How a Radical Restructuring Plan Fractured a Campus and Fueled a No-Confidence Vote

Faculty members at the University of Tulsa overwhelmingly voted no confidence in the institution’s president and provost on Wednesday, bringing to a peak tensions that have festered since the spring. The vote followed months of infighting over a controversial restructuring plan university leaders unveiled in April.

Last week Tulsa’s Board of Trustees reaffirmed its support for the administration’s proposal to cut 40 percent of academic programming, primarily in the humanities and natural sciences, in an effort to ensure the university’s survival by meeting the STEM-focused needs of the 21st-century work force. The board also reiterated its faith in a president and provost who were accused by some faculty of undermining critics and working to silence dissent on the campus.

Top administrators, faculty members, and students have been embroiled in a battle for the past seven months to define the identity — and the future — of a university whose leaders trumpet its “liberal arts core” while seemingly chiseling away at its base. Ninety-nine years after Henry Kendall College merged with another Oklahoma college to become the University of Tulsa, the institution finds itself today at a crossroads, caught between administrators’ “True Commitment” restructuring plan and professors’ longing for a time when excellence in the classroom was good enough.

A Bombshell From the Provost

Ask Tulsa faculty members what they were doing on the morning of April 11 when the restructuring plan was announced — “4/11” as they call it — and they’ll probably remember every detail.

Scott Carter was teaching a class, so he wasn’t present when Janet K. Levit, Tulsa’s provost, dropped the bombshell at a campuswide faculty meeting that the administration was “reimagining the academic structure” by eliminating several liberal-arts programs, one of the university’s greatest strengths. When his class let out, Carter met a line of “completely dejected” colleagues. It didn’t take long to find out why.

Later that day, arts and sciences faculty members attended a forum to learn more about the proposal from university leaders. Afterward, Carter made his way over to President Gerard P. Clancy. The two men had always been friendly enough, though not close. Carter had never called Clancy “Gerry” like some faculty members did. They shook hands.

“This must have been a really hard decision,” Carter recalls saying to the president. “And I swear to God, he looked around at the audience and said, ‘No, Scott. This is one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make.’ ”

The words stuck with Carter.

“An easy decision?” he asked himself. “To destroy this university, and all the hard work that we’ve been doing here?” From there on out, Carter says, it was “game on.”

As a faculty senator representing the Henry Kendall College of Arts and Sciences, Carter reported the next week that his colleagues had voted 89 to 4 against the restructuring plan. The margin of opposition, he says, indicated that his fellow faculty had reached the same conclusion: In formulating the plan, administrators had violated the principle of shared governance.

In interviews with The Chronicle, Tulsa students and professors describe a campus in turmoil, uncertain of its own identity. Some say administrators have tried to intimidate and muzzle critical faculty members by serving them with ethics violations for speaking out — accusations that Levit dismissed in an interview. At least two professors have hired lawyers, and one lodged a formal harassment complaint against Clancy. Several of them formed an opposition front, the Concerned Faculty of TU, a decentralized group that has strategized to overturn the plan.

On the other side are the university’s leaders, who argue that Tulsa must restructure its academic offerings to weather an uncertain future. They contend that the members of the Concerned Faculty are the real “bullies,” obstructing difficult — yet necessary — progress.

“We do understand the sadness and the emotion that comes with it,” Clancy said in an interview. “We’re not going to disregard that at all.”

Last week’s vote by trustees signaled that, barring the unexpected, the university will move forward with the plan.

Bold, or Reckless?

As laid out, the True Commitment will gradually eliminate core undergraduate programs in philosophy, religion, theater, dance, musical performance, and languages. Graduate programs in art, fine arts, education, history, anthropology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, geophysics, and geosciences are also on the chopping block.

The colleges of business, health, and law will morph into a “professional super college.” First-year students will start out in “university studies,” a new division of arts and sciences focused on foundational courses.

Levit pitched the True Commitment as a wholesale re-envisioning of the university: STEM-focused, and heavy on terms like “student success” and “professional, practical” development. Administrators call the plan “bold.” Others have called it reckless.

