we received during the past several years. In essence, we had barely begun to catch up when the current reductions hit.

I did not share this information with our legislators to whine about where we are; I simply wanted them to understand what has happened to all of our institutions. The reductions we have experienced have led to furloughs, eliminated positions, larger classes, shortages in critical student support areas, and other cost containment efforts that have lowered morale and threaten to erode the quality of our programs and services. At the same time, we have tried very hard to preserve as much as possible the integrity and quality of our instructional programs.

Although there is abundant evidence that institutions throughout the USM have managed responsibly during this difficult time, there are still those who advocate additional measures that would, to use a common term, “re-engineer” the way we do business. Included in those measures would be increasing faculty workload by about 20%; requiring students to take a certain number of on-line courses so that they might shorten the time to degree, thereby increasing the capacity of current buildings so that new buildings would not need to be built; and determining which institutions should grow and which should not as the number of high school graduates continues to increase over the next decade. These initiatives are not cast in stone at this point, but I can tell you that they are being discussed seriously and that there is impatience among some of the Regents with the perception that administrators and faculty are generally inclined to resist out of hand the possibility of significant change. These developments may tend to suggest that institutions are not the masters of their own destiny, but are merely pawns in a larger game of political chess. Instead, I would argue that, unless we are willing to engage in the dialogue and help to shape the outcome of the debate, we will be abdicating our responsibilities as educators.

Steven Portch, the former Chancellor of the University System of Georgia, characterized the challenges facing all of us in public higher education in these words: “We will have to be comfortable with ambiguity. . . .Chaos abounds. . . . The question is whether we are going to abandon the horse and buggy and jump into a new car. . . . It’s risky. There are lots of curves, forks and landmines out there. There comes, once every generation or so, a moment of opportunity in history. . . . this is one of those moments to take off the brakes and push down the accelerator.” (“Curves, Forks, and Landmarks.” Washington, D.C.: AASCU, 2002, pp. 15-16) What Dr. Portch’s metaphor suggests is that events are unfolding at a rapid pace, and that a commodity that we in higher education have always valued -- Time (time to deliberate, to discuss, to refine our ideas) -- is no longer on our side as we either are passively propelled or choose to take some risks, to propel ourselves as it were into an ambiguous and often chaotic universe.

Let me, for a moment, digress from the topic of higher education to draw some comparisons with another profession that is going through much the same sort of transition. I sit on the Board of the Western Maryland Health System, and several weeks ago we held a retreat involving members of the hospital boards and several physicians about what is happening in that profession today. The discussion centered on what was described as the changing social contract between and among physicians and patients and hospitals. In brief, the issue is one of control. Traditionally, physicians were in control of the way in which they delivered services to patients, much as faculty have been in control of what and how students have been taught. Increasingly, technology is influencing how medical services are delivered, just as technology is affecting both instruction and support services in our institutions. And in both professions, assessment and accountability -- measuring the effectiveness and efficiency with which services are delivered -- is a critical determinant of funding.

Extensive reporting has become endemic in both the medical profession and in public higher education. In our case, reporting focuses on such variables as retention and graduation rates, SAT scores and GPAs of entering freshmen, pass rates on professional examinations of our graduates, faculty credentials, fiscal management, and alumni achievements. A recent publication characterized the twentieth century as The First Measured Century (Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, Ben J. Watttenberg. Washington, D.C.: The American Enterprise Institute, 2001). The twenty-first century has continued that trend with a vengeance. Without question, we are all being called upon to measure in concrete terms the success of what we do and to account publicly for the results. All of this can lead us to feel like pawns in the metaphoric chess game. Or it can help us to understand what we do well and what we can do better, to energize us and to muster our resolve to shape, rather than be the passive victims of, change. A professor of public policy at the Claremont Graduate University, Jack H. Schuster, describes our situation this way:

“Even the most traditional academics . . . cannot, as King Canute tried to do, stand on the shore and simply forbid the tide to come in.” (In R. Eugene Rice, “The Future of the American Faculty.” Change, March/April 2004, p. 33)

Now, am I issuing today a call for abandoning the core values that brought us into higher education? Decidedly not. What I am advocating is what Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation and the former president of Brown University, wrote in 2001:

“The question is whether faculties and universities respond to the challenges or retreat from them. Whether they are going to be the ones in charge or followers. This has been the issue in the past, and it will be in the future. After all, it is the university that invented the computer, the Internet, distance learning, and even the term management. Universities are not derivatives, in stock market lingo, they are the primary sources of knowledge and inspiration and invention. The issue is whether they abdicate their inventions, their ideas, their roles and their possibilities to the outside world—or whether they shape their own future.” (Higher Education’s Accomplishments and Challenges. New York: Carnegie Corporation, 2001, p 23.)

