In California, Tensions Over Growth Divide a Campus

Over two hours in late November, in a packed meeting that spilled out into the hallway, dozens of professors at the University of California at Riverside described fallout from an ambitious and fast-paced expansion plan. There was not enough lab space to accommodate new hires. Deferred maintenance and understaffing resulted in leaking ceilings and dirty bathrooms. It was impossible to find enough classroom space for all the new students. And, they added, the administration had been dismissive of the faculty’s concerns.

“This is not world class,” said one professor, reading a statement from her colleagues. “It is third class.”

Two weeks later, under threat of a no-confidence vote, Riverside’s provost, Paul J. D’Anieri, announced that he would step down at the end of the academic year, citing “significant differences” with the faculty. Kim A. Wilcox, the chancellor, promised to redouble efforts to communicate with professors, slow down the university’s expansion, and reorganize oversight of facilities maintenance and renovation.

Some of Riverside’s problems are unique to the campus, but they stem broadly from the kinds of challenges, pressures, and aspirations that shape decision-making at campuses across the country. They include shrinking public funds, the pursuit of prestige, a growing emphasis on research, frequent administrative turnover, and managing change in institutions that are known for being slow-moving, in part by design.

Patrick M. Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, notes that the University of California’s model of shared governance, unusual in how much power it gives faculty members, would make an ambitious and rapid growth plan like Riverside’s all the more challenging. “The question is whether, given the complexity of shared governance, how hard would it be to move the most ideal plan forward under these circumstances?”

Now Riverside is wrestling with how to heal divisions on campus.

The hiring strategy that the provost designed, and is at the core of the controversy, centered around cluster hiring, in which groups of academics were to be brought in to work around interdisciplinary research themes. Concerns started to be aired publicly last year, when a faculty survey found that many people were unhappy with the rollout of that strategy. It was part of a broader plan announced by Mr. Wilcox, who took the helm four years ago, to hire 300 new faculty members, representing a 50-percent increase in the size of the faculty. He also wanted to increase enrollments by several thousand students.

So far, Riverside has 181 new faculty members — although most are not part of a cluster — and tensions remain between the administration and the faculty.

Administrators had hoped their plan would raise Riverside’s profile through cutting-edge research and would increase diversity among the faculty on a campus where 70 percent of students are from minority groups. But many professors said the leadership, staffed with relative newcomers, hadn’t consulted faculty sufficiently in designing the clusters and rushed into the hiring process. Some pointed out that they had warned the administration in 2014 that the campus lacked a “realistic and comprehensive plan” for growth, particularly when it was still struggling with budget cuts brought about by the 2008 recession. Between 2007-8 and 2009-10, for example, state appropriations to Riverside fell by $38 million even as enrollments were growing.

Strain on Facilities

After the faculty survey came out, the administration agreed to slow down cluster hiring. But troubles still appeared. According to some professors in the sciences, departments struggled to find lab and office space for the new hires. As more students descended on the campus, the university scrambled to schedule classes to fit them all in. And years of declining public support had already pushed the campus to its limits on facilities maintenance and staffing. At the town-hall meeting, an assistant professor of dance showed slides of broken furniture and mildewed showers as she described chronic staffing and space shortages, which she said jeopardized the health of the program.

Speakers worried that the strain on space, equipment, and staffing would hurt Riverside’s reputation and its ability to serve its students. “There doesn’t seem to be a real solid vision on how to achieve this growth and what we’re actually growing for or why, other than we have to get bigger to get into AAU,” said Richard Redak, chairman of the department of entomology, during the meeting.

In a later interview Mr. Redak said nobody is against attaining AAU status, which signifies entry into an elite group of research institutions, but that “the rapidity with which we have embarked on campus growth with minimal planning and minimal faculty consultation has resulted in all these problems.”

