The Pace of Change
This is a transcript of a talk given by Chancellor John D. Wiley at a Roundtable event at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on April 12, 2006
Today I thought I would talk about change, and I’ll explain what I mean by that in just a minute.
How many of you were here on campus, employed by the university, in 1848? [No hands raised.] That’s kind of what I expected. How about 1975? And 1990? [Many hands raised.] I can tell you right away that you’re somewhat atypical of the campus as a whole … About 11 percent of our employees today were here on the payroll in 1975, and about 40 percent in 1990. That means that most of the people on campus can’t remember what happened in 1975. So what I’m expecting as I tell you about the changes that have occurred since then — and I’ll tell you in a minute why I picked ’75, and it’s just coincidentally the year I arrived here — is to see a lot of heads nodding yes, remembering things, and the majority of the heads nodding no, meaning “I can’t believe it was that way.”
Some things obviously change very abruptly. I wouldn’t want to be the chancellor at Tulane now, trying to rebuild after Katrina. Their whole world changed in a matter of hours. But most changes that occur at an institution occur incrementally and slowly, and they sneak up on you and you don’t realize how much the whole place has changed unless you take a somewhat longer view.
Slow is a relative term. All of us live our lives on a time scale and experience things and form our perceptions about our circumstances on a time scale of hours or days or maybe months — at most, a few years. But around a place like this, the really significant changes usually take decades.
Whatever we don’t like today we’re impatient to change quickly, and the things that we do like or feel comfortable with we’ll fight to the death to keep forever. That’s just human nature. There’s nothing we can do about it. There’s probably nothing we should try to do about it, because both impulses are needed. A car needs an accelerator and a brake. Without one or the other, you’re in big trouble. And institutional change requires impatient, committed people who will keep driving toward some desired goal. It also requires more cautious, conservative people to remind us that we need to preserve what doesn’t need changing. So we’ll always have a balance of both, but it really helps to understand those two impulses and to put it all in context. So what I’ve done is gather a few examples of what this campus was like in 1975 and what it’s like today, and I’ll divide them into several different categories.
We were a very different place organizationally in 1975, and these are just random examples — off the top of my head for the most part. I could have cited many others.
In ’75 we had a vice chancellor position for the health sciences and the deans of medicine, nursing and pharmacy reported there. Veterinary medicine was not included — no one thought about veterinary medicine as having any relevance to the health sciences. If we were to reorganize that way today — and don’t think that we are — there are lots of other units that probably would be included. There is work going on today in veterinary medicine that unambiguously has huge implications for human health. The same is true in CALS [College of Agricultural and Life Sciences], in engineering and in lots of other places on campus.
That health sciences vice chancellorship also was responsible for the hospital, which in those days was a part of the university, reporting to the regents through the chancellor. We had a school of allied health, like any other school or college.
To mention one specific college and the changes that have taken place there, I’ll just go to the one I know best: Engineering. Back in 1975, [the College of] Engineering had a Department of General Engineering and a Department of Engineering Mechanics. Neither one of those exists today. They have just been eliminated. We had departments of civil engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, nuclear engineering and metallurgical engineering. None of those exist in that form today. They’ve all evolved and changed their names to civil and environmental engineering, electrical and computer engineering, chemical and biological engineering, engineering physics, material science and engineering, and we have a brand new department — biomedical engineering — which is one of the fastest growing, most vibrant departments in the college. It didn’t exist in 1975.
Even these departments that have changed their names have done a lot more than that. They’ve changed their curriculum several times over. They’re currently involved in making another big set of changes. The courses that exist today that existed back in 1975 have dramatically different content. Lots of material has been thrown out, lots of new material put in. I know that because I recently took a look at the syllabus for a course that I developed in electrical and computer engineering, and I can tell you there’s no way on earth that I could go back there and teach that course today. The content is utterly unfamiliar to me — not because I’ve forgotten it. It’s just different. It’s a whole different course with the same title.
