As readers of this blog know, I’ve been writing a bit on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited volume. This paper will focus on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis.
You can read more about it here or here or here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).
The final section that I had to draft was a description of the actual crisis itself. I have to admit that time had dulled my memory of the budgetary causes of the crisis while preserving intact my memory of the anguish that the the budget cuts caused. This is my first effort to narrate, in a concise way, the confluence of events and individuals that caused such campus wide anxiety and inflicted such a deep wound on campus morale.
As I tried to do this, I came back around to a sense that I had at the time. It wasn’t so much at our campus had a budget crisis, it was how various parts of campus responded to it. In particular, I was struck by how quickly and decisively the spirit of collaboration and shared governance dissipated. Perhaps administrators suppressed it by design and it reflects the idea that crisis management tends to be top down. Maybe it was
In any event, my text here tried to capture some of the vectors which converged to cause the crisis:
The Anatomy of a Campus Crisis
The context for UND’s budget crisis was both unique and familiar. On the one hand, the university had largely avoided the financial crisis associated with the “Great Recession” owing to tax revenues generated by the opening phase of the Bakken oil boom. The earliest phase of the oil boom came on the heals of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 and the larger economic downturn that it triggered. On the other hand, the University of North Dakota, like many mid-sized, public institutions, remains dependent on the state for a portion of its operating budget. When the state of North Dakota experienced a $1 billion budget shortfall in 2015, owing to the drop in oil prices, a particularly dry harvest, and an aggressive tax cut to companies and individuals, the state cut appropriations to UND as well as elsewhere on the basis of a budgetary formula. Another series of budget cuts occurred in 2018. UND like many state institutions had limited options when it came to increasing revenue as legislation limited the institution’s ability to raise tuition or increase fees. As a result, the only real solution to budget shortfalls on the state and institutional level was to reduce funding across campus largely through retrenching positions, but also through eliminating programs.
Like many institutions, the University of North Dakota is a tight knit community. Relative stability in leadership positions, a close relationship with the town and alumni—partly attributed to a successful and popular hockey program—and committed faculty and staff endowed the university with generally decent morale, a sense of purpose, and a collaborative spirit. In fact, the shared commitments of the extended UND community had helped it navigate a controversial change in nicknames that culminated in 2015 with the Fighting Hawks replacing the Fighting Sioux. The retirement of President Robert Kelley in 2016 and the naming of former governor Ed Shaffer as acting President of the institution came at the moment where the first round of budget cuts impacted campus. His brief term which saw a round of staff and faculty layoffs, ended with the naming of Mark Kennedy president. Unlike Shaffer who garnered respect across the region from his time as governor and his North Dakota roots, Kennedy was unpopular, inexperienced, and came across as aloof and unsympathetic. Shaffer and Kennedy relied on Provost Tom DiLorenzo to implement painful budget cuts and DiLorenzo’s sometimes awkward personal style further contributed to the unpopularity of the administration. Faculty had viewed DiLorenzo with suspicion after an abortive effort at “program prioritization” on campus in 2014 and his role in implementing a new MIRA (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation) budget model for the university at the same time. This model, which was complex and poorly understood by faculty and staff, seemed to harden barriers between colleges and foster competition for resources based on what appeared to be an impersonal and inflexible formula. Administrative, procedural, and leadership changes exacerbated the impact of the state level budget cuts by creating a sense of alienation from the institution.
Efforts by the administration to explain the challenging situation through a series of town hall style meetings led to emotional outbursts especially as staff who had worked at the university for decades were laid off in an effort to balance unit budgets. Administrators who had fostered innovation, program development, and collegiality, found themselves quickly transformed into hardened budget warriors tasked with cutting costs and tempering faculty ambitions. Across the entire institution, an aloof and unpopular president, the poorly understood MIRA budget model, and its chief advocate, the provost, became scapegoats for financial challenges that went far beyond MIRA’s scope or interpersonal conflicts. Deans and associate deans shared this burden as faculty sought to both understand and mitigate the budgetary changes taking place across campus. In many cases, the lack of familiarity with the mechanisms, processes, and procedures (as well as the details of the budget cuts themselves) impaired the community’s ability to present viable solutions.
Since the 1970s, UND had followed national trends and developed its administrative bureaucracy to accommodate federal regulations, an increasingly competitive funding environment caused by the reduction in state funds, and the needs of its growing student body (for a general history of the early phase of these changes see Robinson 1971). These changes had accompanied a gradual increase in professionalization in the administrative ranks. New positions with narrower responsibilities served the specialized needs of funding agencies, new students, and programs with increasingly elaborate accreditation requirements. While some faculty and students recognized these slow changes, the budget crisis of 2016 brought their sense of alienation from the inner workings of the university to the fore. The sense of alienation among faculty and students came to the fore with cuts to two high profile and outwardly successful programs—Women’s Hockey and music therapy—which galvanized student and faculty frustration as the authors of these cuts appeared to both take responsibility for their decisions and explain them as part of necessary budgetary calculations. This both personalized animosities and further alienated faculty and students as the processes and decision making appeared opaque and misguided.
Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 