The University of California system recently appointed its 16th chief administrator in Mark G. Yudof who was the former president of the University of Minnesota system and University of Texas systems.
One major thing that really struck me about some of the initial comments made by Dr. Yudof centered around the policies that his administration would pursue in the interest of California students. From an article about him on InsideHigherEd:
…he noted that one of the reasons why the UC job attracted him was because there is widespread agreement — characterized in proposals like one last month from the university’s current provost, which would cut the size and budget of the president’s office by 20 percent next year — that such changes are necessary. “Intellectually everyone’s bought into it,” he said, and “they want someone who will implement those changes and also look for other savings and economies.”
UC’s campus chancellors, who have bristled at times under what they characterize as a president’s office that impedes ingenuity and agility, are likely to have found Yudof’s message to them appealing. “I want you to think about three questions,” the incoming president said he told the chancellors he met during the search process. “What business is the office of the president in that it should not be in at all, that adds to your workload and adds no value? Think about the things that inevitably have to be dealt with at the system level or are more efficiently dealt with at the system level. How can we make those processes work better? And third, what businesses should the president’s office be in that it isn’t in now that would help the campuses reach the higher levels” they strive for?
This seems like an entirely different philosophy from the one that the University of North Carolina system holds. The recent initiatives rolled out by UNC offices seem to be bogging down the administrations of each campus to the point where local goals seem out of reach.
The UNC PACE initiative led to subpar results such as, Blackboard sharing across campuses in order to conserve resources… which sounds like a great idea until you compensate for the cost of collaborating and coordinating multiple very different institutions. What ended up happening is Blackoard worked very poorly and now campuses are scrambling to find a way to invest in an alternative without losing out on a ton of money.
This all relates back to the inability of the UNC system to understand that while the 17 NC public institutions all receive money from the same source, they are very different. We can’t expect blanket policies to apply while at the same time enabling chancellors across the state.
Currently, UNC system schools are forced to adhere to a very complex and rapidly approaching response time frame for the UNC Tomorrow (UNC-T) initiative… which once again sounds like a great idea. But after a long and drawn out exploratory phase, the UNC-T commission found out some really vague recommendations for universities such as, “increase access to education” and “prepare students for a global economy”.
I value the time that many important people have invested in this effort but forcing campuses to develop huge and unwieldy programs that will ultimately lack funding (except in Chapel Hill and Raleigh) is little more than an exercise in appealing to public opinion. However I truly hope that I am proven wrong on this point.
At the end of each day, we have to evaluate whether the UNC system administration is helping our our public universities or if by trying to build a strong “system” we’ll end up hurting the institutions that make up our state. Running a university system like a business might be appealing to potential investors, but as a participant in the process I haven’t seen any benefits that outweigh the costs in Charlotte. Moving to a “soviet” university model instead of a confederate model will have its initial appeal but little success. Institutions have a hard time meeting their own needs and are sadly often know for bureaucracy and an inability to communicate within themselves, I am unfortunately pessimistic about the ability for these schools to work amongst each other. (Kind of like the UNCCH Medical School moving into Charlotte without even communicating with UNC Charlotte until we contacted them.)
What NC really needs is a bond package for higher education and I’m hoping we’ll see one soon.
