Scott Cowen, President of Tulane University, announced the renewal plan for Tulane. The basic jist is that the U lost a lot of money in the wake of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history and is scaling back on some stuff. They are cutting back athletic programs and dropping some graduate programs, focusing on those that “have demonstrated ability to be world-class and, in the sciences and engineering, have the proven ability to obtain competitively awarded grant funding”. The chart outlines the current degree programs.
First signs suggest minimal disruption for our Department (International Health and Development) and very little for the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in general. (A plus for chosing a top program, I guess!) From a short message from Pierre Buekens (the Dean of the SPH&TM): “the Plan opens many new opportunities for the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. No major change is planned for any of our Departments or our teaching programs.” So, no major surprises seem to be lurking on that horizon.
In fact, there are signs for opportunity. Some neat initiatives: all new and future students will be required to perform service learning in rebuilding efforts (this is in addition to the wonderful service learning that Tulane undergrads already participate in — something that has very much impressed me about the undergrad experience here); all first and second year students will live in residence halls to rebuild the community; and (the most interesting), “our professional schools will augment their current programs to increase interaction with undergraduate students.”
I am curious about how and if undergraduates will have “increased interaction” with our professional school. (FYI: “Professional School” means just graduate students. Every School I’ve attended post-bachelors has been a professional school.) Possibilities for teaching positions, etc? It will be interesting to see how it all falls out… especially since current faculty are already majorly strapped.
Deb | 09-Dec-05 at 4:07 pm | Permalink
Holly,
The doctoral program at Tulane is being ended. Also, over 200 faculty, many of whom are tenured are losing jobs. These are troubling outcomes to the downsizing at Tulane. I’ve copied an article from the Chronicals of Higher Education below about the changes at Tulane.
I’m glad that your program won’t be affected.
Tulane U. to Lay Off 233 Professors and Eliminate 14 Doctoral Programs
By JEFFREY SELINGO
Article tools
Headlines
Tulane U. to lay off 233 professors and eliminate 14 doctoral programs
Federal panel on higher education appears likely to call for testing of college students
Advisory committee to U.S. Education Dept. penalizes accreditor of conservative colleges
Colleges should look beyond the Internet to recruit students, marketers say
NYU joins Coca-Cola boycott over allegations of union busting and rights violations in Colombia
State Digest: Requests to extend desegregation remedies in Alabama, and other news from the states
Information Technology
Texas Supreme Court endorses college district’s technology and activity fees, voiding $12-million judgment
A little more than three months after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, forcing administrators to cancel the fall semester at Tulane University, the storm has dealt another blow to the institution.
On Thursday university officials announced a sweeping restructuring that will slice $60-million from the annual budget and will result in the layoffs of 233 faculty members, the elimination of 14 doctoral programs and 5 undergraduate majors, and the suspension of 8 athletics teams.
Tulane’s president, Scott S. Cowen, revealed those plans for remaking the 13,000-student institution after concluding two days of meetings with the university’s Board of Administrators in New Orleans. The plan is based in part on the expectation that 86 percent of Tulane’s students will return in the spring.
Since the storm hit, Tulane — the largest remaining employer in the city — has continued to pay most of its full-time workers, and Mr. Cowen has trumpeted the university’s planned reopening on January 17 in visits to cities around the country, talking about how the institution would reposition itself in a Peace Corps environment and help New Orleans rebuild.
That repositioning began in earnest with the cutbacks announced on Thursday. In an interview, Mr. Cowen said the idea behind the changes was to make the institution more “campus- and student-centric.”
“We have acknowledged that the undergraduate program will be the center of a new Tulane, with fewer graduate programs,” he said. “We will focus on and invest more heavily in what remains. We will get stronger by subtraction.”
The changes are wide-ranging:
The university will go from 45 doctoral programs to 18. Fourteen will be totally eliminated: in economics, English, French, historical preservation, law, political science, sociology, water resources planning management, social work, and five in engineering. Other Ph.D. programs will be combined.
At the undergraduate level, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering will be reorganized into two new schools: the School of Liberal Arts and the School of Science and Engineering. Five undergraduate majors will be eliminated, four in engineering, plus exercise-and-sports sciences.
Of the 233 faculty members laid off, 53 are from academic departments and 180 are from the medical school. The medical school took the biggest hit because the smaller population of New Orleans will result in fewer patients and less revenue, Mr. Cowen said.
All undergraduates will enter the university through a newly created undergraduate college, rather than through applications to individual schools.
