A Conversation with the Chancellor

September 2003

Dr. Loren Crabtree, recently promoted from provost to chancellor, talks about the job and the state of the university.

Q: What’s the definition of the chancellor’s job?

A: Campus manager. Doesn’t sound very impressive, does it? Chief executive officer of the campus—how is that?—although I don’t like the CEO moniker. I am supposed to manage the research, teaching, and outreach missions of this campus. That’s a pretty big challenge. Everything from enrollment management through graduate programs and the research activities. Every facet of the university. That’s pretty exciting. It’s huge; it’s wide; it’s deep in responsibilities. But I like it.

Q: What effect do UT’s outdated facilities have on students and faculty? What can be done to modernize our buildings?

A: The state has made a huge investment in this campus over many years. It’s a shame to see the deterioration of the buildings. From a public policy standpoint the state should--and obviously is--interested in maintaining the campus facilities at a high level. To have our freshman Engage program in the engineering college (housed) in a building that’s more than a hundred years old and that’s never been renovated substantially is not a good public face for the College of Engineering. That’s a fine program and it deserves a much better space. So that building obviously is a detriment to the recruitment and retention of good students. The fact that we have a very fine music program--but in antiquated facilities--is a detriment to the program and holds the program back. It really is superb anyway, but what could we be with better facilities? It’s hard to recruit new faculty to degraded facilities. It’s hard to recruit the finest students to poor facilities. When students find that their high schools have better facilities than we have, this is not an easy way to recruit the best students.

On the other hand, many of our science labs are in good shape. Students who come here are going to get excellent lab experiences. The buildings we’ve been able to renovate are superb. Alumni Memorial is a great building. It shows what we can do. Is there any way to accelerate the renovation of buildings? What’s happening now in the case of Glocker is a challenge the governor placed on the external advisory board to raise part of the $30 million needed to renovate Glocker. The governor has made a compact with the advisory board to find the rest of the money through state sources. I think that might be the wave of the future, where we do private fund raising and the state would do the rest. Another way to get money for renovating facilities is through a major bond issue. Time is wasting on that, because interest rates are going up. But we have still a pretty favorable interest rate. And if the state could see its way for mounting what I think would be a billion and a-half or two billion dollar bond issue for higher education—and maybe for K through 12 as well, I think we could make an immediate improvement in our facilities. And it would have a nice economic impact on the state as well. Failing that we’ll just continue to use whatever institutional resources we have to make whatever renovations we can.

Q: What is the general education curriculum and how will it benefit students?

A: The idea is to take the existing “gen ed” system of requirements and make it universal for the entire campus. That is to say, all students will have to take a certain number of credits in the social sciences, the arts and humanities, the natural sciences, the communications areas, and so on. What we’re doing is plotting out those requirements and then saying there will be a limited selection of courses that fulfill these gen ed requirements. The advantage is that if students are skillful in their selection of courses, those courses will fit any major. The intention is to make sure students do not waste credits as they fulfill their gen ed requirements. Beyond that there is a little bit of a more creative approach to gen ed than we’ve had before. If a student takes a political science course, we want the student to understand “this is a social science course.”

The professors need to take teachable moments to show the students this is one of a family of disciplines that have a particular way of knowing. So if a student takes only six hours of social science courses in their entire career here, they’ll be introduced to the social science way of reasoning and understand what social scientists do. Same with the humanities and the natural sciences so that students will understand better why they’re taking these courses and why they prepare them for the world that lies beyond college. There will be more emphasis on writing and computational skills and more of an emphasis on speaking. Students will get formal training in speech, and they’ll be asked to practice that in courses. The idea is to have a vertical dimension to the critical reasoning courses in that students will be picking up and honing those skills throughout their university career.

Q: What is the status of the gen ed curriculum?

A: It’s pretty well in shape. We’ve been working on this for a year and a half. It’ll be brought before the appropriate (Faculty) Senate committees this year and hopefully it’ll be in place next year. That will be a significant improvement.

Q: Isn’t gen ed supposed to help transfer students?

A: Yes. This matches up pretty well to the Tennessee Board of Regents new requirements. There should be pretty much a seamless transition as students move from the TBR community colleges to here, or from a TBR four-year college to here, or if our students are going the other way. They should not lose credits. That’s the intent. Another piece of this is to reduce the minimum requirement for degrees to 120 credits or as close to that as we can get. Students would need to average about 15 credits a semester to graduate in four years. That again matches up with TBR. We can’t get there in certain fields constrained by accreditation requirements. But basically we’re going to reduce the number of credits required for graduation.

Q: Does that send a negative signal? Does it appear we’re “dumbing down” our requirements?

A: It could, but the reality is we could structure undergraduate programs with 200 credits and still not teach everything we think students need to know. The intent is to take a hard look at our majors and say, “What does a student in sociology need to know? What are the basics?” You really don’t need 150 credits in engineering. You need a basic, core understanding of what engineering is and the basic requirements an engineer ought to have out of the undergraduate degree. We could teach endlessly. We could teach through the doctoral level as undergraduates and couldn’t even then teach everything we want to. So I think focusing on what’s essential to know and focusing on their ability to learn how to learn is critical. We’re all engaged in lifelong learning, and students need to understand how to ask the right questions and then learn properly. So it’s learning how to learn, no matter what the major is.

Q: It doesn’t appear there’s going to be a windfall of new money for the University of Tennessee. Are we going to have to eliminate some programs?

