On November 17, Dr. Judy Hample, President of UMW since July, gave the first substantive speech of her tenure. A video recording of the speech can be viewed here.
I’ve been mulling over how to respond to the speech or whether to respond at all. I decided that it’s important to make public my response in hopes of promoting conversation on the direction of UMW.
I was hoping to be inspired by the speech to make UMW stronger and more distinctive than it currently is. I’m not sure how much of that hope was fulfilled.
Dr. Hample’s thesis was the following:
“My vision and dream is that UMW will become a premier, public, national liberal arts university.”
Fair enough, but how will we get there?
The first third of the speech, with a few nods to catch phrases like ‘fewer silos’ and ‘embracing a culture of excellence,’ emphasized administration, rather than academic leadership. Dr. Hample talked about greater efficiency and the need for tough decision-making. She stated that decisions would be made on the basis of an upcoming strategic planning initiative.
She claimed that UMW faces three challenges which prevent us from achieving her vision:
1. We need to make UMW student-centered.
2. We need to make UMW a more diverse, inclusive institution.
3. We need to realize the full potential of being a [real] university.
I admit to being taken aback by her first challenge. UMW is the most student-centered institution that I know. Classes are relatively small (though not as small as they used to be) and faculty know and work closely with their students. Unlike at large state universities, it is all but impossible for a student to remain just ‘a number’ at UMW.
It turns out that Dr. Hample meant the term ‘student-centered’ in a much different and narrower sense than I interpreted it. She used it to refer to the user-friendliness of business services like accessing financial records and registering for courses.
Dr. Hample made several remarks about campus life, saying alumni she talked with praise what they call the “Mary Washington experience.”
“I wonder if that is as strong today? I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that it might not be. The perception of too many of our students is that we have an unresponsive bureaucracy and administration.”
I have no quarrel with more user-friendly access to services, but her alumni story seems a non-sequitur to me. I doubt that the Mary Washington experience alumni describe is about business services; I imagine it is about close relationships they formed with other students and with faculty, something which is still very much a characteristic of UMW. And to be fair to administrative staff, my sense is that existing bureaucratic hurdles, and there are some, are largely the result of resource constraints as past leadership has moved funding out of administration to protect the instructional program.
Dr. Hample also said she wants to renovate dorms into “living and working environments” with places to study, socialize and get a cup of coffee after midnight. “These simple things that students want, need and are, frankly, long overdue,” she said. Yes, but these innovations come with a cost, and I don’t think UMW will ever win the battle of student amenities; nor do I think we should. Rather, if we are to be a truly distinctive institution, it will be on the basis of our academic programs.
Dr. Hample’s second challenge is to make UMW a more diverse, inclusive institution. This is, of course, worth doing and something we have struggled with as an institution for years. If she has a way of achieving this, I applaud her.
The third challenge, on which Dr. Hample spent the majority of her speech, is to make UMW realize the potential of becoming a university. She plans to accomplish this by creating two new schools: a College of Business and a College of Education, as well as developing selective graduate programs in the College of Arts & Sciences. These are worthwhile goals. Arguably, the College of Graduate and Professional Studies has failed to live up to its potential, and so reorganizing its programs along traditional disciplinary lines makes sense to me.
My concern comes in that Dr. Hample plans to finance these plans by belt-tightening and eliminating programs that don’t meet her standards.
“The choice comes down to this: What programs, what jobs are critical for insuring high quality education, high quality safety, high quality services, [and] high quality welfare for our students?”
I don’t doubt that these initiatives are worth doing, but in my view they won’t make UMW a premier, national institution. The College of William & Mary is such an institution. It has a total budget of roughly $220 million or more than three and a half times UMW’s total budget.
I don’t think it’s possible to build a premier public, national liberal arts institution on our current budget no matter how well we reallocate it. To achieve such a goal would require significant additional funding which Hample didn’t address.
What I fear is that without significant additional resources, the changes planned by Dr. Hample will only reduce what makes UMW distinctive, and turn us instead into a generic state university.
To be honest, I know next to nothing about UMW except that an awful lot of people I think of as being on the frontier of ‘student-centered learning’ (particularly with regard to edtech) seem to be there. But as an alum of Pomona College and as a current economics faculty member at a big state university, I’m confused about something – what is meant by a ‘liberal arts university’ and, assuming such a thing exists, how does adding a College of Business get you there? Aren’t professional schools, practically by definition, outside the liberal arts?
