He Who Controls UVA’s Strategic Investment Fund Controls Its Strategic Direction Part 2
This is the second part of a new three-part series exploring the influence of UVA President Ryan’s Strategic Investment Fund.
Cutting costs and tuition
UVA is one of the most expensive public universities in the U.S. to attend. It provides significant financial aid to lower-income students, but the rising cost of tuition is pricing out the middle class, especially students from out of state. Chief Operating Officer J.J. Davis has hired consultants to achieve efficiencies through procurement reforms, IT implementation and other administrative tweaks, but cost savings are measured in the millions of dollars while spending leaps yearly by the tens of millions. No one has challenged the underlying cost drivers.
The Jefferson Council believes that there is massive waste and redundancy in UVA’s vast and growing bureaucracy, that teaching productivity of tenure-track professors is abominable, and that UVA is supporting too many academic departments where enrollment is eroding. Not only has the administration refused to address these issues, it has withheld information from board members who seek to conduct their own analysis on the grounds that staff doesn’t have time to perform busy work. The administration has a deep vested interest in continuing to fend off such discussions, and by its intransigence has forfeited the right to lead a reform effort.
Counter-intuitively, it appears necessary for the Board to add another administrative cost in order to tackle the issue of administrative costs: The Board should tap the Strategic Investment Fund to employ an independent staff, answerable to the Board, to respond to information requests and conduct analysis on how to cut costs. It could also hire outside consultants for specific projects as needed.
Board member Bert Ellis has advocated cutting administrative overhead by $200 million and devoting the bulk of the savings toward cutting tuition & fees (with some going to pay student-athletes under the new NCAA regime). We support Ellis’ cost-cutting goal, although we think UVA needs to tackle more than administrative overhead. The university should delve into faculty productivity. UVA’s compensation richly rewards tenured faculty, supplementing their salaries with endowed professorships, even though they teach fewer courses than junior faculty. Arguably, this imbalance needs to be corrected. We also have noted that UVA likes to launch new schools and programs — the School of Data Science is a recent example — but resists cutting programs that have lost enrollment and which are graduating fewer majors. UVA should consider retrenching low-demand departments — perhaps filling in gaps with online courses shared with Virginia Tech, William & Mary or other institutions.
Restoring intellectual diversity
Last March the Board voted to adopt a statement by the Council of Presidents, crafted at the Governor’s request, in support of free speech and intellectual diversity. The key phrase in that statement was this: “We support a scholarly environment that is supported by a diversity of research and intellectual perspectives among our faculty and staff.”
To our knowledge, the administration has done little to promote intellectual diversity at UVA. Based on measures such as political donations and self-professed political identities in surveys, UVA faculty and staff skew heavily left of center. The Baby Boomer generation of scholars, which was intellectually diverse, is retiring, and liberal/leftist hiring committees have been hiring faculty that either think like them intellectually or meet demographic diversity goals. Although pockets of intellectual diversity and tolerance for a range of views still exist, the University is evolving into a partisan/ideological monoculture.
Traditionally, the Board of Visitors has refrained from interfering with hiring and promotion decisions, but it has the power to do so. Each session, the Board routinely approves “personnel actions” recommended by the administration. In December, the Visitors rubber stamped forty-one faculty appointments, twelve endowed chairs, and nine faculty promotions. Another lever of influence available to the Board in rectifying the ideological imbalance is allocation of Strategic Investment Funds to endow professorships.
As a first step, the Board should build upon the broad principle it embraced when adopting the Council of Presidents statement on intellectual balance. Just as UVA tracks metrics for demographic diversity, it should establish metrics and goals for intellectual diversity. As a second step, the Board should create a strategy that respects the academic independence of existing faculty members. One approach, as demonstrated at George Mason University (the Mercatus Center and the Scalia School of Law) and the University of North Carolina (School of Civic Life) is to fund the launch of new institutes and centers. Instead of endowing professorships that reinforce the ideological prejudices of the current faculty, UVA could use SIF funds to recruit professors who add to the university’s intellectual diversity.
James A. Bacon is the founder of Bacon’s Rebellion and a contributing editor with The Jefferson Council.