A: The state of Tennessee is not going to be able to give us much in the way of new resources. The opposite seems more likely: that higher education will continue to be the variable that’s used by states—not just Tennessee—to balance their budgets. Until the states come to a basic reform of their taxation systems—and I’m not talking about just income tax—but taxing services, taxing e-commerce, they’re not going to have enough resources to give higher education very much. I think it’s probably inescapable that we will have to begin to cut back on some of the programs of study. We’re launching a study of about a dozen programs that have been identified as not meeting the normal standards in terms of quality and quantity. They’re not bad programs, but we would have to invest at too high a level to bring them up to high quality standards. So we’re beginning to look at some programs with the idea of eliminating them. We’re doing too much for the resources we have.

Q: Some people in business would say, “Why are you wasting time studying these programs if you already know they’re low-producing?”

A: At the university we think everybody has to be consulted about everything we do. Sooner or later, there has to be an executive decision made. Hopefully it’s made on the basis of consultation and rational thought. But we can carry this on too long. We in the university know how to kill any initiative that comes along. We’re very good at that. So I kind of agree that we do know we have to take these actions, but we have to pay attention to due process. But I worry about due processing things to death so that we spend all this energy and we get nothing out of it except black eyes. I’m troubled by that. But in cutting programs we have to pay attention to the constituencies, no question.

Q: Nationwide, state funding for public higher education continues to decline and tuition rises. Is higher education becoming the domain of the wealthy?

A: We all ought to be concerned about the privatization of higher education, and it is going on at the University of Tennessee as it is at many other institutions. If we look at the College of Business Administration here at UT Knoxville, we find that as much as 60 or 70 percent of the budget of that college is self-generated—by gifts, by executive education, by a variety of other means. That is significant privatization, and it’s been going on for 20 years. I think our College of Business Administration is the most advanced in that, but we’re all heading that way. There’s a double whammy here. You have higher and higher tuition and lower and lower percentage of state support. And then we have a new generation of students. There will be about a 15 percent increase in enrollment across the nation by 2015. Of that the vast majority are minority students and first-generation students, the vast majority Hispanic. Their families do not have a lot of resources to send them to college. That will affect us here like it affects everyone else.

So you have rising tuition and a growing cohort of students who are unable to pay that tuition. So that means you have to have more financial aid. But simultaneously, the state is not providing more money. What worries all of us is that as tuition rises so quickly we may be eliminating a lot of people who really need to have a higher education. How do we cope with that? What does it mean for the United States if we lose an entire generation who cannot afford higher education and therefore can’t gain access to the middle class? That’s a serious question for public policy makers. We are in a time when higher education is more and more a requirement to enter the middle class. So there is the whole question of access and affordability and we are in trouble, I think, in both cases.

Q: And UT, as a research university, has added pressures?

A: Our tuition is higher here at Knoxville than any other institution in the state. Our costs are also high because we do more than teach. We conduct research so there are costs related to that important endeavor. And universities like this one had best keep up with that because not only are we an engine of democracy, we should be an engine of economic development. So the costs will be higher at Knoxville, and we have to make it possible for talented young people, no matter what their financial circumstances (to come here). And that for me is just a huge challenge. When I went as an out-of-state student to the University of Minnesota, I paid $100 a quarter and paid my room and board by working about 15 hours a week. Those days are long gone.

Q: What plans does UT have to upgrade student housing and make it more desirable to tomorrow’s students?

A: There’s a 10-year capital plan for renovation of old residence halls. They’re all more than 30 years old. Part of that renovation involves taking some of them permanently out of use. Melrose and Strong are in their last year. They will be decommissioned as residence halls. We’ll do some minimal renovation, and they’ll be used as faculty offices, graduate student offices, and administrative offices. What replaces them? Off campus, you have the UT Foundation’s apartment style housing that will absorb some of the demand. Students don’t want to live two persons to a room. They’d rather have apartment style. So the plan is to renovate to provide more opportunities for students to live by themselves in a residence hall or live off campus in apartment style.

Q: What’s new in information technology resources for students?

A: Information technology is a strength. We are competitive with similar universities. We are a wireless campus. A few buildings still are not wired, but that is happening this year. Even in antiquated Glocker, students can use their laptops in the wireless setting. We are concerned about reliability and security, as are most public institutions. We are concerned about downloading music, and we may have to put some constraints on students. Faculty members are using technology more in the classrooms. We spent $800,000 in student fees this year for classroom technology. We have opened a new foreign language laboratory—a multimedia facility that facilitates learning. The Writing Center has opened an evening lab in the library, and the library has a new $1.2 million operating system. Students can check out laptops and use them in the library. There are lots of opportunities in information technology. We’ve interviewed our new faculty for the past three years, and they say IT is one of our real strengths.

Q: What further cooperative developments are in store between UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory?

A: UT and ORNL have three joint institutes: Computational Science, Neutron Science, and Biological Science. All of them are supported by initiatives in nanoscience. We are at this moment negotiating with three outstanding scientists who work at the interstices of these new fields. We believe they will join us and help to make UT the dominant scientific force in creating new physical and biological materials for the 21st century. Very soon, the world's largest unclassified computer will be installed at ORNL, and UT scientists will have access to it. The opportunities for great scientific breakthroughs are unparalleled, and UT scientists will be at the center of the discoveries.

Q: Many alumni have children coming of college age. What would you tell them about UT as a choice for their sons and daughters?

A: We have a rich array of programs. Our faculty are at the cutting edge of their disciplines. We are emphasizing undergraduate research experiences for all students. We have a goal that every student should come to know at least a half dozen professors on a first name basis. We have good advising, and we will guarantee graduating with 120 credits in four years if students will follow their advising. For an institution of our size, we have relatively small classes. Students get personalized attention.