Archive for September 19th, 2009

It looks like there is some dissent ion in the ranks at the UofA. A recent opinion from a UofA Regents Professor takes a swipe at the administration, the poor moral and the questionable education your son or daughter may be getting at the University of Arizona.

He forgot to mention a pretty crummy community partner that’s really good at taking and not so good at giving back.

Guest opinion by Oscar Martínez, Regents Professor of History: Poor leadership, funding is bringing down the UA

By Oscar J. Martínez

Special to the Arizona Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 09.10.2009

During my my 21 years at the University of Arizona, I have witnessed a steady decline in the quality of the institution, with the most rapid and worst plunge taking place over the last two years. Following are examples of recent subsidence:

• Drop in ranking in U.S. News & World Report from 96 in 2008 to 102 in 2009.

• Embarrassing low ranking in the 2009 Forbes survey at No. 339, behind institutions like the University of Texas at Dallas (114), Utah (174), New Mexico State (193), University of Texas-Pan American (218), New Mexico (239), Idaho (312) and University of Texas at El Paso (333).

Drop in national rankings of top-rated schools and departments; examples include pharmacy (down from four to nine) and sociology (down from nine to 20).

• Permanent loss of faculty in key fields; examples include history (down seven positions), English (down 10) and political science (down 14).

Protracted underfunding by the state is the major cause of the overall decline of the UA. But persistently bad university leadership has played an important part as well.

While it is difficult to resolve the state funding problem, there is no excuse for putting up with administrators who do a poor job of leading and implementing needed change.

There is overwhelming dissatisfaction among UA faculty and administrators with the policies and practices of the upper administration. This is tragic because the UA has never needed the strong, positive decision-making that it requires now; yet it is getting mostly ineffective and polarizing leadership.

Provost Meredith Hay, in particular, has become a lightning rod and legions of faculty and administrators would like to see her vacate her post.

The feeling is widespread on campus that the university administrative system has been rendered dysfunctional by the recently implemented structural “transformation.” And the restructuring has left untouched important areas that have the potential to achieve significant savings while at the same time expanding the teaching capacity of the university.

Most obvious is the failure of the administration to implement differential workloads that consider research productivity; this has deprived students of greater class possibilities.

Decline in the quality of teaching is evidenced first and foremost by ever-increasing class sizes. This year classes of 600 to 1,500 students have made their debut in gargantuan Centennial Hall. Ask any professor if she would like to see her child taking such a class and you will elicit a horrified look accompanied by an emphatic “No!”

You will get a similar reaction if you mention online classes, which are on the increase at the UA because the administration wants to boost enrollment. Web classes sacrifice direct contact with students and do little to teach critical thinking skills. And the failure of the UA to monitor Web classes carefully is spawning questionable practices, as in the case of one tenured senior professor on the high end of the pay scale currently teaching small Web-based courses while residing 1,200 miles from Tucson. Such an arrangement is certainly not cost-effective.

Write to Oscar J. Martínez at martineo@email.arizona.edu

The real issue is whether the UA can really reform itself in the right way without outside pressure. After many years of seeing how the system works, I seriously doubt it.