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The First 365

The First 365

A conversation between Chancellor Gearhart and President Jordan

Edited and condensed by Laura H. Jacobs

Just prior to the completion of G. David Gearhart’s first year as University of Arkansas chancellor, he sat down with Alumni Association Board President Gerald Jordan to talk about everything from cost containment to hate mail. Jordan, a longtime reporter and journalism professor, and Gearhart chatted for an hour in the chancellor’s office, a bright warmly decorated space with upholstered cornices, red leather chairs and numerous personal effects, awards and tokens on display.

Jordan: How is the university fairing in regard to growth?

Gearhart:  This year is going to be a little bit of a struggle. We’re about even with where we were last year. We want to grow, but the economy seems to have a different idea. I’m being told that the community colleges are seeing a real spike – as much as 10 percent – and we suspect that what is happening is because of the economy and people having furloughs and cutbacks, and frankly, layoffs, people are choosing to go to the lower cost institution, albeit it the community colleges. The good news is, I don’t think we’re going to see a huge decline.

Jordan:  What tools are available to you to enhance growth? I know there is the traditional scholarship.

Gearhart:  We need to put more money into our admissions operation. We intend to do that. We need to be more aggressive in Texas, about 10 percent of our students are coming from Texas now. We need more [scholarship] support for students not only who are merit student, but also students who have real need, so we are working hard to raise money for that. I think that the lottery scholarships will help … and it will enable a lot more people in Arkansas to be able to go to college.

Jordan:  Yes, I want to get back to the lottery in a minute, but while we’re still on enrollment: my understanding is that the UA stands to benefit from some of the fallout at the University of Central Arkansas. Is it possible that UCA’s decision to spend less on scholarships might prompt some students to come this way?

Gearhart:  It’s hard to tell. Those scholarships, we are being told, are not going to be phased out this coming year. So it probably won’t, and I use the word “help” sort of cautiously because we certainly don’t want to appear to be growing our enrollment at the expense of another institution. But, I think there is some validity to the fact that as they curtail some of their expenditures and scholarships, we could potentially see some increase.

Jordan: Let’s talk about budget. LSU is facing a $101 million shortfall in state funding. I recently read an article that reported that Arkansas was alone among SEC state universities not to face a reduction in state support. So what’s the projection from the legislature? Where are we right now?

Gearhart:  I was at a meeting of my SEC counterparts, the chancellors and presidents of SEC schools in March and they were all singing the woes of cutbacks and furloughs and layoffs. To give you an example, the University of South Carolina is experiencing a huge cutback in their budget and they are going to furloughs. We are, I believe, only one of seven states that is not experiencing a huge budget deficit problem statewide.

We are terribly under-funded, we have serious budget problems, but we’re not near as bad as some of our benchmark institutions and not near as bad as most other state public universities.

We have made a decision to try to not increase tuition this year. I think Arkansans are hurting just like the rest of the country is hurting. I think we need to show good faith that we are doing everything we can to help Arkansans, that we understand that they are having a difficult time with budget cutbacks. We are trying to send a strong, firm message that we want to keep our costs low, we want to benefit our students the best we can, and we’re trying to balance the need to benefit students with the need to certainly keep the institution strong and viable and progressing for the future.

What that means is that we’re not going to be able probably to give much, if anything, in terms of raises. We might be able to ink out some stipends that we might give out to faculty and staff sometimes around the holidays.

Jordan: This may return a little bit to enrollment, but the New York Times reported a story that essentially said that cash paying students were gaining college admissions to institutions where finance is their strength. Do you see that potentially happening here, that there are students who might otherwise have been told that they might fit in somewhere else and they said “Yeah, but I’m a cash-customer, not looking for financial aid or scholarship” and they say “Come on in.”

Gearhart:  I saw that article and read it carefully. Frankly, when I first saw it, I thought, “Gosh, this is not a good policy.” I think we ought to base our admission decisions on merit. They ought to be based on qualifications.