This has happened all over the campus. In 1975, we offered 16,467 differently named courses. In the intervening 30 years, we’ve eliminated 6,660 of them. We’ve added 1,390 new ones. So we now have just about 11,000 courses — 11,197 — a substantial reduction in the breadth of the curriculum. Some of those changes we could and should be very proud of. Others were cost-free. They were courses that were on the books, but were never taught anyway, so we just erased them. But there is a huge amount of curricular change buried in those numbers.
` In 1975, we had 239 differently named majors. Today that number is 213. In these intervening years we’ve eliminated 65 majors, added 33 new ones, and, through mergers and acquisitions, changed lots of others to produce a much more efficient, compact and targeted curriculum today than we had in 1975.
In the IT area in 1975, we had a group called the Administrative Data Processing Unit [ADP]. We had the Madison Academic Computing Center [MACC]. In Engineering, there was a unit called the Instrumentation System Center [ISC], and in the Graduate School, a unit called the Physical Sciences Lab [PSL]. ISC has disappeared. That was eliminated completely by Engineering. PSL still exists, but the reason I mention those four together is that all four of them offered computing services to the campus. They sold computers and they sold service contracts to repair computers. They were all competing with each other for the same finite customer base, and they were all losing money.
We merged ADP and MACC to form the current DoIT, and we eliminated ISC and forced PSL to get out of the computing business. If you ask any three people in the IT area to evaluate those changes, you’ll get six different opinions. I’m convinced that there is no optimal way to organize IT service delivery, and we’re constantly studying it and constantly changing. We just had an external review, and there probably will be more changes ahead in the future. I can’t promise that, but I can predict it.
Technology in IT has changed almost everything about our business operations. In 1975, students registered for courses by standing in line for hours on end and by running all over the campus. I can see heads nodding yes and no. I won’t to go into the gory details of that. Some alumni, believe it or not, remember it fondly and wish it were still that way, but our students are not among them. They register online.
Purchasing — and all of other business services, such as personnel — everything has been radically changed by IT. I have today in this cell phone more computing power and more memory than anyone on campus had in their laboratory computers in 1975 — dramatically more, a factor of 2,000 more. I think it would be very difficult to name another development that has had a bigger impact on the way we do business, or the way we live our lives, for that matter.
It isn’t that some of these things weren’t feasible in 1975. They just hadn’t taken hold. I worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories — that was a unit of AT&T — and one of my first jobs there was to work on developing LEDs. [Points to the back of the room.] I pointed because that exit sign is lit up by LEDs. We had a few ideas about what the phone company wanted to use them for. They were mostly on operator switchboards in those days, but no one could have predicted how pervasive they would become in our lives.
The same is true of cell phones. Believe it or not, there were cell phones within Bell Labs. The technology was available. It was clunky and it would have cost $10,000 per handset, but it was available. The same is true of picture phones or video over phone lines.
No one in 1975 could have predicted what we have today or what we do with the technology that was being developed then. I mention that just by way of saying that if you think you can predict today what some future chancellor will be saying in this room 30 years from now, forget it.
In the facilities area — I’m going to gloss over this lightly, because you all know how dramatically our buildings have changed even just in the last few years. Never mind 30 years. But I will mention, maybe fondly, that in 1975 in Engineering we were teaching lots of our courses in World War II temporary buildings — the Quonset huts — and we only just last year removed the last of the Quonset huts from the campus. In ’75 all of our greenhouses, with no exception, were in shabby condition, almost to the point of being unusable. We now have probably the best collection of greenhouses anywhere in the country.
Athletic facilities, most of the things that people use and think about today, didn’t exist in ’75. My favorite example out at the intersection of Mineral Point Road and Whitney Way were the Charmany and Rieder farms, and they really were farms in 1975. You could drive by there and see horses running around in the fields. Today that’s 110 businesses employing 5,500 people, and this university did that unassisted over this time period.
