During autumn semester, 1994, the University of Montana faculty represented by the University Teachers Union negotiated their contract for the time period July 1, 1993, through June 30, 1997. A significant feature of this contract was an increase of 20% in instructional workload for the faculty as a whole in return for being allowed to use increased tuition income for faculty salary raises.
The agreement had repercussions at MSU-Bozeman where, like our colleagues at UM, we also had had no pay raises for two years. President Michael Malone and then-Provost Mark Emmert had the immediate assignment from the Commissioner of Higher Education, Jeff Baker, and the Board of Regents to determine MSU's method of negotiating for pay raises for faculty. Since MSU is not unionized and has shared governance, the President, Provost, and Vice-President for Research, the Faculty Council Chair, Sharon Eversman, and Chair-Elect, Warren Scarrah, submitted names for a committee to work on MSU's plan. We all met together and agreed upon the members of a committee consisting of six outstanding faculty members (Gordon Brittan, Susan Capalbo, John Carlsten, Nancy Dodd, David Mogk, Robert Oakberg), two professional staff members (Kim Obbink, Bob Waters), a classified staff representative (Peggy Smith), the President of ASMSU (E.J. Powell), a representative of the Governor's office (Patricia Haffey), the Deputy Commissioner of Higher Education (Richard Crofts), and the Provost (Mark Emmert) and Vice President for Research (Robert Swenson).
They started meeting in October, and they were to have a draft plan by the middle of December, a daunting assignment. It was the understanding that this committee would be responsible only for establishing the framework for increasing efficiency and effectiveness of the university: a separate Implementation Committee would be established to coordinate meeting of the goals.
The first draft of the Productivity, Quality, and Outcomes Agreement (affectionately known as the PQ&O, the railroad) was submitted to Faculty Council in January 1995. Its sections were Preface, Process: Shared Governance, Approach of the Task Force on PQ&O, and nine major goals which were as follows:
The Task Force used the MSU Long Range Planning Document, which had been agreed upon by both administration and Faculty Council, for guidelines for the PQ&O goals. For each of the goals, a baseline and target to be achieved by 1997 were to be established using the office of Institutional Research, and realistic projections. The emphasis was on institutional goals to be reached, not designated, quantified input by individuals to reach those goals. Faculty Council members submitted comments on each section, and on the document as a whole, and those comments were transmitted verbatim to the Provost on January 13, 1995. A strong thread running through the discussion in Faculty Council was that undergraduate education was being emphasized to the possible detriment of two other functions of a land-grant university, research and service. There was also a fundamental understanding that increased workload for faculty was implied in the document, although not stated directly. A faction in Council presented a draft document that sought to decouple raises from the document; since salaries had been frozen, salary raises had already been honestly earned, were justified, and should be negotiated separately from the document. Council voted to not send the document forth to administration, acknowledging that political reality was such that the document and raises were related.
Communications between and among MSU administrators President Malone, Provost Emmert, Acting Vice Provost Arthur Coffin, the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, and Faculty Council Chair and Chair-Elect clipped along at a regular pace between January and August, 1995. In April, Provost Emmert left MSU and was replaced by Interim Provost Jack Drumheller, who quickly got submerged in this ongoing process. Baseline data were being compiled by Cel Johnson, Institutional Research. Arthur Coffin and others pointed out that we would be visited by an accreditation team in 1999, and it made sense to lengthen goal achievement times to coincide with that event. While MSU administrators and Council were maintaining that the important things were the institutional outputs, i.e., reaching the goals, more and more pressure was coming from the Commissioner's office to pin the institution down to inputs and commitments by MSU administration, particularly in the teaching and financial aspects. For example, in March, Commissioner Baker relayed to President Malone that the Governor and he were satisfied that "the increase in teaching responsibilities is the centerpiece of the UTU agreement" and that MSU's approach in justifying faculty raises must have "comparable substance if the centerpiece is something other than increases in teaching." A memo from President Malone to Commissioner Baker on April 11 verified that the Commissioner wanted a salary strategy, budgetary implications for reaching our goals, and more elaborate measurement of, monitoring of, and reporting on the results of the strategies.
A second version of the PQ&O document was on the agenda of the Faculty Council meeting April 19, 1995. The Preface, Process: Shared Governance, Approach of the Task Force on PQ&O, and basic nine goals had not changed from the original version. Two sections were added, Commitment of Institutional Effort and Reporting and Accountability, both written by administrators, with consultation with Faculty Council Chair and Chair-Elect. In the goals section, baseline data were included, and numerical goals to be reached by 1999 were inserted. Implementation techniques had also been added to the goals section, although as stated before, the original intent was to have a separate implementation task force suggest and coordinate implementation with more faculty input and control. Faculty Council approved the document with some changes, most notably strengthening a sentence in the Approach section to read "The faculty task forces will be called upon to shape these strategies into final action plans for review and adoption by Faculty Council and the campus."
On May 2, a strong statement from Commissioner Baker to President Malone demanded that the document contain more specific statements on financial implications and workload implications for faculty. He stated that while MSU need not pledge that teaching load for every faculty member would increase or name specific department strategies, he insisted on a "credible plan" on how MSU would achieve what we said we would, and how achievements would be measured. MSU was also warned that things that we were already doing, such as providing many presently available capstone courses and experiences and professional development, would not count in reaching goals.
