Disestablishment
In April 2010, in response to an order from the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) made at its March meeting to cut 2.75% from the university’s salary budget, Provost Elizabeth Capaldi submitted a plan to university President Michael Crow to disestablish the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. The plan also proposed the disestablishment or merger of other university units. The university estimated that the disestablishment of FIGSE would save $1,292,000 in salaries, although no faculty would be terminated. An external search for a new dean was underway at the time of the proposed closure. The University of Arizona, under the same budget reduction mandate from the Board of Regents, imposed a hiring freeze and tiered furloughs to meet its obligation. ASU had lost more than $108 million since 2008, and President Crow was reluctant to impose additional furloughs, which reduced salaries by $24 million the prior year. In a statement to the ASU community, President Crow wrote, "We understand the situation the state faces. During the next 30 days, we will be reviewing implementation measures to try to minimize disruption to our faculty and staff and keep them focused on providing exceptional service and education for Arizona students and their families."
The disestablishment of FIGSE was controversial, as it was opposed by FIGSE’s faculty and students, and protested by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in a letter sent to the University Provost.
Representing the FIGSE faculty, Professor Beth Blue Swadener made the following remarks to the ASU Faculty Senate on May 3, 2010, as the body considered whether or not to support the proposal:
I am substituting today for Carlos Ovando, who is in Denver at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, where the FIGSE faculty and students have contributed to a total of 181 sessions.
During the meetings, two of our faculty colleagues were inducted as AERA Fellows, and one received a lifetime achievement award. Everywhere I went during the meetings I was asked about two things: Arizona’s new immigration law and the disestablishment of the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School at ASU, or "FIGSE."
While it is now too late to stop the latter, I believe it is important to go on record as opposed to not only the decision made by the administration, but to raise concerns about the process, and the lack of faculty consultation or representation.
You have had the opportunity to read both the faculty and student statements concerning maintaining the integrity and high rankings of our graduate programs in education. As faculty, you can imagine that suddenly being told we were "free agents" and should not plan potential moves together with our program colleagues has led to fragmentation, loss of some very strong colleagues, and a lack of transparency and accurate information. Within this very challenging climate and short timeline, we have all worked hard to maintain program integrity and support our students.
We have also sought to support the 32 staff losing jobs, following the loss of 37 staff last year, in a reorganization of our college.
The larger context of concern to Senate is governance-- each time such major changes are made without faculty consultation or input, it has immediate and far-reaching impacts on our programs and, moreover, erodes traditions of faculty governance by making our work environment a more corporate, top-down space. As one colleague at AERA put it, "I thought ASU was a 21st Century New American University, but it looks more like a 19th Century factory with a boss controlling the workers!"
Our sister institutions responded to the ABOR mandate in far less dramatic ways with future tiered furloughs (at UA) and closed searches and non-replacement measures at NAU. When I spoke with deans from both universities at the AERA meeting, they said that their presidents simply didn't view this as requiring any extreme measures.
Thus, while recognizing that it is too late to change the disestablishment of our Institute and Graduate School, I respectfully request that you vote "No" on this measure and thereby signal our university faculty’s stand on the flawed process by which this action was taken, and the importance of faculty governance in such matters.
The ASU Faculty Senate voted against the proposed disestablishment, with 73 votes against the motion, 20 in favor, and 6 abstentions. On a related vote at the same meeting, the senate opposed the renaming of CTEL as the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College by 75 to 18, with 5 abstentions.
Despite senate opposition, the Arizona Board of Regents approved Capaldi’s proposal, and FIGSE was disestablished in May 2010. At the time, a majority of FIGSE faculty joined the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering, and a few other units. Today, 85 percent of former faculty members are affiliated and/or teaching courses for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.
All FIGSE doctoral programs moved to the newly named Teachers College, except Applied Linguistics, which moved to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Counseling Psychology, which moved to the School of Letters and Sciences.
Carol D. Lee, president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), sent a letter on behalf of the organization, urging ASU to reconsider:
Dear Provost Capaldi:
We are writing to you on behalf of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to express our concerns about pending decisions that could reduce the vitality and significance of scholarship and training in education research at Arizona State University. AERA is the national interdisciplinary research association of approximately 25,000 scholars who undertake research in education. Founded in 1916, AERA aims to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.
