About two years ago, Brown set out on an ambitious five-year plan to conduct external reviews of its entire academic enterprise. It organized departments into related clusters, then scheduled each cluster for reviews. With the process near midpoint, the George Street Journal's Mark Nickel talked with Provost Kathryn T. Spoehr about some of the emerging issues.
The faculty seemed very concerned when the review process was announced. Did the idea of decoupling faculty staffing from the reviews help ease the anxiety?
Probably. Staffing plans used to be high-stakes games because someone was making a decision about how many faculty you were going to have - and that decision was going to be set in concrete for five, seven, maybe ten years.
During these reviews, each department comes up with a realistic plan for its future. By articulating that plan - the Academic Council asks them to write it down - faculty members think about what areas they want their department to move into and what traditional strengths they want to maintain. So now when a retirement or resignation occurs, they don't have to hire the same sort of replacement. Instead, they have a purposeful, thoughtful plan in mind for the best use of the position. The University may not be able to give them the position right away, but that doesn't mean they're never going to get it.
Are there any overarching themes that are emerging as a result of the reviews?
Sure. Every review has pointed to the underfunding of our graduate programs, financial aid in particular. That spans the entire range of units. Second, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, reviewers have pointed to holes in the library collection. That is particularly true in certain regional studies fields - Middle Eastern studies for example - where Brown hasn't always had faculty members. Third are technology-related issues. That's come up in the physical sciences where you would expect it, but also in the social sciences, where there are some pockets of high-quality support but not as much as you'd think. Technology may also come up in the creative arts review next spring. There is a lot of activity in the creative arts involving digital media.
Have there been any area-specific discoveries?
There is a whole constellation of things that fall into the area of faculty competitiveness. It's not just a matter of salaries, for which we have developed a plan. It's also staff support for faculty work in departments and in CIS. It's adequate funding for new faculty startup. That's increasingly not just a problem in the physical sciences, where a new professor can require as much as half a million dollars for a lab, but also the acquisition of library resources to support teaching in the humanities. Competitiveness also means having funds on hand to do cost-sharing on federal grants.
If lab costs are the big-ticket start-up items, do problems in the humanities occur on a scale where you can fix lots of them - maybe all of them - at once?
I'm not sure the humanities are easy to fix. They are less costly to fix, but faculty in the humanities need time for research more than anything else. The teaching load in natural sciences here is normally somewhat less than in the humanities. Many of our faculty in the humanities and social sciences feel the stress of [the teaching load] year in, year out. That's not something that has a cheap solution.
Were there things that surprised you?
One knows in theory that it's much more difficult to have a highly ranked sciences program if you're small than it is to have a highly ranked humanities program if you're small. I've been surprised at the extent to which size is an enormous disadvantage to many of our science departments. That's been driven home by the review process.
In some areas, I've been surprised by the extent to which we are not fully taking advantage of the interdisciplinary opportunities that we have at Brown. A couple reports have suggested, for example, that some of our centers are not performing up to expectations with respect to research. There are some fixes to be made, I think.
Are there any reasons for that?
I think some of our centers have found themselves devoting considerable energy toward nurturing and supporting interesting and new undergraduate concentrations. Over the years, what started out largely as a research endeavor has devoted larger and larger shares of effort to running an undergraduate concentration. It's wonderful to provide students with independent research experience and so forth, but that has often come at the expense of faculty research collaboration. When this happens, a core of faculty can become deeply involved with the concentration and many of the other faculty sort of float away. Research proposals that involve multiple faculty members stop getting submitted, money stops flowing in. Undergraduate research opportunities originally may have involved work on faculty grants. If those grants dry up, the center is left to maintain undergraduate research without resources to do it.
Isn't the continued existence of centers conditional on five-year reviews?
They are supposed to have received reviews, and sometimes they have, but we haven't reviewed the centers the way we should. Just because they haven't been reviewed doesn't mean that someone sat down and wrote them a letter that says, "You're done." Many have continued to exist without review.
What the Academic Council is in the process of doing is asking the centers to pay closer attention to their research mission and not merely to become undergraduate concentration programs. We will give them some firm direction in that regard, and if they don't do it, we will have firm ground to say that the center doesn't have to exist in the way it has. We have many excellent undergraduate concentrations that don't have a home in any one department or center.
Were there any other surprises?
Some of the surprises have come out of the self-studies rather than from the external reviews. In some cases, faculty have used the cluster review to develop interdisciplinary strengths. Brain Sciences is a good example, and the creative arts will probably be another.
Will regular cycles of comprehensive reviews become a permanent part of life at Brown?
That's the goal. The strategic planning task force that recommended the review process in the first place had a goal of making reviews institutionalized, creating a culture of self-evaluation. Our process will take five years to complete, and then we might take a brief sabbatical. But when we've finished the first round, we should be thinking about how we should do the second. Following the model of Northwestern University, we are also looking at reviewing administrative departments as well. We're starting with Summer Studies and Special Studies this winter.
When will the faculty receive a final report?
I'm hoping there will be time at the December faculty meeting for me to report on the most recent set of reviews and outcomes. There has been lots to report to the faculty, but there wasn't time at the November meeting for me to report on the outcomes. I have yet to review with the full faculty the outcomes for brain, behavior and computational sciences or for the theater cluster. Those letters have gone out to the departments, but the Academic Council is now making its way through the physical sciences reviews and responses. We'll move on to the social sciences then, and then the ancient world cluster which came in over the summer.
Has the process always reached a point of agreement with the departments?
The Slavic, German and Italian people are, of course, unhappy that their graduate admissions have been suspended, but we try to explain the rationale for what we choose to do. We have asked these departments to work together with Comparative Literature and the other literature programs to create a new graduate program for the study of modern languages and literatures. Despite some continuing disagreements among the involved faculty, I still believe we can create a program that will be as vital and innovative as some other such collaborative projects have been at Brown. In general, we try to be upfront about new proposals we consider unlikely, things we don't think we can support. The Academic Council doesn't always have news they will want to hear, but it's only fair to give them realistic feedback. There are important priorities in this institution that put individual department-level projects in the back seat for a time.
Will the election of Ruth Simmons have any effect on the process?
It's hard to know. She made it clear that whatever Brown does, she wants to have it adequately supported financially. I would anticipate that she would be sympathetic to a process that attempts to identify those things that we can and should do well so that we can focus resources on them. I believe President Simmons will ask us to make even more difficult decisions. What I'm happy about is that we now have some good information on which to base decisions.
Is there a cost figure to this whole review process?
We have budgeted about $60,000 a year for five years to pay for the expenses of the reviewers. Last year we went over that because we had two really big groups in social science and physical sciences. We pay reviewers honoraria and expenses, but I really think it is a small investment considering the quality of information and importance of information that we've gotten.
The Medical School is the major remaining piece. Will that be a similar process?
There was a review of the on-campus departments in 1996 that led to the current configuration. That's why they will be last in this cycle. Dean Marsh conducts ongoing department-by-department reviews of hospital-based units. The campus-based reviews will be part of this process in 2002.