The university will maintain all 16 of its athletics teams, but temporarily suspend training and competition in eight: men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s tennis, women’s swimming and diving, women’s soccer, and men’s track and field. The teams will compete for the last time in the spring, and the university will continue to honor the scholarships of athletes even after they stop competing. By keeping all the teams, the university meets the minimum required to stay in Division I-A of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
The reorganization will take effect almost immediately, with the medical-school layoffs effective January 1. The doctoral programs will be phased out at the end of 2007.
Longtime observers of higher education say that such an overnight transformation of a major research university like Tulane is unprecedented in the modern history of academe in the United States.
“You have to go back to the Civil War, when William & Mary closed for a few years, to see anything comparable,” said David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.
Whether Tulane will be able to remain a major research university is a big question. Although the institution is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, with an $810-million endowment, Tulane is “not starting from a position of strength, at the top of the heap,” Mr. Breneman said. The cutbacks, coming at a time when so many universities aspire to be among the top institutions in the country, are “a horrible blow” to whatever Tulane’s ambitions were before Katrina.
But Mr. Cowen strongly disagreed with the assessment that Tulane’s plan would shrink the institution’s standing over the long run. Decisions about which programs to eliminate or combine were made based on reviews completed over the past several years.
“We basically cut the programs that were not the strongest,” he said. In a way, the hurricane prompted the university to make decisions it could not make before the storm hit. “Under the current way universities operate, you can’t make these decisions under normal circumstances,” he said. “It takes an event like this.”
He said the university would establish a new program called the Partnership for the Transformation of Urban Communities, that will support educational, outreach, and research programs stemming from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. The institution will also add a community-service requirement for all students and an interdisciplinary seminar for freshmen.
Of the 53 nonmedical professors laid off, 26 are tenured; in the medical school, 39 of the 180 dismissed faculty members are tenured. The layoffs represent about 10 percent of the academic faculty and 35 percent of the medical faculty. Mr. Cowen said an elected faculty advisory committee reviewed the plan and that the university would follow its faculty handbook during the reorganization.
Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, said Mr. Cowen had called him on Wednesday to discuss Tulane’s plans. Mr. Cowen is the only president from a hurricane-affected New Orleans institution to call the AAUP to talk about how the university’s plans conformed with the association’s guidelines on terminating professors, Mr. Bowen said.
“I’m satisfied that President Cowen is eager to comport with AAUP standards,” Mr. Bowen said. “But until we see the final details, it’s really difficult to say whether Tulane has adhered to our standards.”
Mr. Bowen said the association’s standards call for advance notification, discussion with faculty members, and adequate severance pay.
On Thursday, professors were trying to make sense of the proposals.
“I think it’s a fairly good and rational plan,” said Joel A. Devine, chairman of the sociology department. He said that while he hated to see any university employees lose their jobs, the reorganization seemed to be well thought out.
The doctoral programs will not be missed much, he said, since most top-notch masters’ students were sent on to better doctoral programs anyway. This just “formalizes” that procedure, he said. He did acknowledge that some professors would be upset by the cuts, but said that they were driven by institutional realities.
Judith M. Maxwell, an associate professor of anthropology, said the plan “made sense in terms of the current necessities of the university.” Still, she said, the cuts will be difficult for those affected. She noted that the loss of doctoral students and programs will mean that professors will have to take on more work.
“Faculty, I think, are all on board with trying to bring Tulane back,” she said, adding that professors are already teaching an overload of courses in the spring. But “there’s a limit to what faculty can do,” she said.
To help design the reorganization, Mr. Cowen said he had relied on seven external advisers: Malcolm Gillis, a former president of Rice University and an economics professor there; William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a former president of Princeton University; James J. Duderstadt, a former president of the University of Michigan; William R. Brody, president of the Johns Hopkins University; Eamon M. Kelly, a former president of Tulane; Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies; and Farris W. Womack, former chief financial officer at the University of Michigan.
Mr. Cowen said he did not expect to make additional announcements about layoffs. “I anticipate this plan should do it,” he said. Tulane has already laid off 242 full-time staff members (The Chronicle, October 24).
Tulane was not the only New Orleans higher-education institution to announce layoffs this week. On Wednesday, Loyola University New Orleans said that it would let go 28 workers, about 5 percent of its staff, effective December 31. In addition, 27 staff positions that were vacant have been eliminated, and the college will reduce expenses by 20 percent. No tenured faculty members were affected by the layoffs at Loyola.
Piper Fogg and Scott Smallwood contributed to this article.