U. of Cincinnati’s economics professors fight over teaching versus research
Outside of Crosley Tower, the University of Cincinnati’s campus is coming alive with the start of a new quarter. Inside, the 12th floor feels like a morgue.
The economics department, which occupies the floor, is down to 11 faculty members from the 23 they had a dozen years ago. Graduate students, who used to congregate in a lounge and the hallways outside the chairman’s office, haven’t been around since 1998, when the department’s doctoral program closed.
“The atmosphere here is just deadly,” says John A. Powers, an associate professor who has been here for 37 years.
This devastation is the fallout from a war between two faculty groups who clashed over priorities: teaching or research. One side wanted to raise the department in national rankings by focusing on publishing, the other to put a premium on teaching and advising students.
But as the battle raged on, the issues faded, and what remained was a power struggle, with neither group willing to give in. By last fall, tales of professors screaming at each other in the hallways and sending nasty e-mail messages back and forth had become commonplace. Administrators sat in on departmental meetings to keep order. The provost even tried to break the department into two groups, each with its own budget and director. When one side cried foul, the university brought in a mediator.
Finally, last September, the administration -- convinced that no one inside economics could run the department -- put it into a kind of academic receivership, installing a mathematics professor as interim chairman.
The situation at Cincinnati may be extreme -- but self-destructive, intradepartmental warfare has become a fact of life in academe. In the past few years, combative factions in a number of academic departments at colleges around the country have destroyed the collaborative ideal. Things got so bad in the political-science department at Vanderbilt University and in the English departments at Columbia University and the State University of New York at Albany that administrators had to step in and make dramatic changes.
The arguments that tore apart these and other departments typically start -- as at Cincinnati -- with the question of a department’s mission. The fight at Columbia pitted feminists and multiculturalists against traditionalists. At Vanderbilt, the rift was between professors who favored a statistics-based approach to political science versus those whose scholarship was less mathematical.
David Damrosch, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia who writes and speaks about academic culture, says faculty members and administrators share the blame for dysfunctional departments.
Administrators, pulled in different directions, are reluctant to set clear goals. “They want more than ever these days to emphasize their teaching mission,” Mr. Damrosch says, “but at the same time they want to rise in the rankings, which has largely to do with research and national reputation.”
And faculty members are loath to compromise with each other. “Each side tends to think, ‘One more battle, we’ll win, and it’ll all be all right,’” adds Mr. Damrosch.
But battles like the one at Cincinnati leave no one unscarred. The economics department has been decimated -- with few resources, a depleted faculty, and little hope of soon regaining even the meager reputation it once enjoyed in the field.
“No one wins when this happens,” says Richard McCarty, dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt. “Show me a case where a department has disintegrated where anyone can end up declaring victory.”
Research vs. Teaching
Until two years ago, Cincinnati’s economics department was controlled by longtime professors, many of whom had been in place since the late 1960s. Some had even earned their Ph.D.'s here. But most hadn’t published extensively, at least not in the discipline’s leading journals.
Charles A. Berry, who retired from the economics department in 2000, after 36 years, had conducted summer research projects for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but never published his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. That simply wasn’t the No. 1 objective at Cincinnati, he says. “The vision was always to teach well, to inspire students, and to do some research.”
An exception to the rule is Wolfgang Mayer, who has built a reputation in international trade. He has published widely in the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Theory, and serves on the editorial boards of Economics Letters and Economics and Politics.
As the department made new hires in the late 1980s and ‘90s, the new recruits made it clear that they aspired to careers like Mr. Mayer’s, not Mr. Berry’s. They had been trained at places like Indiana University at Bloomington, Washington University in St. Louis, and Northwestern University -- where publishing was considered the coin of the realm.
“This is a research university, where intellectual and scholarly activity should be nourished and promoted,” says one Cincinnati professor, who asks not to be named.
Instead, most of the department’s senior members showed disdain for scholarly work, says Jeffrey A. Mills, who was hired in 1992 and earned tenure seven years later. “They saw research as competitive and cutthroat,” he says. “They thought: You’re not going to win a Nobel Prize, so why waste your time doing research?”
At many research universities, those who publish most teach least. But at Cincinnati -- where each department makes its own rules about teaching loads -- every economics professor teaches two classes per quarter. “It makes no difference whether you publish in the very best journals or are recognized in your field,” says Mr. Mayer. “Research has not been rewarded here.”
Although the University of Cincinnati is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a “research extensive” university, the economics department has attracted a total of only $30,000 in research grants over the past five years. While research money is not as crucial in economics as in fields like biology or physics, it is one measure of a department’s scholarly prowess.
A list circulating around the department shows that Cincinnati economists published only 20 articles in the top 100 economics journals between 1990 and 2000. Just six professors were responsible for those articles. And Debashis Pal, a professor who arrived here in 1994, published half the total.
Mr. Berry says those who wanted the department to focus more on research were “wannabes” who “every time they wrote a letter to the editor claimed that as a publication.” He adds: “None of them have produced anything very earth-shattering, but they get a publication they can put on their vita.” Meanwhile, he says, “they sit in the office with their door shut and ignore students.”
Another professor aligned with those who emphasize teaching says the economists pushing for change have exaggerated their own scholarly significance. “I think we’re really all just shades of mediocrity,” says the professor, who asked not to be named. “If we all wrote 10 wonderful journal articles a year, that would be great. But we wouldn’t be at Cincinnati. We’d be at Harvard.”
