Saturday, March 19, 2011
Regionalism
Has anyone heard of this practice? Apparently in areas with multiple campuses of a public university system administrators are looking to cut costs by not offering every major at every campus. Therefore if say there are three campuses close-ish together (as there are here in California, particularly in the Bay Area and in Southern California) then campus 1 might have an engineering dept. campus 2 might have social sciences, and campus 3 would have humanities rather than each campus having their own departments in each of those fields. This would obviously be disastrous for students and faculty and I am hoping it is the doomsday scenario but, doomsday seems to be getting closer. This is all a part of their "reform" they are trying to push a Wisconsin-like contract on us that basically eliminates seniority and therefore tenure as we know it and taking other privatization-type measures. It is scary because we are the largest public university system in the country and we used to be the best but, they just keep dragging us lower. Has anyone else heard of these types of ideas being floated?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Nothing's been implemented yet, but our system's been having some discussions about sharing specialists. Not parcelling out majors (we're much too geographically spread for that) but using distance learning tech - CCTV or web-based - to have faculty with unusual specialities offer classes that are available to students at other institutions. Since I'm one of the only dedicated Asian historians below the KU/KSU level, my name's come up.
ReplyDeleteIt's my understanding that it isn't exactly as you put it: one humanities, one social sciences, etc. Instead, one would have a specialists' History department, and one would have a specialists' chemistry department, etc, but all would have a handful of historians and chemists to cover the general education element.
ReplyDeleteAnd, honestly, that sounds good to me. There are too many people majoring in stupid degrees to support multiple departments where teaching focuses and research focuses could streamline the process.
That's how the CC in my city does it, more or less. There are roughly 25,000 students (the metro area of my city is around 1 million), and there are, I think, 4 main campuses and several smaller satellite campuses.
ReplyDeleteEvery campus offers the basics, like Writing 101, Math 102, Biology 103, etc. But when it comes to majors, either the campuses switch (so in Spring term, the Basketweaving courses are at Campus A, and then in Summer at Campus B), or completely concentrated on one campus.
My area has a pretty good public transit system, and there is a school specific shuttle.
It seems like a good way to offer a lot of courses in a restricted space.
I'm not terribly well-informed about this, but it's my sense that my own state system already does this to some extent at the graduate level. For instance, one of the arguments my department made for creating several (small, targeted) PhD programs is that there was a need in the region, and no other program at a state university within easy commuting distance.
ReplyDeleteAnd as my university has grown and spawned a couple of satellite campuses, certain majors, and the library and other resources supporting them, have settled primarily on particular campuses.
While this could definitely be taken too far -- and while the change could be very hard on those who are already settled near a particular campus which turns out not to be their "home" one after a shakeup -- my instinctual reaction is very much like AM's: if carried out well (and I know that's a big "if"), this could be one of those streamlining approaches that actually makes sense. It certainly strikes me as preferable to the approach of eliminating entire departments and programs, a la SUNY Albany.
But maybe I'm missing something. Can you explain what, exactly, would make this "disastrous for students and faculty," ncb?
The school I work at now does this. I work at our newest campus and we don't have "all" the majors yet. We only offer the ones that make the most sense given our demographic. If hardly anybody here majors in X, we make them drive to the nearest campus that offers X and so on. It saves time in assessment and accreditation.
ReplyDeleteOf course, none of us have lost majors either, but we do have to petition for them. I imagine I would be saying "but it's not FAIR!' if I were told we were losing degree programs. Ugh.
One of the worst ideas ever to be invented in the academy is the "satellite campus." (The actual number one is, of course, the invention of the perma-adjunct.)
ReplyDeleteIMHO, it may have sounded really good, but the implementation has been nothing but bad.
Yes, we are doing this with specialized programs. In CC Universe, it's a little different, but if we have a high-cost program spread out over two of our colleges, they get consolidated at one. We are already starting to have some fights over this as certain programs that have been established and actually have larger enrollment at one college than another are being considered for moving to the smaller college even though that college has inferior facilities, fewer faculty, and not enough resources. Admins figure they can just transfer the faculty and that will take care of the problem. They forget about specialized buildings that can't be moved or quickly replicated and large amounts of equipment that can't be moved easily or cheaply.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like a way of concentrating resources and perhaps enhancing the distinctive character of each school. Instead of everybody doing basically the same thing, one school could function primarily as a Liberal Arts school, another as an Engineering school, another as a Business School, with graduate-programs relegated to each campus. How you handle the basic common disciplines might even emphasize this; perhaps no adjuncts or in the given fields at one's home campus.
ReplyDeleteThe overlap in programs, though, between campuses that are geographically close seems unnecessary in the best of times (probably the by-product of unplanned growth and development of an institution), and simply unsustainable in the current times.