Long-range planning not fit for universities

Editor’s Note:This is the first part in an occasional series taking a closer look at the University one year after a national science consulting firm visited SIUC to measure its research strengths, weaknesses and ability to achieve the goals of “Southern at 150.”

Long-range planning is the new popular catch phrase at universities across the nation, including SIUC with “Southern at 150.”

However, some in academia think this trend is faulty.

Richard Vedder, distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, said long-range planning is taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to set goals, sending student tuition dollars through the roof and leaving universities begging on the doorsteps of state capitol for more money.

“We are all trying to be number one,” Vedder said. “We think the way to be number one is to say, ‘Give us more money, and we’ll buy more resources.'”

Not only is long-range planning a waste of money, said Stanley Fish, a University of Illinois-Chicago distinguished professor, but also it is nearly impossible for institutions of higher education.

“Fluctuations in budgetary and state support can lead to a total alteration of the conditions under which you are operating,” Fish said. “Therefore, your long-range plan will now refer to conditions that don’t exist.”

SIUC’s “Southern at 150” is the long-range plan designed to push the University into the top 75 public research universities in the nation by its 150th birthday in 2019. A national consulting firm examined the University’s strengths and weaknesses in July 2003, and found that while the plan is “appropriately ambitious,” the firm said it was unsure whether SIUC understood the amount of money it would take to achieve the goals.

Vedder, who holds three university degrees from Illinois institutions and whose father was an editor at the Southern Illinoisan, said it is highly unlikely that SIUC’s goals can be achieved. Vedder recently wrote the book, “Going broke by degree,” that examines the reasons behind rising tuitions nationwide.

“Unless someone drops a billion dollars out of an airplane over Carbondale, I think the plans are extensively optimistic,” he said.

University administrators across the nation are turning to complex, lengthy plans that look far into the future and attempt to raise their universities’ national profiles and rankings.

“The quality of a university is largely determined by its reputation,” said SIUC Chancellor Walter Wendler in a September telephone interview with the DAILY EGYPTIAN. “In order for research programs to grow in prominence and fuel the reputation that the University is of high quality, leadership has to constantly be illuminating the research progress of the University.”

But Fish said long-range planning usually cannot last in the university culture because the college atmosphere – especially at public universities – is never steady.

Fish wrote a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education in April, “Plus a change:The trouble with long-range planning is that it almost never works”.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Illinois State Legislature have made funding for Illinois higher education difficult, Fish said.

“If the governor is unfriendly to higher education, those who want to fight for it are in an uphill battle,” he said.

The amount of money SIUC receives from the state has reduced drastically. In 2003, only 39.5 percent of the budget came from the state down 17 percent from 1978.

University of Illinois-Chicago tried to replace the 50 faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, lost to retirements in the past two years, but when the state budget crisis hit, the university could no longer supply the money to fill the positions. However, Fish said, one of the keys to success is the administration sustaining the effort to improve without a break in intensity for at least five years.

“The tendency of an administration is to really float something new with a great deal of huffing and puffing, and then after about two years, let it slide,” he said. “And if you do that, you will just be spending money over and over again.”

Fish said administration turnover is another hurdle for long-range planning, because moving is a part of university life. Turnover usually leads to a turnover of ideas and a shift in planning as well, he said.

“They don’t know or they dislike what the others are doing or they think in order to make their mark they have to do something different,” he said. “Then all the long-range planning goes out the window.”

John Koropchak, vice chancellor for Research and Development, said SIUC’s “Southern at 150” plan will stand the test of administration turnover because it is not solely tied to a single administrator, but rather developed by 200 people directly related to SIUC.

“Now, is that going to completely prevent the possibility that if we have a turnover in administration that we wouldn’t have a change? Or that the next administration wouldn’t be pleased with it?” he said. “Well, I think quite the contrary. If we had to change an administration, they need to hire somebody who looks at this and says, ‘This is what I want to do.'”

SUBHEAD – IT WORKED FOR THEM

Fish said during his extensive career in higher education, he can only think of two universities that successfully implemented long-range plans for improvements. New York University and Duke University, whose transformation Fish was a part of, have been successful.

He said NYU’s success is rooted in its law school, where the institution initially placed its emphasis.

Fish said the success could also be drawn back to the school’s former dean John Sexton, who was inaugurated as NYU’s president in 2002, because he played an integral role in the institution’s plan. Fish said Sexton’s long tenure at NYU helped the plan stay on track.

Looking at Duke today, outsiders see a university with a top-ranked medical school and other nationally recognized programs. Many would wonder what is its secret to success.

“There is no secret,” said John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs at Duke.

Burness would rather think of it as commitment.

He said the commitment of its leaders, even from its earliest days in the 1920s, have given the institution its vision. However, until the last two decades, Duke University was considered a very good regional university known for its medical school, and little else. When former President Terry Sanford came into office in the 1970s, he had a catch phrase, “outrageous ambitions,” to describe his goals for the university.

Those “outrageous ambitions” did not take true form until the mid-80s when then-provost Philip Griffiths constructed a plan to focus on the humanities, rather than the sciences, which was the popular trend at the time.

“It was totally counterintuitive because nobody in the country was invested heavily in the humanities,” Burness said. “What he figured out was Duke didn’t have enough money to invest heavily in the big-time sciences.”

Burness said the plan worked because an entry-level assistant professor in the sciences it would cost about $500,000 including salary and yet a competitive humanities salary was about $100,000. In the span of 20 years, Duke rose to be the fifth ranked university by U.S. News and World Report for 2005 from 26th in 1985.

