From dtompkin@thunder.ocis.temple.edu Fri Jan 1 05:08:29 1999 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.1+UW98.09/8.9.1+UW98.09) with ESMTP id FAA12638 for ; Fri, 1 Jan 1999 05:08:29 -0800 Received: from voicenet.com (mail11.voicenet.com [207.103.0.37]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.1+UW98.09/8.9.1+UW98.09) with SMTP id FAA31150 for ; Fri, 1 Jan 1999 05:08:28 -0800 Message-Id: <199901011308.FAA31150@mxu1.u.washington.edu> Received: (qmail 22750 invoked from network); 1 Jan 1999 13:08:27 -0000 Received: from chill141-pri.nj.voicenet.com (HELO ?207.103.30.105?) (207.103.30.105) by mail11.voicenet.com with SMTP; 1 Jan 1999 13:08:27 -0000 Subject: Classics Depts in Universities Date: Fri, 1 Jan 99 08:14:45 -0500 x-mailer: Claris Emailer 1.1 From: Dan Tompkins To: "classics" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" I've been reading around in the literature on university planning. There is some very good stuff out there, much of it from professors in higher education studies--a field I heard too many classicists disparage at APA, by the way. One example is David W. Leslie and E.K. Fretwell, Jr., *Wise Moves in Hard Times. Creating and Managing Resilient Colleges and Universities,* (Jossey-Bass, 1996) a study of how 13 postsecondary institutions dealt with the financial & enrollment crises of the past decade. (Subject schools include: Penn State, Syracuse, Trenton State, U Mass-Boston, U Texas El Paso, Virginia Commonwealth; I've not finished it but it looks as if Syracuse, UTEP and Trenton State --now nomenclaturally inflated to College of NJ--come out quite well.) Anyhow, the authors do a good job of showing that business models, for all their utility, don't wholly cover the problems of universities, noting that: "... if strict cost-accounting and 'productivity' standards were used to decide whether programs should be kept, then institutions risked losing some of their essential parts and fundamentally changing their missions in ways they might regret later. "The 'classical' example is the classics department. While it may not be an institution's most productive department--or its most popular--it nevertheless represents the institution's basic commitment to preserving the culture. Do you kill classics to ride the wave in business (or engineering, or education)? What happens when enrollment cycles reverse themselves and the institution has simply lost its competence in some core areas? Some of our site institutions had learned bitter lessons from earlier efforts to benefit from such cycles. What may be 'up' today may be 'down' in a few years. Making quick and opportunistic moves may look smart in the short run but may damage the institution's position in the long run." (p.62) I'm not sure I like being singled out like this, but it's good to hear supportive remarks from folks whose work is being read by decision-makers. In general, this is a useful and reasonable book about how universities make decisions. Dan Tompkins .