By Nicole DeCriscio
news@thedepauw.com
Larry Stimpert, vice president of academic affairs, sent an all faculty email Friday evening apologizing to the faculty for not including them in discussions surrounding the cuts and changes made to the faculty development fund.
Stimpert cited a paper that he wrote on shared governance, or the idea that faculty members should share in decision-making in matters that directly affect the faculty, while he was a faculty member at Colorado College. He shared the paper with the search committee two years ago when he was a candidate for his current position at DePauw University.
“In that paper I stated that it would be a mistake for any administrator to ever assume that faculty members at a liberal arts college would not want to be consulted on any matter of consequence,” Stimpert wrote. “This summer I violated my own beliefs when I sent the memo about changes to our Faculty Development Program. I very much regret not engaging you in broader discussion and consultation before making that decision.”
As reported in the Friday, Sept. 19 issue of The DePauw, Stimpert was asked, by Vice President of Finance and Administration Brad Kelsheimer, to cut $800,000 or 2.2 percent of the academic affairs budget.
Due to faculty criticism for the budget cut to the faculty development fund, until new recommendations can be made from the Internal Grants Committee (IGC), Stimpert is reverting to the funding model from last year, with the exception of meals, which will still be through the per diem allowance that was announced earlier this month at the faculty meeting
“Let’s have a conversation in a better environment,” Stimpert said in a phone interview last night.
Alejandro Puga, professor of modern languages, was on sabbatical leave last year and received support for his leave.
“I was grateful to the IGC, to the Faculty Development Program, to my department and to the university for supporting my leave,” Puga wrote in an email yesterday afternoon. “It saddens me to think that a colleague might have to take more, and more difficult, steps to receive the support that I was granted just by virtue of being a member of this faculty.”
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, professor of English, was pleased with the response that Stimpert gave in the email.
“It showed some real flexibility on the part of the academic vice president and the administration and real responsiveness to the pretty outspoken criticism that the policy had received,” Csicsery-Ronay said. “It’s a very encouraging step in the right direction.”
Faculty took issue with their own lack of involvement in creating the plan.
“Our big problem was that the decision was made without adequate consultation,” Csicsery-Ronay said. “This just showed part of a culture that academic concerns of the faculty are the last thing to be considered.”
But that doesn’t mean that the faculty necessarily saw eye-to-eye on the now reverted changes. One particular source of contention was the lack of support for attending conferences at which faculty aren’t presenting.
“In our profession, a lot our professional development doesn’t happen by putting something on your resume — it’s conversations with other people in either your field or other fields, especially other fields,” Csicsery-Ronay said. “In the creative arts, they don’t present papers at all. They just don’t work that way.”
For several institutions, there is a requirement for how many scholarly or creative works faculty are required to produce.
“DePauw doesn’t have that — not yet at least,” Csicsery-Ronay said, “but there is a strong expectation that people will continue to develop scholarship in their fields.”
Stimpert said that the cuts came as both a means to balance the budget and push for publication.
“It seemed to me that [the faculty development fund] was an area where we had some possible give and take in the budget,” Stimpert said.
Where the necessary cuts for academic affairs will come from has yet to be determined.
“I don’t know,” Stimpert said of where he will make the cuts to balance his budget.
He said that the senior level staff has decided to make faculty development a priority.
“It’s important enough that we just have to find the money for that,” Stimpert said. “We’re not going to make it up here.”
Several members of the faculty signed a letter calling for an open faculty meeting, which will occur on Thursday.
“I think it should be a great opportunity for faculty to come together and talk about common concerns,” Stimpert said of the meeting.
Csicsery-Ronay believes there is a larger issue in the administration’s inability to raise money for faculty concerns.
“The problem is that we’ve seen fundraising that’s gone into building a new gym, the expansion of the dining hall,” Csicsery-Ronay said, “but we’ve seen very very little, if any, real progress in fundraising and development for sort of faculty issues.”
He continued.
“We feel like in all of this fundraising the faculty concerns have been left out,” he said. “Most of us acknowledge and we’ve been told that fundraising for academics is difficult compared to fundraising for buildings.”
Csicsery-Ronay noted that the program “hasn’t been ungenerous” but claims there is a “benign neglect” of faculty concerns.
“We feel like we’re respected in name, but there’s been very little done to develop that while all this other stuff has been going on,” Csicsery-Ronay said. “Our status as a university isn’t going to go up because we have a better gym.”