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University of Maryland’s University College (UMUC) has proposed a new degree program (a doctoral degree in college administration), which was denied by the state administration because it would be seen as duplicating a service provided by an historically black university elsewhere in the state, in this case Morgan State University. UMUC appealed, and the matter is now at MHEC (Maryland Higher Education Commission) – which according to latest reports has blinked and asked for more time. We sure don’t envy them that decision.

The running of any successful university is just like any other business, and it is competitive. Each ‘company president’ has his or her own strategy for success. UMBC’s Freeman Hrabowski is doing a bang up job by knowing and serving his local market, and playing state politics like a fiddle. Dan Mote on the other hand is focused on outsourcing, by turning Maryland resources into political coin that buys relationships for him in the international community. (Maybe he should pay attention to what Freeman is doing…)

UMUC’s strategic edge is distance learning and on-line service, and the present proposal appears in that spirit. Morgan State shows that in competing for market share it is willing to do anything … including play the race card. The policy they are trying to leverage hearkens back to Selma, Alabama, and the 1960′s, arguing that it would constitute racial discrimination to allow another program to even enter a market that is today served by an HBU.

Our view: Morgan leadership does itself no favor in pressing that argument. There would be no better way to confirm that the school has ‘made it’ than to show it can compete in the market without regulatory protections. There is no better way to confirm that the school will remain a prospectively black institution than to follow a business plan that admits it can’t succeed without special protections.

At the end of the day, Morgan’s argument fails a reality check: They say UMUC’s new program should be free to serve students in all the nation’s states except Maryland. So much for the consumer rights of a student in Bethesda who would be denied the value of visiting a mentor 20 minutes down the road as compared with a mandate to commute to Baltimore.

The Provost’s updated web site just rolled out in the last day, bringing its veneer into line with the rest of the campus’ internet motif. And its new organization surely has something for everyone!

Is comedy your bag? Go right to the Strategic Plan. The part about building a culture of assessment and quality improvement is a rib tickler. (Like anyone here is allowed to ask a question to which the Provost doesn’t want an answer.)

Those interested in fiction can browse the policy section. (Be sure to check out the part about Deans getting a serious review before reappointment. It’s a modern classic.)

New age mysticism is the order of the day in announcements of the I-series, the only thing anyone knows for sure will be a part of the ‘new CORE’ required of all students. (“We don’t know what it is, but anything can be it and we’re sure it will be good for you. After we offer the new classes a couple times then maybe someone will find a way to work back and describe what it was for us.”)

Where do you find budget? History section, of course. (Just don’t expect access to see any details.)

But as usual, Admissions is number one, topping of the page. Can anyone be surprised?

Senator Andy Harris was quick to pontificate when he thought dirty pictures were being shown in the Hoff Theater. Why haven’t we heard from him yet when sex toys show up?

(Answer: The General Assembly isn’t in session, so it’s more difficult to get an audience. At least in Annapolis you can get reporters to mill around and listen for a few minutes on their way to meet with legislators in the majority party.)

Thanks and a tip of the hat to the Student Government Association activists who went to the bother of acquiring and redistributing the campus’ official state budget. This is linked from the Diamondback article on same, and … oh heck, in case you can’t wait, feel free to click here for the PDF image.

The salary guide from the Diamondback is of course must-read material when it comes out each year. That’s the day you should plan on losing half your office’s productivity as eager employees dive into the lists and start clucking about who is gaining on who, who’s is bigger and how in the world did that happen? Friday’s release of budget info is an unexpected boon for gossips, activists and taxpayers alike, as it goes beyond what we normally find. It’s all public information – but that doesn’t mean it is all easily accessible. Historically leadership has gone to great lengths to slow distribution of information, by limiting formats in which it is provided or implementing access procedures that are onerous. It’s possible to find – just difficult to get.

[Stiff administrative headwinds are how we stonewall access to many other records that officials prefer not to expose. Almost any document we have, no matter what its format, should be accessible under state law but who thinks we cling to state law? The only way to open the flow is to file suit in circuit court, which is expensive. And in the end, revisions to state law a few years ago means there is no sanction of substance to an official who willfully denies information. The most you can get is an order for the official to produce a record. The SGA rep's effort overcame administrative headwinds to sail buget data out of its obscure hidey-hole.]

