What are They Scared of?

On October 23, President Alivisatos will deliver his annual report to the University’s Senate—loosely speaking, all tenure-stream faculty, plus the president, provost, and vice presidents—and “discuss matters of University interest” (Statutes of the University, amended 5/1/2013, §12.4.2.1). What information should he provide, in order to enable an informed and critical conversation? What does he owe the community in an age of transformation?

Two models are available for how to talk about the University’s policies, priorities, and ambition among engaged, committed insiders. One is offered by the University’s institutions of faculty governance, with which I have over a decade of personal experience. There, decisions are presented as discrete acts of judgment on academic matters alone, shorn of financial data and therefore without any holistic discussion of trade-offs or opportunity costs.

A second model is offered by the University’s Board of Trustees, who discuss whether to advance or weaken units amidst a sea of data: in particular, historical, current, and projected budgets for operational expenses; numbers of faculty and staff in each governing body; trends in enrollment and revenue; and historical, current, and projected capital expenditures. This I know because, just after Labor Day, I received (from an anonymous benefactor) briefing books from the annual meetings of the Board, as well as supplementary materials—booklets of data and a manual on “The University’s strategic approach to risks and opportunities”—going back to 2009.

To my mind, the importance of the enterprise, and the gravity of the moment, together urge that the president adopt the second model in conversations with the faculty, as well.

The context of this year’s report is one of achievement and promise, but also change and loss. Starting very nearly from scratch, the University has achieved remarkable excellence in molecular and geoengineering and is a central player in an emerging regional ecology in quantum computing. At the same time, the University’s financial troubles and their consequences—its great debt burden; its layoffs; the decline in the rank of its College; its faltering commitment to need-blind admissions—have received coverage in newspapers across the nation. What is noise and what merits sustained reflection among those charged with thinking about the health and direction of a great university?

The temptation is strong to think about the many individuals, research groups, and projects of the University in isolation. Nor is this unreasonable. As an intellectual matter, one could map life at the University partly and properly on the model of toddlers on the playground, engaged in so-called “parallel play.” (Something like this is the false premise for the budgetary model increasingly adopted by mostly private universities, that of “Responsibility Center Management,” but that is a story for another day.) As I have said, this is very much how matters are generally brought before the institutions of faculty governance—as isolated academic matters, shorn of financial data. The faculty should not concern themselves with money, it is implied; no trade-offs are necessary. Indeed, when I sat on the Committee of the Council many years ago and the question of the acquisition of the Marine Biological Laboratory was raised, I inquired about the opportunity costs of an initiative on that scale and was advised—by a fellow member of the faculty—that “at the University of Chicago, all good ideas get funded.” We segued rapidly to the acclamation phase of the proceedings.

The news that the University might spend as much as $100 million on a single cluster of projects and hires related to geoengineering raises (again) the question of opportunity costs. At what point—at what scale—does a commitment to one person, area, or field, crowd out the University’s ability to pursue excellence to the same degree in other areas?

That said, consideration of “opportunity costs” seems to me insufficient to the scale of change and the vast shift in priorities that the University is undergoing. Here it is useful to recall that the context for the University’s debt crisis, layoffs, and so on, is vastly increasing revenue. According to the University’s public financial statements, the combined revenue of the University and Biological Sciences Division (without the Medical Center) was $1.916 billion in 2013, $2.425 billion in 2018, and $2.901 billion in 2023. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI inflation calculator, inflation from January 2013 to January 2023 was 29.92 percent. Revenue growth of 51.4 percent was therefore markedly greater than inflation. How does this figure into the mix of facts that I cited above? If we are making so much more, why are we deeply in debt? Why are programs being closed and the arts decimated? What is the larger context of priorities, choices, and institutional change in which this all makes sense?

The simple facts of the matter are that the University has been spending far, far more than it takes in, in order to invest in select fields of research; and we never actually existed in a world in which trade-offs did not need to be made. To see this, one needs something other than pablum about how much President Alivisatos enjoyed the Core when he was a student, or how the University aspires to excellence across the board. We need to follow the money.

Broadly speaking, we need two bodies of information. The first is a history of the budget of the so-called governing bodies (Booth, Divinity, Humanities, Law, etc.) in terms of gross operating expenses, presented alongside numbers of tenure-stream faculty, other academic appointees, staff, etc., in each unit, as well as gross undergraduate enrollment and aggregate numbers of majors. Have we enabled research and teaching to flourish in the many fields that we study? And have we sustained those communities with a reasoned and appropriate commitment to the efficiency, dignity, and safety of research and learning in all those fields? To understand the future to which we are being led, we need those figures for the last 15 years and projected at least three years into the future.

The second body of information that we require is a history and projection of capital expenditures—essentially building new stuff or investing in the renewal, refurbishment or replacement of old stuff—over the same time period, including the crucial matter of what portion of capital expenditures over that period in any given unit has been funded by restricted funds, as well as what percentage, for each governing body, has been funded via unrestricted funds. The point is that while attracting restricted funds in support of a given project might seem to free up unrestricted funds for other purposes, it very much appears that restricted funding exercises a powerful gravitational pull on all other forms of funding. And we would want this laid out in a way that expenditure per member of the Senate (and perhaps per unit of undergraduate enrollment) is clear. A back of the envelope calculation suggests a ratio of capital investment from unit to unit of hundreds to one.

Are these requests for budgetary information unreasonable or difficult? One answer is: this is more or less exactly the information that is already supplied to the trustees when they discuss the present and future condition of the University and vote on policy and priorities. It is in the briefing books.

That the University’s leadership is making trade-offs and starving some units in order to pay for others is explicitly part of the briefings received by the trustees. They are told that we are eliminating programs and weakening some units to pay for others. They get an explanation, or perhaps, an interpretation, of what the consequences of budgetary acts are likely to be. During the liquidity crisis of FY2016, for example, the library eliminated 14 vacant positions, laid off 13 persons, and cut $1.35 million from the budget for collections. The trustees were told, “These actions will result in a reduction in library hours, reduced services to faculty and staff”—perhaps “students” were intended—“and may impact statistics related to national rankings.” (The negative impact on the Library’s national ranking, due to the disfavor to which it has been subject, is now well known.)

In the same year, the Divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences together eliminated 35 positions, “reducing support to affiliated centers and cutting non-compensation costs. The impact of these actions will be to reduce the support given to faculty.” You don’t say.

But in that same planning session, it was announced that the Department of Economics would hire seven additional faculty in FY2017 alone, and it was envisioned that the Institute of Molecular Engineering (as it was then known) would soon expand by nearly 50 percent, from 17 faculty to 25. In the trustees’ meeting a year later, $25 million was allocated for renovations to office space to accommodate “incremental IME faculty.”

This raises the question of how explicitly the connection between choices made this past year will be made in future briefing books to the trustees: Did we eliminate German and shrink middle school sports at the Lab School, did we shrink spending in humanities, did we fire staff from the Smart Museum, did we, as I am told, momentarily suspend our commitment to need-blind admissions, to pay for geoengineering (say) on a scale greater than we can afford?

At some level, this is as it should be—if by that one intends that universities should not remain static and must respond to the development of new fields of knowledge. It is also the norm, here undergirded by the University’s statutes, that the president and provost should determine the direction and priorities of the institution.

But why should these choices be a secret? If the president, provost, and trustees are secure and confident about their vision, why not discuss in public their reasoning about which departments, divisions, and majors are to be privileged, and which are being encouraged to decline?

Provide the data, to be checked against what the trustees were told. Then we can discuss “matters of university interest” together.

Clifford Ando is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History and in the College, as well as Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University.