Orange County Voices : COMMENTARY ON EDUCATION : UCI Policy for Future Should Not Hinge on Research Dollars : Allowing it to happen could have a detrimental effect on the nature of academic programs at the university.

On Sept. 16, Chancellor Laurel Wilkening spoke her thoughts about the future of UC Irvine, both in a campus weekly newspaper and at a meeting with newspaper editors and reporters.

The thoughts closely mirrored the recommendations of a final reviewing committee, the Academic Planning Council (APC), rather than those of two planning task forces that started the process of determining strategies to keep UCI moving forward “within a long time environment of limited resources.” The predominant theme was to move UCI up to rank among the top 50 research universities, where ranking is determined by the size of research expenditures and the amount of grant funds generated (two measures that are closely related and influential in such domains as the number of Ph.D.s produced.)

The actions by the task forces, APC and the chancellor were motivated primarily by the severe budget crunch faced by the University of California these past four years. In particular, there has been a $341-million cut in state funding between the 1990-91 and 1993-94 academic years; the resulting damage is intensified by the effects of inflation. The impact on UCI is estimated to be about $35 million.

The ensuing difficulties faced by the UC range from the impossibility of continuing to operate in the customary manner to the more subtle expressions of dissatisfaction by students, parents and legislators to one of the methods used in adjusting to the shortfall, namely more than doubling fees while reducing services to students.

I will focus on three major difficulties in evaluating the extent to which Chancellor Wilkening’s plans are likely to produce alleviation.

First, there is the direct debilitating effect of the money shortage on campus operations, an effect that can be dealt with by decreasing expenditures or increasing income substantially. Will the plans do either?

The only immediate cost saver of apparent substance is the option to discontinue the comparative culture program, although Wilkening does suggest closing the physical education department and others with less than seven faculty members.

Ceasing comparative culture will save a trivial amount of money. It is not a very large program, but, more important, it is not the UC’s policy to terminate tenured faculty members for other than code of conduct violations, and so salaries and benefits will continue for most comparative culture faculty members, with different titles.

There are implications in Wilkening’s suggestions that significant relief from the fiscal stresses will come from improvement in grant and contract funding.

Research grants and contracts do fund research projects, including the support of graduate students, but money for general use must come from the additional charges referred to as overhead costs. But if, say, the federal government is charged overhead fees for grants by a UC campus, nearly half of those dollars are returned to it (the state alone takes 44 cents on the dollar).

Moreover, the UC was shaken resoundingly on notification earlier this year by a key federal agency that overhead allowances would be significantly reduced by an accounting rule change, and also by threats from the federal bureaucracy generally that such allowances will not be permitted to increase even if more grants are generated. In short, the returns from grants cannot do much, and will unquestionably do less to compensate for the mammoth general fund losses.

But even that is not the full picture. The amount of money available in support of research has not been growing in recent years, and may very well shrink in coming ones, while the competition for the funds is getting fiercer. And preparing grant proposals is extraordinarily costly, especially in the required time commitment.

Second, the UC is facing difficulty in offering courses in the manner and quality that students deserve and citizens expect. It is largely due to the fact that almost 2,000 faculty members have accepted the “golden handshakes” offered the past three years to reduce operating costs, while over the same period the number of undergraduates has remained virtually constant.

The process has led to an increase in the student-faculty ratio, from 17.6 to 1 to 18.7 to 1. An answer to the resulting problem, as amplified by the hoped-for increased time of faculty working on well-funded research projects at UCI rather than course offerings, lies, according to Wilkening, in the “expanded use of part-time faculty, full-time lecturers, TAs, information technology, the community colleges, and University Extension.”

Put that side by side with the frequently expressed position that research universities like the UCs are great for undergraduates because they are taught by leading researchers (it is even claimed, “If you want to find a faculty member who can be a superb teacher, show me a researcher”) and it is easy to be less than convinced of the validity of this approach as a solution to the teaching predicament.

Another major difficulty is the low morale of faculty and staff members stemming from the bashing, financial and otherwise, of UC these past several years. Will Wilkening’s plans help boost morale?

For faculty members in the hard sciences, engineering and medicine who have commitments to, and significant successes in or hopes for, external fund raising, one might expect morale boosting, but for people outside that orbit, I have my doubts.

It is difficult for me to imagine professors in the humanities, fine arts and most social sciences becoming more content in the atmosphere sketched by Wilkening. One dissonant note worth mentioning: To the extent that internal resources, which are controlled by the chancellor, are devoted to those “soft” fields, with few exceptions, the move to the “top 50” is threatened or retarded.

Wilkening’s emphasis on the importance of seeking external research is relevant here: “We must attune ourselves to them (the funding agencies and their agendas). Doing so will be our route to the top ranks of research universities.” Consider that the research emphases of major research universities influence, or even determine, the nature of their academic programs. More advanced courses are often selected for offering by the research directions of faculty members, and students work with those faculty members on their research projects. Those relationships flow naturally from the definitions differentiating a research university from a liberal arts college.

To what degree, one must ask, should the educational directions of a university be influenced by the dictates of funding sources? It is one matter when isolated investigators follow research paths on the basis of money, and quite another when it is stated as university policy by the person who has final responsibility for the internal allocations of resources.