Dan Mote’s comments in that Diamondback article are fundamentally correct, however. This budget document doesn’t give you a full picture of what’s going on or where we spend the money. Here are some of the things to keep in mind as you try to interpret numbers in the newly-released document:

• This isn’t the budget of today. It looks like what was approved for the campus in the state budget – which is to say, the figures were a piece of fiction the moment they were branded official by the Governor. We’ve suffered several rounds of returns of base funding since then.
• Even if correct and up to date, this document would not reflect the full fiscal dashboard used to drive the ship of state. Deans manipulate ‘soft’ funding (completely outside the scope of this document) daily. These monies are in the several Foundations affiliated with campus but unreported here – the campus equivalent of off shore accounts. And the athletic association? Development office? These people virtually have funds sewn into mattresses off campus. You’ll need a Mission Impossible team to crack into those books.
• Even salaries are difficult to understand from this sheet. In order to get an approximation of what someone makes, you need to know what contract he is on and all of his various appointments. For example, Professor X might look like he is making more than Professor Y according to this sheet. But X may be on a 12-month contract and only paid from the source you found in the sheet. That likely means what you see is what he gets. But Y might be on a 9.5-month contract or paid from multiple joint appointments, so Y’s yearly take could be almost a third again as much salary from research grants or other external sources (“summary salary”), which won’t be reflected here. And joint appointments? You need to sum what is paid from each of the units – those data are shown separately. And overloads or administrative stipends? Depending on the arrangement those might or might not be reflected here too.

None of that means the budget picture is rosier than thought – it still genuinely sucks here and is getting worse. But readers should only use the newly exposed budget sheet as a source of clues, not conclusions.

The Admissions juggernaut staggers forward, unphased by the state’s dismal economic climate.

Tonight’s debacle seems to be representative. A large group of guidance counselors was meeting in Baltimore and (correctly) someone thought to arrange a visit to College Park. Key people who are involved with students at their key decision points? Sure – they should know about UM.

Unfortunately, it was a typical Admissions level of organization. Mixed messages and conflicting directions were sent to locals, pressing them to come and schmooze visitors at the Riggs Alumni center. That’s standard. But the problem is that whoever in Admissions was responsible for confirming reservations for the 150 to 200 important visitors clearly didn’t get the message right.

The bus service hired by campus to shuttle visitors from Baltimore only ended up bringing 15 visitors. What had started as a gala planned by Director of Recruiting Barbara Gill became an awkward affair, made up 3-to-1 of campus locals – deans, prominent professors and all the colleges’ recruiting officers in an all-hands drill – just standing around trying to make the best of it.

And who did the campus attract? About half of the visitors were local teachers with whom our staff deal every day. No big recruiting advance there. The rest were international – like we are really going to draw a lot of students from Thailand.

So someone mentioned cost? Never mind the bus. Never mind the mountain of catered food (shrimp, fancy desserts, etc) But an open bar? Beer, wine, cocktails, and capping all, a new drink unveiled they call the “Terptini”. (Gag) Icing on the cake: party gifts for all.

Barbara Gill sure sends a message … but not the one we think the public wants to hear.

A campus starved for operating funds but even more desperate to maintain advertising hype just managed to get a little bit of the best of both worlds: Mandatory student fees will go through the roof next year, in order to cover operating expenses normally carried by the state. But officials can still advertise “no tuition increase!”

As reported in the Diamondback, a key committee has just given the green light to President Mote for a classic administrative shakedown. The mandatory fees for undergraduates will go up over $200 (put that in perspective, this places each semester bill at $1,700 just for the base fees — do the math to see what you’ll pay annually.) Nobody expects Mote to do anything except approve it, unless of course he would actually ask for more (which was the original objective.)

But wait, there’s more! In addition to this hike, new fees are recommended:

1. $200 per year library fee (Translation: Yeah, that’s it. What’s a campus without libraries? Nobody can beef about money for libraries. And this fee times 40,000 students is a few million dollars we can displace out of the operating budget to cover other important things, like lawn maintenance.)
2. $60 per year teaching facilities fee (Translation: Sorry we haven’t been keeping up the buildings and classrooms. This is another one that will sound good when we soak you for it. Even we know not to cite administrator salaries or HVAC repair as the excuse for students paying more.)
3. $70 per year health center fee (Translation: Never mind that we mandate private health insurance of all students in the first place, just like President Obama praised the other day. What parent strapped for cash could object when we later ask for more funds to subsidize health? Err … maybe just like Obama will do …)

Let’s face it. If Dan Mote could find a way to show that cute puppy dogs on campus would be threatened if not for an emergency fee increase, then he’d use that as an excuse too.

If leadership was honest about it, then we’d just raise your tuition. Effectively, that’s what is happening now. After all, at the end of the day, the bottom line on your invoice will largely look the same anyway – bigger. So why the chicanery?

