Real cost of “Spires of Excellence”
Posted on | April 21, 2010 |
We can only wonder if the “Spires of Excellence” will benefit UVM in the long run, or simply reassign resources to specific areas. What implications does this have for UVM staff?
Here is an excerpt from Burlington Free Press writer & blogger Tim Johnson:
Beachheads of distinction
We were away last Friday for the unveiling of the three new “spires of excellence,” which turned out to be so modest in proportion that we couldn’t help but wonder what all the fuss had been about. No new graduate degree programs, and just five new hires to get the three programs up and running.
Of course, they’re not really spires yet — they’re more like beachheads, where resources are funneled and marshaled in anticipation of an advance. The big unanswered question remains what investments really will be necessary to turn them into hallmarks of national or global distinction, with what implications for the campus at large. Those “resource allocation” decisions will be made over the next few years.
The first step, at least for food and complex systems, is to recruit intellectually visionary leaders. The food proposal, which external reviewers effectively said was not ready for prime time, seems to be the needier of the two.
Another question is how many spires an institution UVM’s size can realistically support. The announcement holds out the prospect that any of the five other rejected proposals might eventually advance to spire status after further refinement. Then of course, there’s the commitment to let the faculty participate from the get-go in proposing still more spires for consideration in what is described as “an iterative and continuing process.” Even if UVM really becomes a “premier small research university,” could it conceivably sustain more than a handful of transdisciplinary research enterprises of first-tier national prominence?
Faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences might well wonder. The first three beachheads have their centers of gravity elsewhere (engineering, medicine, agriculture). The fear is that TRI will saddle the arts college, in the absence of a beachhead-to-be-named later, with more students and less resources. That partly explains why most of the faculty resistance to TRI has come from A&S.
Adding to the unsettled air at A&S has been speculation among the faculty that the contract of Dean Eleanor Miller, who came to UVM five years ago from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will not be renewed, but we have it on pretty good authority that the rumor is wrong and that she’s sticking around a while.