Interim Provost Drumheller sent a copy of the revised PQ&O document to Commissioner Baker on June 16. This version incorporated more details in the Commitment of Institutional Effort section, including such items as the four-year graduation contract, reduction in time required to complete degree requirements, new low-enrollment freshman seminar classes, more senior capstone experiences, and other efforts. The section also included more financial details, and the Reporting and Accountability section mentioned the reinstatement of faculty workload reports.
On July 20, Commissioner Baker again demanded more detail about financial forecasts, faculty workload projections, and credits at graduation. He said that we must state what we are going to do and do it, and implied that to do less would show poor accountability and lead to less credibility with Montana citizens. In response to this correspondence, Interim Provost Drumheller sent a memo on July 31 to Commissioner Baker outlining possible ways in which MSU faculty could increase its teaching load by 15%. The methods included increasing student/faculty ratio to over 20; establishing new freshman seminars; establishing smaller writing classes and more recitation sections in large courses; encouraging new faculty to use a new promotion and tenure policy that rewards teaching as much as research; and increasing undergraduate research activities and independent study. The estimated percentage increases in each of these were summed to produce the 15% increase in teaching load. Drumheller also addressed increased research funding, reduction of time to graduation, and financial steps that had already occurred and what would happen in the future. He said that in order to maintain the relative status of MSU faculty at about 88% of comparable 25 Category I institutions, a 6.9% increase in salaries would be necessary in FY 1996 and FY 1997. Financial tables had been added to documents going to the Commissioner that projected expenses and revenue from 1996 through FY 1999. Faculty Council Chair and Chair-Elect were included in almost weekly conversations, being kept abreast of these correspondences and included in two meetings in Helena at the Commissioner's office on April 4 and August 1.
At a special Faculty Council meeting August 22, 1995, Council unanimously passed the last draft of the PQ&O document that incorporated nearly all the demands of the Commissioner's office as addressed by our administrators with Faculty Council input. The biggest changes since the first draft were the inclusion of many implementation strategies and outcomes measurements particularly in the undergraduate education and advising goals sections. It was after the approval by Faculty Council that the Commissioner unilaterally imposed a 14.3-credit baseline for faculty workload that would increase by 15% and that did not include student independent study. President Malone submitted on September 1 that the 14.3 credits per FTE was not a formal part of the PQ&O, and that the measure of credits taught also includes graduate credits. This seems to have been ignored.
The Board of Regents accepted the document at their September meeting, and raises were authorized beginning October 1, 1995. The Salary Review Committee, which includes four faculty members, met in July to review projected raises, and their appropriateness relative to faculty members' annual reviews and overall performance rating. Institutional Research provided us with data about raises, and while some of us had feared that the largest raises would once again go to the faculty with the largest research programs, that seems not to have been the case. The average raises of 6.9% were awarded based on COLA (2.5%), merit, and market, with teaching adequately considered.
The most troubling part is that an Implementation Task Force that includes faculty members has been slow to be established. Changes have been made mostly by administrative fiat, including demands from non-instructional staff and the Governor's Fiscal Analyst. A newly appointed director of assessment and outcomes relative to the 1999 accreditation review seems to be operating somewhat as an implementation chief. As of the beginning of spring semester faculty has had little or no direct input into actual implementation strategies for the nine goals in the PQ&O Document. Some of the current perception of low faculty output is probably due to the requirements to decrease curriculum offerings when we were forced to change from the quarter system to the semester system; reinstating lost courses and sections takes time, and it should come from faculty initiative. The mental change that is necessary to go from a situation where research has been rewarded most favorably to one in which teaching is considered equally valuable has also been difficult to adjust to, and some faculty are wary. A demand from the Governor's Fiscal Analyst that individual problems, tutorials, and research would not be given workload credit for only one student is especially hard to swallow, since the agreed-upon PQ&O document includes undergraduate research as a means of increasing instructional quality.
We made the assumption throughout this process that Commissioner Baker had insight into what was desired by Governor Racicot in our document development because he had passed approval on the UTU document from UM. However, all along in the process, questions arose about the constitutionality of the governor's role in direct manipulation of the University System. The business of the Montana University System is the function of the Board of Regents; the governor is an ex officio member of the Regents. If anyone should have been communicating with the Commissioner and our administrators about this document, it should have been the Regents. While we appreciate the governor's interest in higher education, there is the perception of his trying to gain executive control of the entire university system.
Could this process have been handled differently? Would a Board of Education similar to the Office of Public Instruction have resulted in a different outcome? Alternatives may have been worse. The business of a university is different from the business of elementary and secondary schools. While accountability of educators of all levels is important, and we should respect the public's demands for accountability, we in all levels of education are responsible in different ways. Kindergarten teachers do not give career counseling and we do not teach children the alphabet. The public does not contact the closest elementary school when it wants to solve whirling disease or hantavirus problems nor does it expect universities to teach addition and subtraction. Students at different levels require different educational approaches.
Teaching faculty from kindergarten through graduate schools are aware of those differences and are responsive to the different demands. We are not sure a unified Board of Education would realize that. The current Board of Regents has only postsecondary issues to deal with and can give adequate attention to those issues. The Office of Public Instruction has a different set of worries, including different funding sources. We applaud recent conversations between the groups about common concerns, such as adequate preparation for post-secondary education, and agree they could be extended. However, one board is probably not the best way to approach management of state education.
Preparation of the PQ&O Document was a good sensitizing exercise to concerns about undergraduate education. However, we feel we'll have to do it all--continue with our three missions, and convince our public that our institution is damn good at all three!