“What happened out of that, was that Duke began to be seen across the country as a place of intellectual ferment,” he said. “It was a place where a lot of things were happening, and we started to attract faculty across all of the disciplines because the aura of that intellectual ferment started to spill over.”

Burness said skeptics are always prevalent on college campuses, and there were many when Duke was trying to make the change, too.

“That’s what universities are about, but you have to focus on excellence. You have to always want to be better,” he said. “It kept getting better and it kept wanting to get better and it has never stopped wanting to get better. It’s never satisfied with where it is.”

Fish said the only solution he sees to fixing the problems with long-range planning is to avoid doing it at all. The only way to effectively respond to the economic changes of the state and nation is to plan with easily adaptable short-term goals, he said.

“The more adaptable long-range planning becomes, the less it is long-range planning,” he said.

“Southern at 150:Building excellence through commitment” is SIUC’s long-range plan designed to push the University into the top 75 public research universities in the nation. The plan calls for an 11 percent annual increase of total research and development expenditures and 13 percent increase in federal research dollars.

“The key word in this is excellence – aspiring to excellence,” Koropchak said. “If we don’t target improvement then we are going to stay the same at best. There is nothing unique about what we are planning that good universities don’t do.”

To achieve that excellence, Wendler called together nearly 200 faculty, staff, community members and students in 2001 to conceive a plan to make the University a top 75 research institution.

The most recent rankings in August showed the University rose to the third tier from the fourth tier of the U.S. News and World Report rankings for universities.

Total research and development expenditures have risen to $53 million in 2002, and the University brought in a widely respected science consulting firm, the Washington Advisory Group, in 2003 to examine its strengths and weaknesses.

The group analyzed SIUC’s ability to achieve the goals set forth in “Southern at 150” by looking at its science and engineering colleges and the School of Medicine.

“SIUC’s goal of increasing federal [research and development] expenditures by 13 percent per year is a laudable one. … However, it underperforms relative to other research universities in the area of federal support, and while SIUC currently seeks to correct this imbalance, it is important to recognize the magnitude of the effort that will be required to do so.”

In the September interview, Wendler said he wondered if, in the short time the consulting group was on campus, it truly understood the culture of SIUC.

“I don’t know if they realize how dogged the determination on this campus is to improve this campus,” Wendler said.

Koropchak said immediately after the report came back, focus groups formed to study interdisciplinary research and faculty incentive. Out of the report and the groups’ evaluations, the new version of Wendler’s faculty hiring initiative was born, with a promise to commit $1 million for each of the next 10 years.

Koropchak, who also serves as the dean of the graduate school, said the Graduate Council, the representing body for graduate faculty that examines the University’s policies for graduate programs and research, looked extensively at the report as well.

Kevin Dettmar, the council’s chairman and a professor of English, said they looked at the report for nearly the entire academic year before passing a resolution in May. He said the council did not like that the report focused solely on the sciences and feared the report endorsed “Southern at 150” because it detailed specific ways for the University to reach those goals. He said that could have resulted in pouring money into already-weak programs.

“We were afraid it might be read as licensing to go ahead,” Dettmar said.

Another consulting group swept through the campus earlier this fall to perform a similar task, but this time focusing on the humanities. Dettmar said the group’s presence on campus was a direct result of the council’s demand.

The University expects the Washington group’s report from this group in the coming months.

Dettmar said while the council only focuses on graduate issues, people have mentioned that undergraduates can easily get lost in the push for rankings excellence.

Wendler and the administration created the undergraduate assistantship program in direct response to that fear. Koropchak said SIUC is the only university in the country with a program targeted to encourage undergraduates to take part in the research process.

“We don’t intend them to fall through the cracks. This is just one example,” Koropchak said.

Koropchak said the University decided to focus on the sciences to bring up rankings because science programs can bring in more money than the humanities.

The report also pointed out the amount of money necessary to achieve the goals in “Southern at 150.”

“We believe that some $200 to $400 million will have to be raised just for the endowed positions contemplated by ‘Southern at 150,’ to say nothing of the costs of meeting infrastructure needs, recruitment packages, new space, graduate student stipends, and other costs,” the report stated. “These could easily double or triple the total.

“In order to be in the top 75 public research institutions for total research expenditures, SIUC will have to increase its total FY2000 research expenditures by roughly $50 million, or 136 percent. And that is assuming that other institutions stand still, which is unlikely.”

Since the report, SIUC’s total research expenditures have risen from $36.3 million in 2000 to $43.21 million in 2001 and $53.6 million in 2002. From 2000 to 2002, the University climbed from 107th to 100th in the National Science Foundation total research and development expenditures in public institutions.

SUBHEAD – THREE IS COMPANY – FOUR IS A CROWD?

Ohio University has a long-range plan to break into the top 50 research universities, but Vedder said his university, as well as SIUC and others with these plans, will have tough decisions to make in the future about raising tuition to fund the plans.

He said justification of public support for higher education is two-fold, because it is hoped there will be a spillover effect into the communities as well as help the common person attend college.

“I think it is probably unrealistic for the Southern Illinois Universities of the world to think they are going to become a top-flight national university. Particularly when the state of Illinois is not probably willing to support multiple top-flight universities,” Vedder said.

“Three of the nation’s top research universities are in Illinois. I think it is unrealistic to think you are going to get four. The University of Illinois is not planning on laying down and going away.”

Fish said in the end, the leadership of the university is what makes the difference in rankings, not long-range planning.

“In my view, long-range planning is always an effort to substitute procedure for leadership. People have faith in plans that its structures can produce good outcomes,” Fish said. “Structures do not produce good outcomes. Structures don’t produce anything. Leaders produce good outcomes. If you don’t have leaders, you can have all the structured long-range planning in the world, and it won’t do you any good.”