“Arguably, the College of Graduate and Professional Studies has failed to live up to its potential”. Wow Steve. I would say that statement certainly is arguable.
I think CGPS has had some huge successes over the last decade (as has CAS). And I don’t see the creation of Colleges of Business and Education as some attempt to reorganize CGPS programs along disciplinary lines (they are already organized that way) but as an attempt to create connections between the campuses and move us all closer to being a University.
You are on point about the budget issues and I think this is something that we all need to tackle together – for the future of the University and for our students. But if we are going to be able to meet these challenges, we need to move beyond thinking in terms of campus potential to thinking in terms of our potential as a University. A house divided cannot stand.
Many good points. I think you are right that many alumni would point to the close relationships developed with faculty and fellow students. On the other hand, I do think that UMWs bureaucracy is damned monolithic, even though this is probably true of any large organization. This, however, should be the least of any student’s worries.
My biggest lingering complaint remains that I rarely felt that the big-wigs cared about me, the student. They cared far more about drawing in the next class of freshmen. To a degree this is of course justified, as it is part of what keeps the money flowing. Hence the series of campus beautification projects taken on during my tenure (most infamously the phenomenally superfluous clock tower). Note subtle hints of more of the same with suggestions of spending millions of dollars in order to make it easier for students to socialize. Don’t let the building fall around the students, sure, but on a small campus, things are already quite communal. Even if it doesn’t happen, the idea that they’re still pursuing such plans is very frustrating to me.
So while UMW may never have the funding it needs to achieve the goal of being a premier liberal arts university, it could certainly have made, or at least start making, better choices in striving for such an identity. I would rather see these monies used to increase salaries of the faculty in order to attract more and/or better talent, and to inject more diversity of thought and opinion into the student body.
Steve, speaking as a non-tenured staff member who cares so very much about this place, I always appreciate your clarity and candor. This is exactly the kind of dialogue that we need to be having now simply BECAUSE of scant resources. At these times when resources are so desperate, we need to constantly raise the standard of teaching and learning and make that the “brand” message loud and clear. We can’t air condition dorms and have state of the art teaching labs, and which is really more important to our reputation and success? Perhaps, just perhaps, if we communicated that “Come here if you’re looking for a meaningful life.” instead of trying to look like so much fun with smiling students in brochures, students wouldn’t leave for more fun college town schools. We’d get the cream of the crop liberal arts and sciences students who care less about creature comforts than they do about learning. Judging by the turnout in this election, I think we now have a younger generation that is more interested in being part of something bigger than in convenience. We should be churning out citizens, not consumers.
Steve… Nice summary ….
All who care about the UMW legacy and community should pay careful attention, to Dr. Hample’s strategic plan and, most importantly, to how it is carried out. Please seek to help Dr. Hample do the best job possible in transforming UMW while preserving it’s unique community spirit.
A review of Dr. Hample’s considerable previous accomplishments shows her strengths in strategic, budget and structural management of academic institutions. It is less explicit, but can be inferred from past public records, that Dr. Hample’s methods for addressing budget, structure and strategic issues can be be really difficult and dispiriting for the faculty, staff and students. Strategic goals may be achieved, but perhaps at a high cost to UMW community morale.
In a tough state budget environment (this year it is particularly bad) new initiatives and positions must come from existing budgets. The only source is from re-organizations, program eliminations, and personnel dismissals (staff, academic and admin faculty). Dr. Hample made this very clear in her address.
When I reviewed the “we will change” portion online, it disturbed me that I found the tone of her words to be threatening — something I’d very much prefer not to see in an academic leader. I checked my impression out with some attendees — many found the tone threatening as well.
I’ve followed UMW announcements, and see that personnel changes and dismissals (some quite abrupt, and involving persons with long, dedicated and valuable contributions to UMW) have started — and I am afraid that they will continue as Dr. Hample focuses on transformation.
Please do pay attention and get involved!
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Steve, I’m coming very late to this conversation, as I’m waaay behind on my best-of-edublogs reading.
I haven’t listened to President Hample’s speech, but a few things come to mind upon reading your post. I’m afraid this is going to be long. . .
