Faculty fears administration plans to turn UNCG into a trade school

“We educate the nurses, teachers, accountants, small-business owners, and other professionals who fuel the engine of prosperity across the state,” begins UNC Greensboro’s “Reinvention and Innovation” website, which describes the university as “Innovating Our Way Out” of a financial crisis created by shrinking enrollment.

Some faculty fear it’s abandoning core values by “re-inventing” itself as a trade school, an objective first expressed in 2013 by former governor Pat McCrory, who said that university funding should not be “based on how many butts in seats, but how many of those butts can get jobs.”

Of the two local institutions in the UNC system designated doctoral/ research universities by the American Council on Education, only NC A&T is increasing funding for graduate studies.

“We are expanding our grad programs and adding new ones,” wrote one A&T professor, who also requested anonymity. “A&T is all fired up about becoming Research I, which is a Carnegie rating that ranks universities. Faculty here have received bonuses and are getting more support in general to become a major institution.”

The opposite is happening at UNCG, according to associate professor of history Mark Elliott, vice president of the UNCG chapter of the American Association of University Professors, who described UNCG’s nationally acclaimed grad programs as “contracting rather than expanding.”

“Starting in 2020, we hit some losses of students and are doing our best to try and figure out why and stop the bleeding.”

This crisis, said Elliott, is exacerbated by the Board of Governors.

“Their new spending formula only rewards campuses that are growing their undergraduate enrollment, whereas most of our growth has historically been in graduate programs. Our administration wants to adjust by cutting graduate programs and we’re all freaking out.”

Despite the cuts, alleged Elliott, “highly-paid administrators continue to receive bonuses and raises despite their poor performance.”

Spoma Jovanovic, who retired last August from UNCG’s Department of Communication Studies, agrees.

“The pattern over the last many, many years has been to give huge raises to administrators and paltry ones to faculty and staff.”

This has led to what Elliott describes as a “mass exodus, with science and humanities professors not being replaced the way they are in the university’s preprofessional programs.”

Jovanovic said that the current budget crunch dates back to 2008. “Since then, the strategy has been to hire more, and more expensive, enrollment professionals, more staff, and more administrators.” She also expressed skepticism about the expensive recreation center that opened on Gate City Boulevard in the fall of 2016.

“There was tremendous pushback by many faculty about the cost passed on to students. If a new recreation center was necessary (something for which there was scant evidence, unless you count the self-serving study by the company that built it), perhaps the scale and focus should be changed to address the entire UNCG student population rather than elite athletes.”

Other veteran faculty members criticized what they characterize as a de-emphasis of traditional Arts and Sciences in favor of programs they call “flash in the pan.”

In February 2022, the University announced what its press release called “a multi-faceted set of initiatives to seize the growing demand among current and prospective students for a holistic approach to the booming world of E-sports.”

A year later, that boom has become a bust, according to the May 20 New York Times article “ The E-Sports World Is Starting to Teeter ,” which reported that owners of e-sports teams are laying off employees, ending contracts with star players, and selling their teams at a loss.

“There’s a real moral crisis among the faculty,” said Elliott. “I think one of the worst decisions administration has made is that programs in which a Master’s is a terminal degree, meaning there is no Ph.D., cannot fund their graduate students. They will now depend on students paying their own way, with no assistantships.”

Provost and executive vice-chancellor Debbie Storrs recruited two years ago from the University of North Dakota, denies assistantships have been eliminated for terminal master’s degrees, but acknowledged that “due to budget reductions which all units and divisions faced, there was a reduction to the graduate stipend budget,” and that the remaining funding has been “prioritized for students directly involved in teaching and other important pedagogical activities.”

One of UNCG’s smallest but most prestigious programs is the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Its most notable graduate may be Kelly Link, whom “The Sandman ” creator Neil Gaiman calls “a national treasure,” and whose 2017 collection “Get in Trouble” was a Pulitzer finalist. In 2018, Link was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant.

While Link was in the program, she worked on the Greensboro Review , one of the nation’s oldest and most distinguished literary magazines. Storrs stated that “the College’s Advancement team also has been working with the creative writing program to identify philanthropic support for the Greensboro Review .”

Julie Funderburk, associate professor of creative writing at Queen’s University of Charlotte and 1994 alum of the UNCG writing program, said that the Greensboro Review is needed.

“The Greensboro Review is valuable not only as a learning lab for student editors but also its contribution to the national literary landscape. This magazine is an important way the program attracts new students. What it brings to UNCG has more value than what will be recouped by more cuts to such a small but important program.”

Via email, Storrs stated that the Board of Governors has prioritized teaching over other academic endeavors.

“At UNCG, deans and chairs are responsible for assigning differential teaching loads for faculty with consideration of programmatic instructional needs and their budgets. They also consider faculty members’ research/ creative activity, service, and outreach activities which are critical to our mission, inform our teaching, and make important contributions to the community, state, and nation. Given our budget realities due to declining enrollments and the new funding formula, differential teaching loads provide chairs and deans with the ability to address our core instructional needs.”

Multiple faculty members say that Storrs’ claim that “deans and chairs are responsible for assigning differential teaching loads” is no longer true, as this autonomy has been taken away and faculty can no longer be given a lighter course load while they are doing research that goes above and beyond their positions. They counter that enrollment is not down in all departments, and ask why it’s necessary to review those that are functioning well and have increased enrollment.

They also note that increasing teaching loads does not produce more students, and question why administrators have not taken responsibility for their role in declining enrolments, which they allege was anticipated. “Why are faculty paying for the incompetence of administration?” asked one.

“We are engaging in a comprehensive review of all academic programs as is best practice to ensure the academic o erings are aligned with our mission, student demand, and industry and economic needs of the state,” wrote Storrs in an email. “We are also reviewing our academic portfolio due to our declining enrollments. A faculty-led committee is developing rubrics to evaluate programs. The review process will inform future decisions.”

Elliott believes that those decisions “will focus on cutting a lot of graduate programs,” as however much the provost may state she values them, “they are not respected by the Board of Governors.”

Which, Elliott alleged, “also penalizes schools that have a lot of debt or in which students take a lot of time to earn their degrees.”

In 2018-19, US News & World Report ranked UNCG “number one in the state for social mobility” specifically because so many of its students are either working full-time or have financial aid.

“So, the very thing that got us praised nationally gets us targeted in Raleigh. They say they’re rewarding campuses which lower their student debt and decrease their time to graduate, but as both our provost and chancellor have stated, this punishes students for being poor. We have an extraordinary number of students who are working while going to school. That’s not going away unless we increase scholarships based on financial need.”

Elliott said he has hopes for the independent mission study being conducted by UNCG chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

“We’ve hired an outside auditor to do an analysis of UNCG’s budget and explain exactly what our budget situation is and whether or not we are in as dire a situation as the administration has suggested necessitating cuts. I don’t doubt we’re in a bad financial situation, but I think it’s been exaggerated. We hope to have a report to answer a bunch of what for now are just questions, and to have it done before the Fall semester. So, stay tuned, this is a story in development.” !

IAN MCDOWELL is the author of two published novels, numerous anthologized short stories, and a whole lot of nonfiction and journalism, some of which he’s proud of and none of which he’s ashamed of.