Still, lack of publishing was a key reason the university decided to suspend admissions to the economics doctoral program in 1998. An outside review of the department, commissioned by administrators, found that while faculty members at Cincinnati are well known for their participation in professional organizations, they “are not active publishers” and “do not meet national norms for scholarly production.” In the most recent evaluation of doctoral programs by the National Research Council, in 1993, Cincinnati’s economics program ranked 97th out of 107 programs in the “scholarly quality” of its faculty.
But the suspension of the doctoral program came at a steep intellectual price. “Graduate students force you to be current, learn new things,” says Nicolas Williams, an associate professor. “They change the environment.”
And it’s unusual for a research university to lack a doctoral program in economics. “It looks funny if you don’t have one, the same way it would look funny without an English or math program,” says John J. Siegfried, a professor of economics at Vanderbilt who is also the secretary-treasurer of the American Economic Association.
Things Get Ugly
The loss of the Ph.D. program prompted a blame game that put disagreements over the department’s mission into high relief. Then, in 2000, Joseph C. Gallo stepped down after six years as chairman, leaving control of the department up for grabs. The election of a new leader quickly became a referendum on the department’s direction.
Mr. McCarty, the Vanderbilt dean, says a vacuum at the top can mean chaos for a department. “Successful chairs are able to hold a group of faculty together and help them work towards some shared vision. When the leadership isn’t there, for whatever reason, all of that breaks down.”
Working well with people, however, is not a skill that graduate schools emphasize. “Faculty members are trained to question and to be independent thinkers,” says Deryl R. Leaming, who edits and publishes the Journal of Academic Leadership. “Many pride themselves in taking that to extremes.”
After Mr. Gallo announced his intention to relinquish the chairmanship, the situation at Cincinnati got ugly. Each of the two camps fielded a candidate to replace him. The contingent of scholars who wanted to increase research productivity put forward Haynes C. Goddard, a longtime professor. The other side preferred Christina M. Kelton, who had worked closely with Mr. Gallo.
The selection process, in May 2000, was a fiasco: There was so much disagreement among faculty members that Joseph A. Caruso, dean at the time, shut down the search and named an interim leader. He chose Gisela M. Escoe, who specializes in economics education and had joined the department in 1991 to revise its principles course. Although Ms. Escoe had published some, her focus was on pedagogy, and she was aligned with those in the department who favored teaching.
The economists interested in scholarship considered the choice a slap in the face.
Ms. Escoe had a short, rocky tenure as chairwoman. Typical of the petty but dramatic flaps she dealt with was a run-in with three faculty members in November 2000. She clashed with Mr. Mills, Mr. Mayer, and Mr. Pal in front of the elevators in Crosley Tower when they accused her of making it difficult for some scholars to gain approval for their leave requests. One professor who overheard the argument called the provost’s office and considered calling the police when the argument sounded as if it might grow violent. Ms. Escoe later issued a memo reprimanding the professors. Those who confronted her that day say the episode has been overblown.
Nonetheless, Ms. Escoe quit halfway through her term to become associate dean for undergraduate education in arts and sciences. She won’t say much about the goings-on in the department, chalking up the problems to a clash of personalities.
Dividing Line
In April 2001, with the department on the verge of imploding, Anthony J. Perzigian, the university’s senior vice president and provost, put forward a radical solution: Split the economics faculty in two. To avoid inflaming tensions any further by showing even a hint of favoritism, he called the warring divisions “Group A” and “Group 1,” lest a “Group B” feel slighted. Under his order, the two groups would have separate directors and budgets, and develop separate rules of governance. But the professors in Group 1, balking at the suggestion that they relocate from the 12th floor, filed a grievance with the American Association of University Professors. Mr. Perzigian aborted the plan before the association had a chance to investigate.
Since Christopher K. McCord, the mathematician, took over last fall as interim chairman, the dust has begun to settle. Those who want to promote research and scholarship now make up a majority of the department, primarily because so many professors on the other side have left. Ms. Kelton filed a gender-discrimination suit in May over the botched election for department chairman, and this fall moved to the university’s College of Business Administration. Mr. Gallo, the former chairman, moved out of the department to start a Center for Organizational Leadership at the university. Philip Way, a veteran economics professor, has become director of the university’s honors program, and Ms. Escoe took the associate deanship. Two other professors are on the verge of retiring. And Robert Rebelein, who was considered by students one of the department’s best teachers, moved to Vassar College this fall because of all the fighting.
Although the acrimony has diminished, the department has been left with so few professors that it can no longer staff basic undergraduate classes. “We are stretched incredibly thin, and if we don’t get more resources, it’s going to be hard to continue,” says Mr. Williams.
In the past few years, the infighting has made administrators reluctant to devote money to economics. “We want to move our resources to where there’s the greatest promise for excellence,” says Mr. Perzigian, the provost.
Karen L. Gould, dean of arts and sciences at Cincinnati, plans to approve two new hires in economics for next fall -- the first in three years. The question, she says, is whether the department can “rebuild itself from the ground up.”
Mr. Rebelein has his doubts. “There was more promise there three years ago, a sense of working together that quickly broke down,” he says from his new post as an assistant professor at Vassar. “It appears to me that the university is very unlikely to provide the resources required to rebuild this department into a good economics-research department.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 8, Page A12