Dylan E. Rodríguez, chairman of the Academic Senate, said in a telephone interview that his foremost concern is that Riverside live up to the practice of shared governance, which he and others say is practiced more intensively within the University of California than in some other systems. Mr. Wilcox and Mr. D’Anieri, who arrived in 2013 and 2014, respectively, had not previously worked in California and several deans are also new to the campus. “The Academic Senate is supposed to be in a relationship of consultation with the administration. It’s at the heart of almost everything we’ve seen transpire over the last year or so.”

Riverside’s growth problems, he says, are also the result of a broader decline in funding of public higher education in California, which has forced campuses to rely more on private money and student tuition. The November meeting, he said, was a step toward re-establishing the faculty’s role in navigating these challenges and charting a course for Riverside’s future. “This is about faculty taking leadership, not simply rejecting a particular administrator.”

Katherine Kinney, an associate professor of English, recalled a meeting with a consultant brought in to discuss space issues. She was stunned to hear the consultant question whether faculty members need offices and suggest that perhaps they could just reserve office space as needed, a concept known as “hoteling.”

While nothing came of that idea, Ms. Kinney said it reflects a larger trend among university leaders to treat higher education like a business, using growth strategies divorced from the culture of the place in which they work. At the town-hall meeting, several professors said they felt the leadership failed to appreciate Riverside’s existing strengths in research and teaching, including a history of successfully educating a highly diverse student body.

“It’s kind of a self-fulfilling thing where you train people to share a certain set of values, share the same language and same models,” Ms. Kinney said. “You run the risk of not speaking the same language of the faculty.”

Mr. D’Anieri declined an interview request, saying that to “maintain an atmosphere of respect and trust” he preferred not to talk about issues in the media. In his email to the campus announcing his resignation as provost and executive vice chancellor, he said he would continue on as a faculty member.

‘A Shared Culpability’

In a telephone interview, Mr. Wilcox said that “most everyone agrees we went too far too fast.”

But he defended his administration’s record, saying that Riverside has progressed in several key areas. Graduation rates rose by 11 percent in three years. The percentage of new faculty hires who come from underrepresented minority groups rose from 12.3 to 21.9 percent in one year. And federal research grants have increased 42 percent since 2013.

Some of the frustrations people have had over Riverside’s growing pains and directed toward Mr. D’Anieri “were also part of the success,” he said. “Let’s not lose track of what we’ve accomplished.”

Mr. Wilcox said he would work to improve communication with the faculty, and he disagreed that his administration had failed to engage in shared governance. “In my experience, we have worked as close or closer with faculty leadership here than any university I’ve been at,” he said. “Being listened to and having your perspective be the final decision are two different things.”

Some faculty members agree that the administration is being blamed for things beyond its control and that their colleagues have overlooked some of the good things brought about by the cluster plan, including a series of strong faculty hires. “The underlying problem is that this campus has been horrific at doing renovations. That predated the chancellor’s arrival here by decades and is probably the biggest problem on campus,” said B. Glenn Stanley, a professor of psychology. But, he added, “I don’t think anyone in the administration understood the magnitude of the problem.”

Jan Blacher, a professor in the Graduate School of Education who has worked at Riverside for more than 30 years, said the state has long expected the UC system to make do with less and less. “There’s a shared culpability,” she said. “Pointing the finger at one or two people and saying, You did this, is silly.”

Mr. D’Anieri’s mistake, she said, was to focus on faculty hiring to the exclusion of facilities maintenance and other needs. “Paul D’Anieri was a one-step-at-a-time guy,” she said. “And faculty are saying, guess what, you need to do all of this at the same time. If that mind-set comes out of this, we can really do good for this campus.”

Mr. Callan, of the Higher Education Policy Institute, notes that virtually all University of California campuses feel the need to increase their research capacity to stand out from the crowd. And that’s true in state systems across the nation. “This pressure plays out across the U.S.,” he said. “It leads to mission creep that makes higher education very expensive.”

Faculty members at Riverside stress that they’re in agreement with the administration over wanting to make their university stronger. From that common goal they hope they can work together. “I don’t think there’s a single faculty member here who is in any way hesitant to move forward,” said Mr. Rodriguez, “changing the notion of what it means to be a 21st-century university.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.