In his talk as part of the President’s Campus Tour on Tuesday afternoon at the Baker Center’s Toyota Auditorium, UT Interim President Jan Simek said the University of Tennessee, like other schools in the SEC, wants to be like the Pac-10 schools — excelling in both academics and athletics.
“You all heard me quoted in newspapers that UCLA was better than us at academics as well as football,” Simek said. “I’m not thrilled by that, but it’s freaking true.”
According to a U.S. News and World Report ranking of the best colleges among top public, national universities, UCLA, a Pac-10 school, ranks No. 2. Another Pac-10 school, the University of California - Berkeley, sits atop the list at No. 1. Tennessee is ranked No. 52.
“There’s nothing that says you can’t be great at athletics and academics,” Simek said. “And that’s what we want to be. That’s what Florida wants to be. That’s what Georgia wants to be.”
The University of Florida is ranked No. 15 in the same report, and the University of Georgia is ranked No. 21.
At the core of Simek’s vision of improving the university is improving its graduation rate.
Simek identified UT as being about 20 percent lower in graduation rates of students than Florida and Georgia. He said Tennessee as a state is one of the lowest ranking in terms of proportion of population that earns a college degree.
In order to improve the graduation rate at UT, Simek suggested targeting those already in the classrooms, students who drop out or otherwise fail to graduate in six years.
“Where’s the low-hanging fruit?” Simek said. “They’re already in our classrooms. They already have faculty. They have dorm rooms. ARAMARK’s feeding them. There they are.”
As an example to show that focusing on those who are already students at UT can improve the graduation rate, he said the university improved its rate over the last five years by establishing a Student Success Center and freshmen learning programs like the Life of the Mind program.
He said last year UT graduated 11 percent more students than the year before, making the endeavor “doable.”
It all hinges on a shift from getting rewarded monetarily for growing in student population to garnering rewards from improving graduation rate, he said.
Simek also touched on other topics, such as organization of universities in the state, saying he felt reorganization was unnecessary because graduation rates already suggest the systems are split into tiers with varying problems.
In terms of fulfilling the research mission of the university, he said the primary research sites in the system are in Knoxville and Memphis, with Chattanooga and Martin serving a more educational function. He said UT-Knoxville was fulfilling its mission, while Memphis was not.
“An institution like this one with a medical school of that size should be doing about $600 million dollars a year of research; two-thirds of that should be coming out of the medical school,” he said. “Look at Vanderbilt. Look at Georgia. Look at North Carolina.”
While the university does not wish to grow, Simek said, the population fluctuates and more students come because, as the institution improves, more students accepted at the university are choosing to come.
However, Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek said having a growing population would necessitate the state providing money.
“We cannot grow more unless the state comes along and supports that growth,” Cheek said. “We cannot grow on tuition alone. Our tuition is much too low to grow based on just tuition.”
Cheek mentioned a task force headed by Provost Susan Martin that deals with making academic endeavors more efficient. In this way, the university could admit more students through curtailing time spent at the university completing programs.
“It deals with how you incentivize students to take 15 hours a semester to graduate in four years,” he said. “How do you incentivize summer school? If we can increase our throughput, we can actually free up more space.”
While Simek said a focus on improving throughput, with students completing degrees and graduating in four years, is possible, some of the opportunities provided by an expansive state university like UT will be lost to budget cuts.
“We’ll still get students through programs,” Simek said. “They’ll be very good, and I don’t think quality will be reduced very much at all, but the freedom of the intellectual exploration that a comprehensive university like this provides, I think, will be, at least for a while, a casualty of these budget cuts.”
The very environment of class will also change.
“We will not be the same institution as we were two, three years ago,” he said. “We will have bigger classes, fewer classes, we will have to advise our students better than we have in the past, and they won’t have as many choices.”