And students — the ones who spoke up, anyhow — were less than thrilled. Shortly after the announcement, many of them came together on the campus green to hold a mock funeral for the liberal arts at Tulsa, complete with a fake coffin and paper headstones bearing the names of doomed programs. They dressed in black, some holding signs with messages like, “You killed my degree” and “True Commitment to who?”

But some argue that Tulsa has more degree programs than it can justify for an enrollment that hovers around 4,500 students. The plan advocates a push toward more “21st century” fields of study. More cybersecurity and neuroscience, fewer classics and foreign languages.

“For too long, we have tried to be everything to everyone,” Levit told faculty and staff in April. “We have been spread too thin and, in many cases, have not been able to achieve excellence as a result.”

The True Commitment, Tulsa’s administrators promised, will remedy that.

An Evolving Student Body

When Clancy, who took office in 2016, looked at the future of higher education, he was troubled by the looming headwinds. The number of high-school graduates was poised to drop off. Tulsa was going to face increasing competition for online and nontraditional students. Already, the international-student population — key to maintaining the university’s robust petroleum engineering program — was down 80 percent over six years, jeopardizing tuition revenue.

The student body was beginning to look different, too. Though Tulsa’s enrollment of domestic students is at a record high, they are increasingly first-generation and require more support systems on campus. More and more often, their primarily middle-class families are struggling to foot the bill for private-college tuition. Tulsa’s sticker price for tuition, room, and board is $53,148, although the College Scorecard puts the university’s average annual cost at less than $24,000.

If the future was shaping up to be uncertain, Tulsa wanted to get ahead of the curve. Cutting 40 percent of academic programming would be a daring move, but administrators calculated that only 6 percent of the students would be affected.

Still, the proposed cuts stunned faculty, partly because Tulsa’s financial footing seemed sturdy. The university had been running deficits, tax forms show, but Clancy has maintained that Tulsa is on solid fiscal ground. Its $1.1-billion endowment is an anomaly for a university of its size, but Tulsa doesn’t want to dip into that pool for its day-to-day expenses.

True Commitment critics say the data used to justify the cuts — numbers that are not publicly available — were inherently flawed, and they claim that the Provost’s Program Review Committee, a body formed in 2018 to evaluate Tulsa’s academic programming, violated university procedures.

Committee members, handpicked by the provost, had to sign blanket nondisclosure agreements — a practice the American Association of University Professors says is inconsistent with “widely accepted standards of shared governance.”

“No one on the committee could talk about what they were doing,” says Tamara R. Piety, a Tulsa law professor. “And that really inhibited the ability of the committee members to find out whether or not some of the data they were relying on was accurate.”

Tulsa’s student newspaper, The Collegian, also reported that committee nominees were denied seats unless they were willing to make cuts to their own programs. Yet none of them taught in the humanities or natural sciences — two of the areas hit hardest under the plan that ultimately prevailed.

Some dispute the very nature and charge of the committee, which was formed in response to a 2018 visit from the Higher Learning Commission, the university’s accreditor. Shortly after the visit, the commission released what faculty have characterized as a negative report on Tulsa, giving the university just one month to confront its shortcomings, or else face probation.

“The Higher Learning Commission really wanted us to be much more rigorous around assessments and improvement, and to put those pieces in place very strongly,” Clancy said in an interview with The Chronicle. “But also, looking to the future, are you in a position that you’ll be strong five, 10, 15 years from now?”

Tulsa declined to release the accreditor’s preliminary findings to The Chronicle. According to documents on Tulsa’s website, the commission stated that the university had operated under a “build it and they will come” philosophy, failing to conduct comprehensive program reviews, despite having at least 20 undergraduate programs that awarded degrees to six or fewer students each year.

Under the True Commitment’s plan for the humanities, the university will keep 25 undergraduate programs and eight graduate programs, as well as a handful of minors and certificates. Programs with relatively low enrollment numbers will fade out over a five-year period.

‘Fragile’ Shared Governance

Critics of the plan, some of whom viewed the Higher Learning Commission’s report while it was briefly public in 2018, say the commission never mandated that the university undertake a large-scale restructuring effort. The complaints in the report were highly varied, the critics say, homing in on topics like the university’s Board of Trustees, shared governance, and athletics.