Recruiting! The fee increase charade is another victory for the mighty Admissions operation, that will now be free to roll into the new recruiting season (heads up: we’re there now) boldly advertising “No tuition increase at University of Maryland!” (And pay no attention to the fine print on your invoice…)

The Provost has been making his rounds of programs undergoing change as a consequence of the new Honors College on campus. One of the programs having a strong interest in understanding this change is College Park Scholars, which is widely seen as a tremendous ‘living-learning’ opportunity. Its track record is one of fostering tremendous outcomes for students, and it unequivocally led the campus to higher retention rates in recent years. Why? It all revolves around a single reality: the earlier you can establish a connection between a student and some local community, the more likely we’ll see a successful outcome. In this, Scholars is supreme.

Unfortunately, in Provost Farvardin’s world – the one in which recruiting needs drive everything – Scholars is a liability. You see, he has not placed it in the new Honors College since the average SATs or high school GPAs of entering students aren’t at the same level as the traditional Honors Program. (Of course, that is because Scholars isn’t given access to accepted student files until Honors is done with them, but who’s counting?)

And so it was that the Provost’s recent visit with Scholars staff did not go well. While he may have meant well by visiting with the front line troops, it’s clear things only became worse. In issuing new marching orders, he described his intention to drive all programs – including Scholars – to “test students to the breaking point.”

That statement clearly chilled most staff to the bone. Community building, and the education it enables, is all about finding creative ways to reach all students. Not everyone need get to the same successful outcome by the same means, and most staff see it as a sacred duty to spare no effort to find some way to bring all of our students into a graduation – and more. The Provost, in contrast, wants staff to behave as gatekeepers, to filter out the weak.

At one advising meeting today staff reported a discovery that one major program more so than others has recently seen students seek voluntary commitment for mental health counseling. This was wryly observed as having met the Farvardin standard. “We must be doing what they want if more of our students hit the breaking point.”

The dissonance between programs and expectations that Nariman Farvardin created in the last year only grows.

People concerned about tracking the carbon emissions of hefty heifers would surely be appalled once they realize the true global impact from extended exhalations of even one long-winded full professor teaching a CORE humanities course. Bred and trained to fill any available resources with lecture, these faculty wreak previously untold carnage on the planet.

There is hope. While bovine emissions mentioned in the above-linked WSJ article will remain a reality (so far we haven’t found alternate sources of milk), similar emissions from faculty might soon be curtailed, since the CORE program is presently being revised. Just like advanced computations let us rate impact of agricultural systems, so might engineering advances let us track how much venting is required per unit of CORE educational content delivered to a student. And by knowning how to measure it, we can optimize. All eyes turn to the Provost to see whether he will require his CORE committee to measure and minimize the carbon impact of any new curriculum.

It seems likely he will. After all … he’s used every other metric that emits numbers for evaluating campus programs.

Students can clearly help in this effort. We learn today that San Francisco International Airport is the first to place kiosks in its lobby so passengers can buy carbon offsets to balance out the global impact of their ensuing flight. Perhaps we can place kiosks in the main classroom buildings so students can offset the effects of bloviation in the ensuing classes.

President Dan Mote’s delivery of his regular ‘state of the campus’ report on Wednesday was another serving out of the same cookie cutter of past years. A lot of people who are bone-weary of being punked by the governor got to hear how well we are all coming together to optimize our core competencies and move forward in a positive direction and blah blah blah. The audience wasn’t quite asked to hold hands and sing, but it might as well have.

Under-resourced office staff are burning out keeping things operational under the freeze, buildings are crumbling, on-campus housing remains an exercise in dense packing and all employees know the golden rule: the governor takes the gold and makes the rules. (When each of us screws up a budget, we pay. When the governor screws up a budget, we pay then too.)

Ahh. But Dan says we’re doing great. Well there, that should make us all feel better.

Dan Mote gets paid a lot of money to put on an act like this, but obviously the budget affects him too. His entertainment fee only covered up to the part at the end of his talk when he casually slipped in that we’ll soon have program reductions.

Program reductions? Like the stuff that closes departments or removes degree programs? Like substantive information we hoped to learn today from the boss?

Doh! Too late, gotta tune in next time, Dan’s on the clock and we just didn’t have time or money to tell any details today.

So much for parking, morning through mid-day classes and, well, any sense of normalcy. Usually we don’t start losing educational time to disruptions until playoffs.

Campus is already on alert now for H1N1 flu disruptions, and faculty are asked to be accommodating to students who “self isolate” once they show symptoms, in order to minimize spread of infection. What are the odds we see lots of our students report they are “self isolating” starting Thursday…? Hmmm.