In the area of people, we’re roughly the same size. There have been some adjustments in size, but we have about the same number of students as we did in 1975. I couldn’t get the actual numbers for 1975. I could only go back to ’78. That’s because before ’78 everything is in handwritten ledgers, and we haven’t had time or taken the trouble to input these into our databases. So the electronic records that I needed only go back to ’78.
Let me tell you this. In 1978, 15 percent of our faculty were women. In the College of Engineering in ’75, there were no women faculty. Well, technically there were two, but they weren’t engineers. They were English graduates who taught technical writing to engineers. But we had no female Engineering faculty whatsoever.
In 2005, we were at 28 percent female in the faculty. I don’t know today how that compares with the theoretical number. About 10 years ago, I did this calculation, looking up the availability pool of Ph.D.’s by every department we have on campus and calculating how we compared to what’s available to be hired. At that time, the equilibrium number for the campus would have been about 35 percent. I’m sure it’s higher that that now, but we’ve made substantial progress.
We’ve doubled the percentage of women in the faculty. For the academic staff, we’ve gone from 40 percent female to 50 percent. Classified staff is about the same: 56 percent in 1975 and 55 percent today.
For non-white faculty and staff, in 1978 we were 4.7 percent minority in the faculty. Today we’re 15 percent. That’s to be compared with a Wisconsin state average of about 10 percent and a national average of about 20 percent, so we’re closing the gap, but it does take time.
In the academic staff, we’ve gone from 7 percent to 11 percent minority, and in the classified staff from 3 percent to 11 percent. Both of those latter two numbers are higher than the Wisconsin state average and both of those job categories are heavily drawn from Wisconsin applicants.
Beyond just those numbers though, the job mix has changed dramatically, especially in the classified and academic staff. We’ve had a substantial growth in academic staff and a decline in both faculty and classified staff. In 1978, 21 percent of our employees were faculty, 29 percent were academic staff, and 49 percent were classified. Today, 15 percent of our employees are faculty, 49 percent are academic staff, and 36 percent are classified.
So we’ve had a loss of about 120 faculty, a loss of about 300 classified, and an increase of just about 4,000 in the academic staff. The job titles have changed a lot, too. Many of the losses in the classified service have been what would have then been called secretaries, receptionists, data clerks. All of those ledgers that were filled out by hand needed people to do that. In the academic staff, the vast majority of the increase is in research titles, research categories.
So keep this in mind. I know we’re all impatient about diversity, but turnover in the employment categories is relatively slow, and so significant change takes time.
Some of you have heard me try this exercise before, but it’s especially instructive, I think, to think about the top 20 positions on campus — the high-visibility positions — the chancellor, vice chancellors, deans and directors of major units. In the period since 1975, and as a matter of fact, here I’m going to deviate from that 1975, because all of the action starts in 1990.
Just in the last 15 years, we’ve seen the first-ever female chancellor and the first-ever female vice chancellor for legal and executive affairs. Now I’ll stop saying first-ever, because these are all first-evers: female dean of the Graduate School, female dean of Education, female dean of Pharmacy, female dean of CALS, female director of the Institute for Environmental Studies, female chief of police, female director of DoIT or chief information officer, female CEO of the hospital. All of these are firsts-ever, as far as I can tell.
During that same period, we’ve also seen the first-ever African-American vice chancellor for administration, African-American vice chancellor for student services, African-American dean of the Law School, Latina/American Indian dean of students, Asian-American dean of students, Asian-American dean of Human Ecology, Latino dean of Education and American Indian dean of the College of Letters and Science. I hope I haven’t left any out.
I want you to just try to visualize a photo gallery of the holders of those positions over the history of the institution, and what you’ll see is 143 years of almost exclusively white male faces, followed by 15 years with all the diversity I just mentioned. So, as impatient as we may be at the pace of change on the time scales of our perceptions, this is a dramatic change. That gallery would appear as if in about 1990 somebody threw a switch and changed the place abruptly. It wasn’t abrupt, but someone did throw a switch, and it was Donna Shalala. And we’re continuing to work on it.