The few faculty members who read the report before it was sequestered say it identified Tulsa’s “fragile” system of shared governance as a key deficiency. The university suffered from a “top-down” culture, the document said, according to those who saw it.

Shortly after the accreditor delivered its report, Tulsa’s Faculty Senate tried to resolve the flaws in shared governance by amending its constitution to require administrators to bring major academic changes before that body prior to taking them to the Board of Trustees.

The board approved those amendments. Yet the True Commitment, perhaps the most significant academic change in Tulsa’s history, was never brought before senators. And faculty argue that by submitting the plan directly to the board, administrators directly violated university guidelines.

Frustrations heated up in August, when the Faculty Senate moved to condemn the administration for trying to execute the restructuring plan without proper faculty input. Clancy and Levit — as well as several deans — attempted a filibuster to prevent a faculty vote. Matt Lamkin, a Tulsa law professor, remembers the moment the administrators stood to be counted — only to fail by a single vote.

“It was pretty striking,” Lamkin says. “To see the president, the provost and all of the deans who were present, literally standing against faculty, to prevent the faculty from voting on a statement about shared governance.”

Levit later apologized in a public letter, conceding that the administrators had missed the mark and “deepened the chasm.”

So the faculty were given an ultimatum. They could suggest amendments and “alternative ideas” on the restructuring plan, but any proposal they came up with would have to result in several million dollars in savings on academic expenses.

The other catch? They’d have 30 days to assemble their alternative plan. Jacob A. Howland, a philosophy professor, characterized the offer as an attempt to delay the confidence vote that took place on Wednesday. With about 60 percent of eligible faculty members voting, the no-confidence tally was 157-44 against Clancy and 161-41 against Levit.

In a statement Wednesday night, university spokeswoman Mona Chamberlain said that a number of faculty members had abstained from voting “because they consider the process illegitimate.”

On Monday, five faculty members who were opposed to the no-confidence votes wrote The Chronicle to say that they had asked the American Association of University Professors to suspend the vote and investigate the Tulsa chapter, which they say does not represent the views of all faculty members. “There are indeed a wide range of views on campus,” they wrote.

Clancy and Levit have assured faculty that there are no plans for layoffs. But Tulsa did announce an early retirement offer in tandem with the True Commitment — and Howland says some tenured professors are already seizing the opportunity.

“The fact is, this isn’t going to be the kind of school that we signed up for,” Howland says. “It isn’t going to be the sort of school that we loved and flourished at for so many decades.”

The Concerned Faculty estimate that at least a third of the university’s faculty align with the group. But while some of its members have been vocal, penning op-eds and hosting “teach-ins” with the students, others — primarily those who don’t have the protection of tenure — have chosen to remain anonymous, fearing retaliation.

“To characterize their anonymity as ‘bullying,’” wrote Lamkin, the law professor, “states the matter precisely backwards.”

Students Caught in the Crossfire

Tulsa says that students are at the heart of the True Commitment. When she first announced the plan, Levit says they were the ones who had “voted with their feet.” But in recent months, many students say they have found themselves caught in the middle of constant infighting.

Baylor Brandon is one of them — a freshman who says he fell in love the first time he set foot on Tulsa’s campus. The professors, he says, were “amazing.” The campus itself even felt like liberal arts, right down to the Collegiate Gothic architecture. And that’s just what Brandon wanted: a good philosophy degree from a good, well-rounded university.

But he says no one ever told him about the True Commitment. Brandon went through the admissions process, the enrollment process, and a week-long summer orientation. And he says he heard nothing — at least not until classes got into full swing and Brandon attended a teach-in, where he learned what the True Commitment would mean for his degree.

To Brandon, it was a shock – like Tulsa had suddenly lost sight of its own fundamental nature.

“The University of Tulsa has a reputation as a very strong liberal-arts college,” he says. “That’s kind of the core of the whole thing.”

The dean of students assured Brandon that, since students who are enrolled in the 2019-20 academic year won’t be directly impacted by program cuts, he’d be able to finish his degree.

