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Former Temple president to faculty: Give president support |
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Jim Winkler |
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Sep 21, 2006 |
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One of the country’s leading university educators and administrators urged UT faculty members to give President Lloyd A. Jacobs their support as he begins his tenure as the University’s 16th president.
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| Dr. David Adamany spoke with faculty members last week. |
Speaking last week at a joint meeting of the faculty senates from the Main and Health Science campuses, Dr. David Adamany, chancellor and president emeritus at Temple University in Philadelphia and former president at Wayne State University in Detroit, said that UT will face important challenges in the next several years, including the best possible way to merge the cultures and missions of the University’s two campuses, improving the quality of UT’s educational offerings, dealing with an expected decline in college-age students, and coping with a health system that has to provide care to more than 45 million people without health insurance.
“Give Lloyd a wide berth and your best advice,” said Adamany, whose friendship with Jacobs dates back to the 1980s, when he was WSU president and Jacobs was a medical school faculty member.
He told the senators that the addition of an academic health science center with four health-related colleges and a teaching hospital to UT’s selection of programs, courses and services is a “wonderful model,” and that most of the nation’s 125 medical schools are part of larger, comprehensive, research universities.
“You are not in completely uncharted waters,” Adamany said. He urged the faculty members to take advantage of being “part of a larger family” and not let the separation of the two campuses dampen their enthusiasm for working to make UT the best university it can be.
Adamany, who was the keynote speaker at the investiture ceremonies on Tuesday, spent the week meeting with administrators, faculty members and students as a scholar-in-residence.
He covered several topics during a question-and-answer period with faculty members, who are trying to figure out the best way to create a University-wide senate to represent a broad range of professors and to give advice and recommendations to the administration and the Board of Trustees.
He stressed the importance and value of faculty input on important, strategic planning issues, but cautioned that in the end it is the trustees and administration that have to set priorities and make final decisions. As academic disciplines have gotten “more specialized” and require faculty members to work harder to remain current, it has become harder for them to find sufficient time to understand and be involved in complex university governance issues and formulate a vision for universities, he said. A priority-setting process is critical if a university is to increase its academic quality, remain fiscally sound, and boost its reputation nationally.
“As universities mature, the devolution of consultative powers occurs,” he explained. He also told faculty members that:
• Promotion and tenure standards should require excellence in teaching and research and that tenure is “not an entitlement, but a responsibility.” He said universities will demand more of their faculties in the future;
• The time soon will come when the general education standards nationally for undergraduates will have to be raised, that undergraduate instruction will be judged by measurable outcomes, and that undergraduate professors “will be held more accountable.” Students will no longer be allowed to coast to a degree; and
• There will be fewer college-age students in the future and that some level of contraction of programs, courses and services is inevitable, particularly at colleges and universities in the Midwest.
When Adamany, the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law and Political Science at Temple, returns to Philadelphia, he will teach at the law school and also teach political science to undergraduates.
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