Greatness Visible
The University of Texas has more going for it today than ever before: unregulated tuition, unfettered diversity, smart students, winning sports teams, first-class cultural facilities, academic programs with buzz, and finally, an administration with realistic goals. So why isn't it living up to its potential? Good question.
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The reason for the large classes is that the student-teacher ratio at UT has ballooned over the years. In 1966 and 1967 UT had around 27,000 students and a faculty of 1,800: a ratio of 15 to 1. If this were still the ratio today, UT would be even with Michigan and ahead of Berkeley and Virginia (16 to 1). But UT has gained 25,000 students in the ensuing years, while adding fewer than 1,000 faculty positions, with the result that it is 110th in the U.S. News rankings, with a ratio of 19 to 1. Big universities—and smaller ones too—are going to have big classes. Many introductory courses are suitable for a lecture format—but not the only literature course most students will ever take.
THE ISSUE OF SIZE IS INSEPARABLE from the issue of money. Some readers (and legislators) will likely resist the notion that UT is financially strapped. There are those who believe that state funds are siphoned off into athletics, which is not true—"In fact, we pay a two-percent fee to the university for using their business office for our transactions," says men's athletics director DeLoss Dodds—and there are others who believe that UT is rolling in oil money from its West Texas lands, which used to be true but no longer is. Today the income from the Permanent University Fund must be shared with twelve other institutions in the UT System.
What is true is that political support for funding higher education has shrunk. In 1985 the Legislature appropriated $235.2 million in general-revenue funds for the Austin campus' academic budget. In the fiscal year that started on September 1, state spending for the academic budget will be $291.9 million. This represents a piddling increase of about 25 percent. During that time, total state general revenue spending grew by more than 600 percent. For years UT officials and lobbyists attributed their lack of support to the Texas political climate: Legislators were more interested in helping their hometown colleges than UT, or the key budget writer happened to be from Texas Tech. But it is clear now that the dwindling support for UT was part of a nationwide reorganization of state priorities, in which K-12 schools and health care for the poor bested higher ed in the competition for tax dollars.
The decision by state leaders to eliminate the recent budget deficit without raising taxes forced UT, like all state agencies, to find ways to reduce its spending. Inevitably, the consequences are showing up in the classroom. One course that was seriously diminished was the basic government class, Introduction to American and Texas Politics, that state law requires all students in public universities to take. Government 310L, as it is designated, has long been taught in large lecture sections numbering well into the hundreds, but once a week, students have been able to break up into small groups of 25 to 30 for discussions moderated by teaching assistants. Facing a mandate for cuts, the government department decided to reduce the number of TAs in the course, knowing that the number of remaining assistants would not be sufficient to divide the class into reasonably sized discussion groups. Consequently, the groups were eliminated. A faculty member named David Prindle, in an e-mail message to his colleagues in the department, took exception to the decision.
"The purpose of these introductory courses is partly to provide non-government majors with basic facts about their country and their state," Prindle wrote. "Partly, however, it is to help them become better citizens, a task that goes beyond the inculcation of facts." To this end, he pointed out, he had required his students to write an essay comparing the reality of the American political system with the democratic ideal and evaluating the extent to which the United States government approaches the ideal. "Although students can acquire a beginning education about how to fulfill this essay requirement from lecture, . . . they must have smaller discussion sections, " he went on to say. "They must be able to ask questions, have questions posed to them, be given hypothetical situations to analyze, and argue among themselves and with the teaching assistant who runs the section." Without the discussion groups, he could no longer ask students to write the essay. "From now on," he wrote, "the students in my introductory course will be evaluated entirely on their test-taking proficiency."
Some people in the government department say that the decision to reduce the number of teaching assistants made sense. In a time of shrinking resources, the argument goes, the first priority of the department should be to serve its own majors. These number around two thousand, making government the most popular major in the College of Liberal Arts, and most TAs have been redirected to upper-level courses. To decide this argument, one would have to know what the alternatives were, and even Prindle conceded in his missive that every one of them was disagreeable. One thing about the elimination of discussion sections ought to be beyond argument: Legislative indifference to funding higher ed is seriously damaging UT's ability to teach its students how to think, which is what a great university is supposed to do. Come to think of it, this would make a great subject for a Government 310L discussion section—if there were any.
THERE IS NO CATEGORY IN THE rankings for buzz, but the awareness that a university seems to be "hot" is bound to give a boost to how it is viewed by the rest of the academic world. For all its problems of the moment, UT is a highly visible national university right now. If it seems that UT, having been unable to achieve the recognition for quality that it covets, is taking comfort in just plain recognition, well, that is a familiar story in a state that has always felt somewhat isolated from the mainstream.
And so it was reckoned a triumph when the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times took overdue notice this year of UT's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, a library for scholars with one of the great collections of manuscripts, books, and photographs in the world. The Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, which moves into its permanent home in 2005, made a splash with the acquisition of the Suida-Manning Collection—a trove of Old Masters works—and the gift of the Leo Steinberg Collection of more than three thousand prints. Burnt Orange Productions, a for-profit film production company established by a new UT foundation, will produce and distribute low-budget feature films, and the nascent UT Film Institute, which will allow film students to work alongside professionals on those projects, could very well revolutionize the concept of film school. What everyone knows best about UT, of course, is its athletic program. UT teams compiled a record in 2002 and 2003 that assistant athletic director Bill Little characterizes as the best ever compiled by any university. For the first time, an NCAA school reached the Final Four in men's and women's basketball, the College World Series in baseball and softball, and finished in the top ten in football and won its bowl game.
But buzz can take UT only so far. The uncomfortable truth is that UT is best known for its non-academic assets. In addition to the HRC and the Blanton, the far-flung UT empire includes the McDonald Observatory, the LBJ presidential library, the Sam Rayburn library (in Rayburn's hometown of Bonham), the Winedale Historical Center and an accompanying summer Shakespeare program, and the Paisano Ranch of the late Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie. The University of Texas is a great treasure, even if it is not yet a great university.
A BLUEPRINT FOR GREATNESS EXISTS, and everybody at UT knows what it is. "State institutions have only one way to be great," says King, the former dean of liberal arts. In his view, there are three tiers: research universities at the top, with doctoral programs and the extra funding they require and controlled undergraduate enrollment; then good undergraduate institutions that may offer some advanced-degree programs; and then community colleges. If this sounds familiar, it's what California did in the fifties. It's how Berkeley got to be Berkeley and why six University of California institutions rank ahead of UT in the U.S. News rankings. Other states—New York, Virginia, Wisconsin—have tried to duplicate the three-tier system with far less success. Texas might have pulled it off in the sixties, with a popular governor (John Connally), a powerful UT regents chairman (Frank Erwin), and a visionary academic at the helm of UT (Harry Ransom), but then the sixties counterculture overran the UT campus and Erwin became absorbed with power struggles with administrators and faculty. The moment passed, never to return.
Today UT's goal of greatness is out of step with the political climate. It's an expensive, elitist idea in an anti-tax, anti-elitist age. The buzzword in K-12 education is accountability, which can be achieved through standardized testing. Now the UT System is trying to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of higher education. This is no easy task. What outputs are you supposed to measure? "Higher ed is becoming like medicine," says Charles Miller, the chairman of the board of regents. "It's highly regulated, highly subsidized, and the people who get the services aren't the people who pay for them. The cost keeps going up, but it is not clear to the public that there is value added by the additional cost."
My Library