I’m often told that culture is the hardest thing to change and the slowest thing to change in an institution. I’m sure there is some truth in that. Some kinds of behaviors are harder to get rid of or improve on than others, but I want to give you a counter example to keep in mind that proves that major cultural change can take place: the example is smoking.
Those of you who weren’t here in ’75 won’t remember this and you won’t believe it, but in 1975, it was very common for faculty and students to light up in class. Anyone was free to smoke in his or her office. I don’t know if there was smoking allowed in the library, but I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s almost inconceivable today. Even the most hard-core smokers would be personally offended if someone lit up inside our buildings.
The change didn’t happen overnight. There was a lot of resistance at first. Again, this was a Shalala edict to make the campus smoke-free in the interiors. There was a lot of resistance, a lot of fighting, a lot of reasons why it was a stupid idea or why it wouldn’t work or why no one would comply. At first there were no enforcement rules. It was just voluntary. Eventually, when we got down to that hard core who were still resisting, there were some enforcement rules. Actually, it wasn’t until this last year that we got rid of what I think was our very last office smoker, who spent 15 years resisting.
For the most part, the culture of the campus has changed, and I think that should give all of us reason to hope that we can make other big changes on reasonable time scales.
The budget is almost the last thing I’m going to mention, and I’m not going to say as much about that as the published titled of my talk might have led you to believe.
Back in 1975, this was unambiguously a state-supported institution. The state funds were the biggest single piece of our budget and that, together with tuition, I think, was about half of our budget. I didn’t take time to look it up before coming here, but that’s my recollection. The mix now is just dramatically different. The biggest single piece of our budget is federal, the second biggest is gifts and grants, the third is program revenues, fourth is tuition, fifth is GPR — the part of the state money that we actually have some control over and can spend and hire staff with — and the smallest piece is the so-called special-purpose revenue that the state gives us, but then immediately takes back.
The most dramatic growth has been in the gifts and grants area, and let me give you a couple of what I think are shocking numbers there. I’ll start with WARF. WARF was established in 1928, so they’ve been around for 78 years, and during that time, they’ve transferred to the campus about $800 million, with 91 percent of that just in the last 30 years.
In the first 47 years of their existence, they transferred $73 million to the campus, and in the last 30 years, $726 million. That is a phenomenal growth rate. Now, all of the actuaries and accountants in the audience are saying “Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not that impressive because of inflation and so on,” but if you actually do the arithmetic, it didn’t happen smoothly and continuously. It wasn’t just like compound growth of a bank account, but you can simulate it that way. The effective compound-growth rate over those 78 years is 8.3 percent. You’d be hard-pressed to get that in most investments, and there’s almost nothing else in the university that grows that rapidly — none of our costs, for example; none of our big ones.
The UW Foundation was established in 1945, so they’ve been around for 61 years. Over those years they’ve raised $2.56 billion total, $36 million of it in their first 30 years and $2.526 billion of it in the last 30 years, and two-thirds of that just in the last five years.
We got one gift that was announced last week [$50 million from John and Tashia Morgridge for the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery] that is larger than the total amount of money UWF had raised in their entire first 30 years. That’s a compound annual growth rate effectively of 15.2 percent, and there’s no reason to believe that either of those is going to reverse suddenly. Increasingly, there’s no doubt at all that funds from WARF and the UW Foundation and program revenue funds and entrepreneurial funds of other kinds will continue to grow faster than our base budget.
I’m going to give you just one more example and then wrap up. Some things change, and not only are we not aware of the change, but we have exactly the wrong impression of the change. I hope this wouldn’t be true of anyone in the room, but I can tell you that in the legislature and the public at large, most of the parents, most of our alumni, the impression is that in the good old days, whenever those were — let’s say it was 1975 — students graduated in four years and that nowadays it takes five or six or seven or eight years, and what the hell is going on here? This is outrageous. You’re wasting taxpayer money.
