Proposal #77
Proposal Title: Reenvisioning SF State
Anticipated Savings/Revenue: no way to know
Units affected: nearly all
Impacted Degrees/Courses: nearly all
Brief Description of Proposal:
One way of saving funds is by eliminating some
programs, even though we may have the same number of students in the end, because
they would be more concentrated in a smaller number of programs.
How to chose the programs to eliminate? I suggest first a model and
second some criteria.
The model: What are we? How do we want to end up? I suggest
that the goal should be that we emerge as a high-quality, liberal arts, urban
university that attracts not only California residents but also a significant
number of international and out-of-state students (who will pay the full
cost of their education, and permit some growth despite stagnant state funding).
Given this, how do we get there? I suggest that we think of the university
as a core curriculum centered on the liberal arts. We offer GE courses
on basic skills and in the major liberal arts disciplines (mathematics and natural
sciences, social sciences, humanities). Obviously we keep the departments/disciplines
that offer those courses and degree programs: Anthropology, the arts, Biology,
Chemistry, Economics, English, Ethnic Studies, Foreign Languages, Geography,
Geosciences, History, Math, Philosophy, Physics, Psychology, Poli Sci, Sociology. Together
with a limited number of interdisciplinary programs of high quality, those disciplines
form the liberal arts core of the University. To be certain, some of those
individual units might be administratively reconfigured to make them more cost
efficient. Not all the units in the core should necessarily offer masters
programs -- such programs should be justified based on student interest, and
programs that have fewer than 10 graduates per year should be carefully scrutinized,
as it is difficult to see how it is possible to provide appropriate graduate-level
instruction for so few students with any degree of cost effectiveness.
We then add to that core a set of professional majors of high quality that
also have proven career paths: Business, Nursing, studio arts, performing arts,
BECA, Cinema, teacher preparation and credentialing programs, perhaps Criminal
Justice, perhaps Engineering. We add to that a set of graduate programs
of high quality that also have proven career paths: MBA, Nursing, Physical
Therapy, MFA, MPA, MPH, MSW. (Listed programs that are not of high
quality should be brought up to an appropriate level of quality.)
This leaves a set of programs either of questionable quality or questionable
relevance for a liberal arts university that aspires to being of high quality. The
quality question is a difficult one, but one that needs to be addressed. I
leave it to others suggest ways to do that.
Those of questionable relevance might include the current incarnations of
programs that were originally intended to prepare high-school shop and home
economics teachers but which have attempted to reenvision themselves since
they no longer serve their original functions: Design and Industry, Family and Consumer
Studies, Apparel Design, Interior Design, Dietetics. Carefully scrutinize
baccalaureate programs for which the professional degree is at the master’s level
and does not require an undergraduate degree in that field, e.g., Social Work
and perhaps even Business (many prestigious universities and colleges, including
UCs, do not offer undergraduate degrees in Business Administration, but they
do offer high-quality MBA programs). Compare our list of programs with
that of institutions we consider to be our peers, and carefully scrutinize those
that we offer but that are not offered by those peer institutions, e.g., Portland
State, CUNY, and Arizona State seem not to offer baccalaureate programs in Recreation. Nor
do those three institutions offer separate baccalaureate programs in apparel
or interior design.
We should be aware, however, that eliminating particular programs may not
reduce overall student numbers -- most of the students are likely still to come
to SF State but to distribute themselves into other programs. However,
if they end up in programs that provide a higher quality university experience
that is more cost effective, we have moved toward our goal.
Some criteria: If our goal is to emergence as a high-quality, liberal arts,
urban university that attracts significant numbers of students willing to pay
tuition as well as fees, we need focus on quality -- the quality of the faculty
(as expressed both in their teaching and their scholarly productivity) and the
quality of our facilities. In addition, we should focus on raising
the quality of the students over whom we have some control in the admissions
process -- those from out of state.
We know that some of our masters programs are the leading, stand-alone masters
programs in the country for preparing students to enter PhD programs -- Biology
and History have that distinction, and there are probably others. We need
to make use of such programs in two ways -- by publicizing them in an effort to
attract more high-quality, out-of-state and international students, and by learning
from them and applying those lessons to other programs. The faculty in
those two programs, for example, has long been known for their scholarly productivity -- how
do they accomplish that? For such programs, we need to pay particular
attention to meeting their needs to maintain their current levels of quality,
especially if they begin to attract significantly more students (who pay
full tuition).
Some final thoughts: Program elimination is a difficult concept for faculty
members. We should remember that there are alternatives to outright elimination -- e.g.,
closing a degree program but keeping a minor, as was done with Russian. Some
programs (including some of those noted of questionable relevance) might, in
fact, be more appropriate as a minor than as baccalaureate and masters programs. We
need to look to the long-run here. If we downgrade a program to a minor,
and limit future hiring, we make savings over time without laying off tenured
or tenure-track faculty in the short-run. For programs that are of questionable
quality but of importance to the goal of a high-quality, liberal arts, urban
university, the objective should be to bring them up to an acceptable level of
quality. If that goal is not a reasonable possibility, then we need to
think of long-run solutions rather than the immediate chopping block. The
meat-axe approach is likely to leave serious scars even if successful.
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without
editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