This is not, and should not be, a rich kids’ university. This should be a university for the people, founded on the land-grant model of educating the sons and daughters of the working class, if you will. We still have that obligation

Jordan:  Moving back down the financial scale there, there is a lot of stock being placed in the potential for the state lottery. The governor signed it into state law March 25, to be implemented and to provide scholarships. Is this going to be the proletarian scholarship? Is this going to be the next tier down? Is this going to be the C-student scholarship? What is the emphasis?

Gearhart: I think that it will be more available, not just for the high-end merit students. Of course it’s no secret there was considerable debate on both sides of the equation as to whether or not it would be open to any student, or whether it would be just for students with high board scores, high grade point averages. I think they came to an appropriate compromise [of a 2.5 grade point average or a 19 on the ACT to qualify].

It’s going to take a full year before it phases it in. And, it’s all going to depend on how many students decide to take advantage of the scholarship and where they end up deciding to go.

Jordan: What do you expect the impact of the federal stimulus plan will be on the UA?

Gearhart: It’s still a little bit too early to know exactly what we’re going to get, because a lot of it has to do with grant applications faculty will be able to submit to NSF [National Science Foundation] and other agencies. But, we do know, it looks like, we’re going to get outright about $1.2 million, that will be one-time money that will come directly to our budget.

One of the things that’s not stimulus money, we’re going to get $1 million from the athletic department. That has to do with the new TV packages that the SEC signed. It’s going to generate a lot more revenue for our athletic programs and Jeff Long has agreed to send $1 million of that over to the academic side of the institution.

We’re trying to be very conservative, be certain that we don’t get caught being in a position to take money back from deans, do reallocations or have to think about hiring freezes. We are doing a lot in cost-containment.

Jordan:  I know that they are in the arts and sciences, because we’re printing on the other side of the paper. Can you talk about the impact of the financial markets on the UA endowments, on the foundation?

Gearhart:  It’s hit us like it has everybody else. We’re down close to 30 percent in our endowment. We thought that if the market had not taken the plunge, that we would have possibly hit $1 billion endowment by 2010.

It’s tough and that has had an impact in that a lot of the faculty who hold endowed positions, part of the resources for those positions come from the endowment, come from the gifts that were made.

We operate on a 36-month rolling average in our endowment, so it has not hit us as heavy yet, but coming into this next year, we will hit that 36th month and it will start to show rather dramatically. We’ve lost millions of dollars out of that.

Jordan: In an odd sort of way that might give you a little insulation or provide insulation from legislators and granting institution in nearly every story you read where a university says “we need more money,” and they say, “You’ve got a billion-dollar endowment, why don’t you spend some of that money.” Maybe that helps you in that regard.

What should the UA do to accommodate Arkansas high school graduates who cannot validate their U.S. citizenship?

Gearhart: This is a real serious issue, one that is close to my heart because we have worked very hard to try to change the law. The bottom line is that we used to use graduation from a bona fide high school in Arkansas as the main determiner as to whether or not a person should get in-state tuition. Frankly, we did not ask the question whether or not a student was a U.S. citizen. We didn’t see ourselves as being the immigration authority. We took it on faith that if they have been here a period of time, they had gone to high school here, that they graduated from high school here, that they ought to get in-state tuition.

Our feeling is that it makes a lot more sense to educate these people, to give them access to the American opportunity system through education and to get them out into the workforce.

To me, it is a political issue. And I’ve gotten a lot of hate mail, some of it very nasty, mean-spirited. There are, I think, a lot of people in this state that think that these people are teeming across the border and taking our jobs and the truth is, that’s not very accurate. These are really good people that are good for the community. We estimate that there’s somewhere between 200-400 students that will not be able to go to college because of this.

Jordan: My understanding is that about $218 million is proposed for campus renovations. So when the readers of this magazine, our alumni, visit this fall, what markers of progress will they see? And what’s on tap?

