It’s strange to hear university students and administration talk about the possibility of climbing the ranks of the top public universities in the nation when so much right now is going against that mission.
It’s always said that all the university need do is improve those dastardly graduation rates. Back in October, at the President’s Campus Tour at the Baker Center, UT Interim President Jan Simek estimated UT as being about 20 percent lower in graduate rates of students than the University of Florida or the University of Georgia. He also said Tennessee as a state is one of the lowest ranking in terms of proportion to population that earns a college degree.
Florida was ranked No. 15 and Georgia was ranked No. 21 in the 2009 U.S. News and World Report ranking of the best colleges among public, national universities. Tennessee was ranked all the way down at No. 52, below other SEC schools like Auburn University (No. 39) and the University of Alabama (No. 43). Tennessee was in the top 40 as recently as 2007.
And now there’s even more incentive to improve graduation rates, considering the Complete College Tennessee Act of 2010. According to the Tennessee state website, the act “funds higher education based in part on success and outcomes, including higher rates of degree completion.”
Despite the thoughts of improving overall quality of graduates, the emphasis remains on number of graduates and improving throughput to get students out of here in four years (instead of five or six).
The only problem with all this idealism is that everything that is happening at UT, in the wake of severe budget cuts, is going against the ease of graduating. This is because of the reality that lecturers have been getting paid with stimulus money, which runs out in June 2011.
According to the Knoxville News Sentinel, 316 UT employees, including 162 lecturers, were notified in April that their income from the university is coming from these funds. It makes that July 1, 2011, cliff for the university also the prospective July 1, 2011, cliff for some of these lecturers.
Out of everything involving budget cuts, the potential loss of a portion of these lecturers is the most sobering of them all. When one considers that 162 lecturers are getting paid with stimulus funds, it’s sad to think that there’s a probability that someone who has helped you greatly along your path toward higher education could lose his or her spot at the university.
It brings home the truth that cuts cannot just come magically from thin air. Cuts cannot just come from erasing imaginary vice-president positions (which so many have illusory grudges against). As Simek and so many others have already said, this cannot be the same university on its most fundamental level — education.
Even though it’s a loss, what changes at the university level will not even be just the ability to choose, explore and experiment. This will be lost, of course, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not only will freshmen have to start deciding what they want to major in immediately if they pray to have any hope of graduating in four years, it may be difficult even then.
Losing some of these lecturers would mean fewer course sections. It’s already hard to get into some bottleneck classes. This is one of university students’ biggest concerns and most frequent complaints. And now losing some of these lecturers would make it even harder, an almost unfathomable consequence.
Even with some colleges and departments asking tenured professors to take on more sections and classes, that surely will go against the intimacy of the professor-student relationship. With larger class sizes and professors having to juggle even more students, that potential relationship might get obliterated in some circumstances. Forget professors knowing you enough to give you recommendations. You’ll be lucky enough if they remember your name!
Suffice it to say, course selections will also take a major hit in one’s desired discipline. In the journalism and electronic media major, for example, opinion writing has not been offered in recent years. This may or may not be an example of courses being axed because of lack of educators, but examples like that specialized course will no doubt become extinct.
This is a university that has been in the throws of a very public financial crisis for awhile now. It desperately seeks to maintain the value university education and experience that UT students have become accustomed to. However, improving the stock of the university in the wake of all this is just not reasonable. Programs like the Life of the Mind and the Student Success Center might have helped improve graduation rates, but I would argue that the impending impact that losing some lecturers may have on class sizes, offerings and sections would probably offset that.

— Robby O’Daniel is a graduate student in communication and information. He can be reached at rodaniel@utk.edu.