We are aware that many universities like ASU face stringent economic times and need to arrive at strategies that permit transformation and change consonant with mission and purpose. In considering fields of study and scholarship for higher education institutions, it would seem to be a priority for our nation to invest in the next generation of scholars and scholarship addressing the scientific study of education and learning and the policies and practices that shape educational outcomes from early education to the workforce.
ASU has been the home to a community of highly productive faculty members known for the significance of their education research, the quality of their teaching and mentoring, and their professional service. Large numbers of your faculty are leading contributors to this field—publishing in the most competitive and highly ranked journals, holding prominent editorships, and serving as scientific advisors on committees nationally and internationally. For many years, Arizona State has enjoyed visibility as an environment that supports research and training of excellence in education research.
We write, now, out of a concern that, while scholarship and training in education are important scientific and policy priorities to our nation, they may come to have a diminished role and presence at ASU through the proposed reorganization. Although we realize that talented faculty and their students are likely to be retained in any reorganization, the university’s commitment to this arena of interdisciplinary scholarship will be seriously eroded were identifiable graduate programs to be disestablished and essentially eliminated at ASU.
We just quite recently learned of this turn of events and realize that we write at the eleventh hour. Nonetheless, we also are aware that you are strong in your commitment to vibrant interdisciplinary fields of inquiry and training. We believe that, with more time to examine the question and the quality of your graduate programs, ASU will be better situated to reach a decision that serves your institutional goals and that of the nation. Therefore, we urge that you defer such action until options and opportunities can be fully identified and assessed.
We would welcome the opportunity to help in any way we can.
Sincerely,
Carol D. Lee, PhD, AERA 2010 President
Felice J. Levine, PhD, Executive Director
Arizona State University Executive Vice President and Provost Elizabeth D. Capaldi sent a letter dated April 20, 2010, in response to the letter from Carol D. Lee and Felice J. Levine.
Dear Dr. Lee and Dr. Levine:
Thank you for your letter noting concerns about Arizona State University’s recent reorganization in our colleges of Education. Let me begin first by clarifying some erroneous information noted in your letter. Absolutely no graduate degree programs in education are being discontinued or disestablished as a result of this reorganization. Over the past three years of massive budget cuts in Arizona, we have been steadfast in our commitment to protect faculty lines and academic programs. This reorganization, like others we have undertaken, is an administration reorganization that reaps significant budget saving and also has the effect of reorganizing faculty into intellectual clusters tha can continue to build on existing strengths and also forge new and important directions.
I am sharing with you a recent article published in Change that outlines what we have continued to try to accomplish through such reorganization at Arizona State University without compromising quality.
On a related note, as you may know, many of our doctoral programs are highly ranked. These rankings are based on the quality of the degree program and not the organizational umbrella under which the programs find themselves. We value the quality of research and educational vision that the majority of our faculties in education provide. We believe that this quality will continue to improve as our faculties from across the university coalesce around significant educational issues to be addressed in the decades ahead.
As you know, change can be very difficult. In the multiple reorganizations we have already put in place, faculty come to understand that there can be many wonderful new opportunities for them to explore with new colleagues and new programs. At the very core of much of these reorganizations has been an increased interdisciplinary synergy, with new programmatic opportunities for our students that would not have emerged in the traditional structures that were in place.
I am sorry you were misinformed.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth D. Capaldi,
Executive Vice President and Provost
Although no graduate education programs were disestablished concurrently with the disestablishment of FIGSE, the University immediately reorganized and restructured all education graduate programs, severely reducing options for majors, and eliminating all graduate programs specifically focused on the education of immigrant and Native students. FIGSE faculty reassigned to other units were not permitted to develop new programs, and were required to teach for Teachers College, with no right of participation in program management. By the end of 2011, more than a dozen senior FIGSE faculty had left ASU as a result of the reorganization,. Program rankings dropped drammatically for the College as well as for specific program areas.
Read more about this topic: Mary Lou Fulton Institute And Graduate School Of Education