Here at Frostburg, the vision statement in our Institutional Plan states “At Frostburg, students will always come first.” The faculty, in response to the Undergraduate Education Initiative launched by Provost Simpson two years ago, has been evaluating our curriculum in light of what today’s undergraduate students need. The process has been thorough and deliberate, as comprehensive and creative curriculum development should be. At the same time, some of our faculty members have responded creatively and expeditiously to new challenges, such as the invitation from the Provost’s office to develop on-line courses. Following a highly successful summer initiative in 2003, faculty are now offering thirty-four courses on line for the summer of 2004, double the number offered last summer. Student evaluations of those courses have been overwhelmingly positive. In my role as representative of the USM presidents on the Regents’ Efficiency and Effectiveness workgroup, I have fortunately been able to share information about this initiative directly and, as a result, forestall a movement to transfer to University College sole responsibility for virtually all on-line education in our System. It was because of the forward thinking of individuals like Marci McClive, who succeeded in securing over $400,000 in grants to train our faculty and those in neighboring community colleges in on-line education, and John Bowman, who pushed the on-line summer school programming, that we are now seen as leading, rather than following,

And I can point to other innovative, successful undertakings attributable to the entrepreneurism of our faculty and staff. For example, about a decade ago, it was the proactive vision of individuals like Tom Bowling and Bill Mandicott who first encouraged us to apply for an AmeriCorps grant, the result of which, under the dynamic leadership of Cherie Krug and her associates, has catapulted us into national prominence for our programs in community service and civic engagement. Our geography department has helped us to seize the day in attracting the U.S. Geological Service to our campus. The biology department has developed, in collaboration with the Maryland Biotechnology Institute and West Virginia University, an Ethnobotany Institute for which federal support was secured for a feasibility study, the positive results of which have now been forwarded to support a request for additional federal funding to move the Institute ahead. Deans Hoffman and Arnold are working with our faculty in the sciences and business, with economic development offices at the county and state level, and with professional leaders in our community to attract to our area companies that can provide extraordinary opportunities for faculty and students. The English department is considering new ways to showcase and build upon its outstanding programs in creative writing. Bill Mandicott succeeds every year in bringing literally thousands of patrons to a campus cultural events series of unparalleled quality and variety, and student performances and artistic exhibits have been both risk-taking and superb. The College of Education continues to set groundbreaking standards for other institutions seeking national accreditation. And elsewhere throughout the University, doubtless in areas that I know nothing about, exciting new ideas are bubbling up, led by faculty and staff who embrace the possibility of positive, proactive change while still respecting the core values that define this institution.

Our agenda for the coming year is a full one. The Undergraduate Education Initiative is progressing toward final approval and implementation. We will begin our self-study in preparation for a Middle States evaluation visit in the spring of 2006, a process which requires the engagement of all sectors of our institution. With the support of the Chancellor and his staff and the Board of Regents, we will argue aggressively to have the demolition and replacement of Tawes Hall included in the Governor’s capital budget within the next 3-5 years. (On April 22 I am meeting with the Secretary of Budget and Management to officially launch this “campaign.”) A campaign of another sort will also get underway, as we begin the silent phase of our next capital campaign, in conjunction with the University System. We raised over $17 million between 1991 and 2003. Of that amount, several million dollars have been used to support student scholarships, technology, faculty development, and various other initiatives. The assets of the Foundation, combined with the assets we received from the Redskins settlement, have grown from $1.8 million in 1991 to approximately $13 million today. The goal of the System campaign will probably be between $1 billion and $1.5 billion over a five-year period, and we will be expected to identify an ambitious goal for Frostburg as part of that campaign. These are just a few of the agenda items to which we will be devoting our time and energies in the coming year. Our success will depend in large measure on the creative involvement of our entire campus community, and we will look to you for guidance and assistance as we move forward.

For my own part, I will continue to invest whatever time and energy I have to tell our story, and to claim bragging rights on behalf of our excellent faculty and staff to those who will inevitably play a role in shaping our future, whether that be the Chancellor and his staff, the Regents, members of the legislature, or the Governor and members of his Cabinet. In this chess game that we know as higher education, we may not emerge as Kings, but we must surely be players.

CRG/mg
4/7/04