Life as a Physicist

The Higher Ed Protests in California January 18, 2010

I suspect most readers of this blog have seen or heard about the protests in California staged by students at the Berkley, Davis, and other campuses. As a member of a state that that had the worst single-year cut in its support of higher education until California whacked its system, I was quite happy to see some folks complaining about it in a way that got real press. Of course, this took more than it should have: they shut down buildings, there were some mass arrests. I don’t think anyone was seriously hurt (but I’m not sure). Things have been amazingly silent up here in Washington. Students have staged small protests, but as far as I can tell no one in the papers noticed.

I’m getting most of my information about California from a recent New Yorker article, A Letter From California, which tries to give an inside look at what has been going on there. I don’t like the article too much – it spends most of its time concentrating on one woman, only to suddenly decide at the end that perhaps she isn’t the real story. However, it does a good job at explaining many of the moving parts. Short conversations with some of my friends in California seem to back this version of events. I also was attending a workshop in UC Davis, arriving the day after students took over a building and the police brought in helicopters to flush them out.

The students have (as far as I can tell) two targets: high administration salaries and tuition hikes. The second one they should definitely be mad at. Ca is raising their cost of in-state tuition by 32% in one year! One year! UW is raising it 14% two years in a row – so 28% – almost the same as Ca, just spread over two years. Ouch! That said, both institutions are doing their best to put financial aid in place to help students who need it pay for the increases, and compared to private schools these two public, state, institutions are still an good bargain. It is important to keep in mind that in Ca the university system has direct control over the tuition and in Washington while the legislature has direct control, UW doesn’t have to raise the fees even if the legislature gives them permission – so it seems logical that university administrations be a target over the anger in tuition increases.

Second: the administration. I’ve seen the president of the Ca system, Yudof, and the president of the UW system, Emmert, have both been targets of their respective school student’s anger. And, it would seem, main targets in some cases.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can see why they are easy targets. They make boat-loads of money. In some respects, they are a symbol of the general corporate drift of public universities – and get paid to match (i.e. they get paid a lot). And cutting their salaries and those of the top administrators down would certainly free up some cash.

But in the grand scale of things – it won’t free up that much cash. For example, the budget that was put together for UW last year by the state had our funding dropping by 26%. That is close to a 70 million cut in UW’s yearly budget. If you slashed all the administrators salaries to be mine, I suspect you’d save about 2 million per year. Those salaries aren’t the main problem!

The problem is the what the state! Higher education is not a priority. In California they spend more on prisons than they do on higher education! That doesn’t seem right – invest in the future, not the past! In Washington higher education is one of the few expenses that isn’t required by some law – so it is also something that gets cut often:

That red line on the right hand side is the funding per full time student (adjusted for 2009 dollars) from 1990 until the present. While this last drop was steep – this has been going on a long time. Public universities all over the USA have been seeing similar trends – this is not unique to California or Washington – it is just particularly bad here.

And, I think, that is where most of the anger of the students should be directed. The president of UW, Emmert, has decided that the state really doesn’t care any more – and that red curve will never return to its former level – so it is time to stop acting like it will and move on and negotiate a new relationship with the state. Still a public university, perhaps, but not in the same way. No matter what there will always be a better deal for in-state students – but that only works to the level that the state continues to kick in some cash. I suspect he is right – and it is too bad.

While the anger might sometimes be misdirected (and it sounds like the Ca administration made some pretty serious missteps), I do hope that in the future most students target legislators and other government officials. Who knows, perhaps a constitutional amendment is the answer?

Cutting At Universities March 10, 2009

The economy keeps getting worse. State governments are talking about huge cuts to Universities – 20% in one year, something I don’t think any large, healthy, university has had to absorb in the  history of the USA. State governments are calling for the elimination of tenure – so they can fire tenured faculty. It is already getting crazy and it will only get worse until the economy finds a bottom – part of the panic that policy makers see is that they have no idea where it will fall to.

The American Physical Society produces a small rag which has a neat article by the father, Soren Sorensen of one of my former graduate students. He is chair of the physics department at Tennessee. They have a great deal of research funding there, similar to what we have here at UW, and also teach large introductory courses. The article is long – but if you are interested in this sort of thing he has a catalog of things they have tried to do to help their department.

So how do these budget cuts influence our physics department here at University of Tennessee? Profoundly! We now have 25.5 Full Time Equivalent faculty members in our department. This is two less than just a year ago, since we lost two positions as a result of the budget cuts in June. We have to go all the way back to around 1960 to find fewer faculty members in our department.

He goes on to list a few other things that have changed at their department and then notes:

This high efficiency, however, is coming at a cost. There is no more “slack” in the system in the form of professors who can teach more courses. If we have to implement additional budget cuts, we will have to cancel classes. This will result in much higher student dissatisfaction and, more importantly, longer graduation times for our majors, since many students will not be able to schedule the needed 15 credit hours each semester.

This is between a rock and a very hard place. This is because state legislatures get extremely angry when this sort of thing happens (reducing # of students admitted, etc.). Something is going to have to give. In a nice touch, Soren finishes up that bit of the article noting that is where they are now – the recent falls in the economy mean that things are actually going to get a fair amount worse. And, as he correctly points out, there are no contingency plans in place for these sorts of cuts. No one at a major university has ever faced something like this before. We can’t look to another university and see how they dealt with it, there aren’t books titled “how to cut a university by 20%”. This is complicated by the fact that the state isn’t the only source of funding – donations and endowments make up something like 60% of UW’s budget, the state is less than 40%. Those two revenue streams work in concert to make the university run, and they are being cut at different rates (sadly, the money from those two revenue streams has different colors – you can’t use one to make up for the other).

One option that has been floated in our state is to cut the amount of research we do and replace it with teaching. Apparently, Tennessee has (or is) being faced with similar suggestions:

… and 2/3 of our total budget consists of external research grants and contracts. So for a physics department it is vital also to maintain the emphasis on excellence in research and graduate education, and that is not an easy task in the current climate. Letters to the editor of our local newspapers or online comments to articles about our university give the impression that a large segment of the public (and therefore maybe also the politicians) considers research a nice hobby for the faculty, but nothing that should have any priority during a financial crisis.

Let me put it this way. Lets say my group get 1 million a year from the NSF to do research here at UW on particle physics. The university skims more than 400,000 off the top of that. So that 1 million is worth only 600,000 to me. This is called overhead (I’m making up the exact numbers, I have no idea what the average overhead is at large universities). So, if we are busy doing teaching and less research, we will get less money, which means the university has less of that 400,000 to play with – which is another budget cut. So increasing teaching isn’t a win-win game. Not to mention the fact this will drive many of the best people away.

There is no easy way out. Whatever happens it is going to hurt. Everyone is going to see it – students, graduate students, post-docs, lecturers, professors, staff. And, of course, the rate of science output. Good thing the country is already leading in innovation – we can coast for a few years. Oh, wait… Right. Back to work.