UCI Moves to Save Department in Crisis

The dean of UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts has taken the extraordinary step of putting the music department into receivership, putting a pair of outside administrators in control of the department for three years.

Herb Killackey, UC Irvine’s associate executive vice chancellor, said that in the last several years the small department has suffered an acrimonious split between classical and jazz musicians that has made it almost impossible for it to agree on hiring of new professors or to complete departmental business.

“We’ve had several faculty leave, and we haven’t been successful in recruiting faculty,” Killackey said Thursday.

The department has dwindled to eight full-time professors and depends on part-timers to teach many of its classes.

Killackey said the decision was a dramatic one that Dean Jill Beck discussed with top university administrators. He likened the move to a bankruptcy in which a company continues to function while restructuring itself. Asked if it represented a failure, he said, “Yes.”

Such a move is made “only under very serious circumstances,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council of Education in Washington, D.C. “Universities only do it when the department has proven to be dysfunctional.”

Chuck McFadden, a spokesman for the University of California system, estimated that a UC department is placed in receivership about every five years.

The music department was placed in receivership April 8. In a memo to faculty, Beck said: “This means that we need to pause now for review, redefinition and reinvestment in our music programs.”

Beck, who has been dean of the Claire Trevor School since 1995, said the action was not punitive and downplayed it. “We’ve chosen this course as a planning strategy to create an administrative structure to allow a real vision for the department to unfold,” she said.

The department will be run by Cameron Harvey, chairman of the drama department, and Alan Terricciano, chairman of the dance department.

UC Irvine’s focus on the music department is an attempt to bring its quality to the level of the other highly ranked programs that make of the school of the arts--dance, theater and studio art--and not allow it to tarnish the university’s reputation.

Rae Linda Brown, an associate professor, had been running the department. She took the job in 1999 after a nationwide search failed to find a new department chair. Her three-year term was ended by the receivership.

“The dean tried to address the situation by putting a new chair in place and had a go at it,” Killackey said. “In retrospect, it didn’t appear to work.”

UC Irvine’s music department has been plagued with problems for years. A 1999 review of graduate programs by Jon Robertson, chairman of UCLA’s music department, called it “a department in crisis” that had “continued on a downward spiral” in the previous eight years. He said it suffered from low faculty morale, not enough money, “a total lack of department leadership” and “an overall lack of vision regarding the department’s direction.”

Robertson wrote: “It would be criminal and educationally unethical to allow this department to stay in its present condition or, worse, erode further.”

After a separate review in 2000 of Beck’s job performance, two associate deans were appointed to help her manage the school of the arts.

As a result of the faculty openings, the department has decided not to accept any new voice majors for the 2002-03 academic year.

“We simply don’t have the manpower to fill the obligations we put in the catalog,” Killackey said.