But barely two months into his freshman year, Brandon feels like his degree doesn’t have a value — that unlike the STEM programs the administration is pushing, a liberal-arts education doesn’t have a place in the 21st-century work force.

Bits and pieces of Brandon’s free time are spent out walking the campus, handing out flyers and talking to students about the True Commitment. And while he has yet to encounter a student who doesn’t know about the plan, most of them, he says, just don’t understand it.

“If they do know what it does, they don’t know what they can do about it,” he says. “There’s a thing with the students — there’s a feeling of powerlessness, of, ‘We’re just students. What can we do to prevent this massive overhaul of what this university is?’”

For Carmyn Taylor, Tulsa was the dream school. The best liberal-arts education in Oklahoma. But the political-science major didn’t find out about the True Commitment until long after enrolling.

“I idolized this university for a long time,” Taylor says. “I know just how quality its political-science and English departments are, and the level of education I’m getting. And the way they went about implementing it, the lack of shared governance, not explaining the changes to incoming freshmen before they enrolled — all of it felt betraying.”

A student-led petition calling for a repeal of the True Commitment has collected more than 8,000 signatures. Both undergraduate- and graduate-student governments voted no confidence in the plan. Brandon says one vigilante has been leaving anti-True Commitment messages, written in chalk, outside Clancy’s door. And each day they appear, Brandon says, they’re quickly power-washed away.

The Hail Mary

As the deadline for the 30-day offer closed in, faculty task forces made their offer.

The Faculty Senate would endorse a limited number of program closures — 28, rather than 84 — but would do so only on two conditions:

• The administration would have to take all academic stipulations of the True Commitment first through faculty-elected committees and then the full senate.
• University leaders would consent to an audit of administrative expenses.

On November 7, Tulsa’s Board of Trustees sounded the death knell for the faculty proposal, voting to both reaffirm the True Commitment and express its “full and unqualified” confidence in the administration and in the provost’s program-review process.

Clancy announced the board’s decision in a campuswide email. He justified the vote by citing changing demographics and declining high-school graduation numbers, but stressing the Board’s fiduciary commitment to Tulsa’s “best interests.”

Members of the Concerned Faculty, hell-bent on stopping the True Commitment, might still have an ace up their sleeve. In August the group drafted a complaint that, if filed, would ask Michael J. Hunter, Oklahoma’s attorney general, for an injunction to give parties more time to “devise a strategic plan that will serve the best interests” of Tulsa.

The group believes that the attorney general has standing to sue Tulsa’s Board of Trustees on grounds that it failed to obtain adequate data before approving the True Commitment. Although Tulsa is a private institution, the draft complaint argues that its nonprofit status means carrying out the plan could pose a threat to public interest.

The complaint also contends that Tulsa — the city, rather than the university — could face negative financial consequences from the proposed changes. The university’s theater programming alone feeds around $320,000 into the local economy each year.

But even if the complaint works — if the members of the Concerned Faculty get what they want, if the attorney general sidelines the True Commitment — the events of the past year have soured the very idea of the University of Tulsa in the minds of many of its faculty and students.

Clancy and Levit find themselves wishing they could turn back the clock, maybe 10 years or so, to give the university a chance to review itself and make changes at a more reasonable pace. The consensus seems to be that the transformation happened too abruptly, catching too many faculty off-guard and allowing too little time for Tulsa to grapple with the impending changes.

“We’ve had to move quickly,” Clancy says. “If you look at those headwinds that are coming, they’re coming fast. And they’re soon. So we’ve got to move quickly.”

But to the members of the Concerned Faculty, a year of battle with their own institution has been a disenchanting experience — one some of them hope can serve as a warning to other universities.

Correction (11/14/2019, 6:59 p.m.): This article originally stated that none of the members of the Provost’s Program Review Committee taught in the humanities, performing or creative arts, or natural sciences — the programs hit hardest under the restructuring plan. In fact, Teresa Valero, director of the School of Art, Design and Art History, was on the committee. The article has been corrected.

Lauren Fisher is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @lauren__fisher, or email her at lfisher@chronicle.com.