First, I hope that UMW has paid some attention to students’ creature comforts in the past 15 years. The primary reasons I left UMW were homesickness and culture shock, but the smell of burning wires (and a small fire) in Virginia Hall, the decaying floors in the dorm, the tripling of students in double rooms, the lack of phones in rooms (no privacy at all, really), and the really nauseating food at Seacobeck (especially for this vegetarian) meant it was easy for me to make the decision to leave the college at the semester instead of the year. I wrote a letter to the Board of Visitors explaining that they were lucky that their first-year students weren’t litigious–it was that bad. (I hear some of the rooms were carpeted soon after I pointed out a friend needed surgery to remove a giant floor splinter from her foot.) Had I stayed, I have a feeling I would have come to resent the college’s very strong policy of acting in loco parentis.
Second, the classes I took (poetry, math, geology, and French) were not bad, and based on what I’ve seen at other public universities, probably above average. That said, I never had a sense of why I was supposed to go to college, other than Mom and Dad and my high school teachers said I needed to do so–that it was just the logical next step if I wanted to become (as I then thought I did) a high school English teacher. I definitely considered dropping out of not just MWC but college altogether. Overall, I felt I was being sold “tradition” and “honor” and “heritage” rather than “a liberal arts education.”
This was not the case at Grinnell, the older (and smaller) institution from which I eventually graduated. From our first day on campus (and even prior to our arrival), the college administration told us it would not act in loco parentis and that college was a place to explore one’s identity as a participant in civic discourse and public service. As part of this commitment, the college decided to forgo gen ed requirements, instead trusting us to find our own way as learners.
Instead of the general sense of Southern history and culture (and genteel womanhood) I felt I was inheriting at MWC, Grinnell was very specific about its successful graduates and faculty, especially (as it was the college’s sesquicentennial when I was a student there) the Social Gospelers and the many Grinnellians who served in high-ranking positions in the New Deal (Harry Hopkins among them). This was why we were getting a liberal arts education–not to get a job (and in fact when students studied abroad “practical” courses like journalism weren’t allowed to count for credit toward graduation)–but to become better thinkers and eventually contributors to solving social challenges. I have to admit I was embarrassed by the first several years of class newsletters I received (we get at least four each year from our class agents) because while I was kicking back in a poetry writing M.A. program, my classmates were staffing bilingual AIDS hotlines, serving in the Peace Corps, running blood banks, and the like. (Now we’re all PhDs, MDs, JDs. . .) Seeing their ethic of public service, and reflecting on my very liberal arts education, made me realize I wasn’t cut out to be (just!) a literary light but that I needed to be in the classroom or in other service to higher ed or lifelong learning (say, in museums). Maybe Grinnell was just lucky that it had a long history of Iowan populism and progressive Congregational (and now nonsectarian) politics to draw on, while MWC didn’t, but regardless of the reasons, I was (and still am) very sold on Grinnell in ways that I never was on MWC.
Striking a balance between a liberal arts mission and professional schools is another matter entirely. Here, we need to consider not community, but communities. (I’m recalling Clark Kerr’s vision of the “multiversity” as a way of countering his conception of the university as a bunch of faculty united by a common grievance over parking.) As I have learned at UC Davis, a university is not a community but a series of overlapping communities that articulate (in the sense of bones, not tongues) via individuals’ connections and allegiances to one another. My colleagues and I at the Teaching Resources Center, as well as many of those in Academic Technology Services, serve as articulation points for many communities, connecting faculty and staff across disciplines, divisions, and schools through our work with individual faculty and our service on committees.
I think in forging these communities it’s important that those who are the most common points of articulation (the network nodes, so to speak) value equally faculty and staff contributions to university community. At UC Davis there is definitely a caste system that differentiates faculty from staff, and there was a strong reinforcement of this legacy in my own department until those of us who usually benefit from this system made it clear that we value the expertise and ideas of staff equally with faculty’s. This is a key part of forging community that I’ve noticed is too frequently overlooked.
I do go on, but my point is that developing a university’s mission and getting buy-in from all involved requires not only overlapping communities but a clear and compelling narrative of community. Reading the blogs of UMW folks, I’m not entirely sure that narrative has been articulated on an institutional level. There are definitely some shared values among faculty and DTLT staff, but whether those have been picked up by the administration is not at all clear to me.