The fact is that in 1975, the average time-to-degree was 4.4 years. Today it’s 4.1 years. We’ve been systematically driving it down. Now, some of that we can take credit for. Some of it has to do with superior preparation of the students that are coming in today, but nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that in every degree program on campus the median and modal times to degree are just what they’re designed to be. Most of our students are graduating on time, so much so that when you average all our degree programs, including the five-year degree programs, the average is about 4.1 years.
The other dramatic change is this, and when I go around and talk to alumni, sure as anything in every group there is going to be someone who raises a hand and says, “I remember my first class at Wisconsin — a big lecture class — and the professor said, “Look to your left and look to your right: Only one of you is going to graduate.”
It wasn’t that long ago that the graduation rate was about a third. In fact, in 1975 it was under 60 percent and today it’s just about 80 percent. That, too, is not well understood or appreciated by the public. We’re doing a much better job of getting students through. Frankly, I’m not sure if there is a theoretical maximum graduation rate when you take into account health and financial issues, and family problems and so on. My guess is that it’s somewhere around 90 percent, even though some private schools claim they have graduation rates of 98 percent. I think they’re fudging their numbers by erasing some dropouts or something.
We’ve done a remarkably good job and I think it’s fraudulent to admit students that you don’t believe can succeed, and it’s irresponsible then, having admitted them, to not help them succeed. That’s almost a definition of teaching. And so we’re very proud to keep working on increasing that.
Between ’75 and 2005, as a result of those two things, we’ve increased the number of degrees produced per year by 28 percent with a smaller faculty and about the same number of students. So the next time you hear someone charge that universities, unlike businesses, haven’t realized any efficiencies, haven’t improved their productivity, it’s baloney.
Let me end with just a few things that haven’t changed over the last 30 years. In 1975, we were in the top 10 in research funding and in Ph.D. production. We had lots of programs that were ranked among the very best of their kind in the country. These are probably true for a lot more than 30 years. We don’t have data. There weren’t rankings that long ago. NSF didn’t keep data on research funding. But it is true that in 1900, there were only about 15 research universities in the country, and we were one of them, so I think it’s safe to say we’ve been in the top 15 at least for a long time.
Right now, for the first time in my memory, we’re No. 5 in research funding. We’ve been in the top five for as long as NSF has been keeping records, but we’ve usually been No. 3, occasionally No. 2, occasionally No. 4. To my memory, this is the first time we’ve ever been No. 5, and that should be an item for some concern. I’m not sure how much.
We are holding commanding leads in a lot of important research areas, getting a lot of national and international attention for that. We’re still, with a respectful nod to UW System, the most popular campus in the state, public or private, in terms of the clamor to get in. We still are garnering lots of awards for faculty and staff and programs. All of that is partly a consequence of the changes that we’ve undergone in these 30 years.
It has not happened by accident. We’ve been a campus that has taken strategic planning seriously, done a good job of thinking about our strategic position and positioning ourselves for the next challenge. I’ll just remind you that we’ve tied these plans to our reaccreditation site visits, which occur every 10 years. We’re due for one in about three years. So next year sometime, we’ll start a two-year self-study that will form the basis for our next strategic plan. I have no doubt, given the pace of change, that part of that plan will have to include plans for base realignments in a number of different ways, possibly further reorganizations or changes in organization, further efficiencies that we can achieve. In that respect, let me end completely by putting in a shameless plug for the Showcase.
Showcase is a program we put on here in the Union once a year and we invite departments that have found improved ways of doing things to come tell other people about it, and we encourage you to come, see what other people are doing, and steal their ideas and implement them in your own departments. It’s working very well, but it can always work better, so I hope you’ll all pay attention to that and attend the next time there’s a Showcase. Or log on to the Office of Quality Improvement Web site and read about some of those projects.
With all of that, I’m very confident that 30 years from now the things that I told you have not changed will still not have changed. We’ll still be a major research university, very popular among students, doing a good job of mission delivery. How we’re going to get there, though, is going to be largely someone else’s problem.
Thank you.