Gearhart: I’m hoping that we will have started the renovations of Davis Hall, Peabody and Vol Walker. They are all on the front burner of this plan. When I first came into this job, one of the first things I did was take a real in-depth tour of our facilities. It was very obvious that we have some real serious deficiencies.

What gave us the opportunity to fix up the campus and to impact many of our academic buildings was the decision not to purchase the [Fayetteville] high school. We were very serious about doing that and we came real close. As I look back now, with the economy, I’m sort of glad somebody was smiling on us.

The truth of the matter is the property was worth more to us than the buildings.

We will continue to implement the [previously approved] $2 per credit hour fee in order to implement this $218 million refurbishment and renovation.

Some of the other money will come from our budget; some will be from private funds. For instance, Davis hall is being renovated totally with private money. It will take a good 8-10 years for all of this to be phased in properly. I think when we’re done, we’re going to have a campus that will be the envy of a lot of the other SEC schools.

Jordan: I’m thinking 10 years from now, there’s going to be a lot of low-heat glass across this campus and a lot of minimal flush toilets. How green can the UA become?

Gearhart: I think we should be a model. I really do believe that and I’ve said to our facilities management people, to Mike Johnson to Don Peterson and to others, that I support the greening of the campus.

We hired an outside firm to do a lot of energy savings for us. You will see a lot of our buildings start to take on new lighting and new controls on lighting, electricity, heating. It will take a long time to become that proverbial carbon-neutral university. But, it’s something that we strive for. I think that we’ve got the expertise here to do it.

Jordan: When you consider spending for the library system, what tech updates are necessary? Coming at this from the perspective of my business, journalism is being forced by an uncertain market and the ups and downs in the economy, to reconsider the business model that advertising supported ink-on-paper product that would be on everybody’s breakfast table. That seems to be gone kaput. Libraries are by far the largest repositories of documents. What should be done to make sure the UA library system remains vibrant, relevant and useful for our students?

Gearhart: Well we’ve got several issues there that we’re trying to deal with. But the first and most serious issue is what you talked about, which is the loss of a lot of our publications, particularly serials and scientific journals. We are seeing an enormous increase in the cost of journals and materials, as much as 10 percent. Right now, we need to find about $400,000 to shore up our ability to continue with the most important journals, particularly in the hard sciences. I’m starting to hear from a number of our more prolific researchers and scholars that it’s becoming a problem with the cancellations of journals and serials.

We’re looking at different models that we might perhaps take some of the funds that we get from research to help the library. Dean [Carolyn] Allen does an incredible job trying to balance all that. I have told her recently that we will not to despair; we are going to find the money for the library to at least shore up that most immediate problem.

The second issue we have has to do with the physical facility over there. We had some experts on campus take a look at the facility. They recommended some addition to it. The cost is enormous. It’s not likely we’re going to get $50-60-70 million to redo the library from the public funds, so we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to do it.

The third area is one that is much more difficult. If we want to aggressively pursue the ARL [Association of Research Libraries] status, which would take investments of several million dollars more on an annual basis in the library.

All I can say is that you can’t have a great university without a great library.

Jordan: You’ve spoken of changes in the administrative structure. Two notable initiatives were moving the Office of Student Affairs from a vice chancellor post to a vice provost. That seems to remove student affairs from a voice in the executive committee. Does that impinge on your push to put students first?

Gearhart: We have added the vice provost, Danny Pugh to the executive committee, so he will now have a place at the table. We’ve also added our new diversity officer, Charles Robinson, to the executive committee. So there is one new position added and one somewhat new, in that person has a different title and reports directly to the provost, but will have a seat at the executive committee. About half of the institutions in the country have that kind of model. About three-quarters of the institutions in the SEC have that model.

It is a philosophical issue. I believe it is really the faculty’s prerogative to be engaged and involved in all aspects of a student’s education inside and outside the classroom. To me, the most important job that we have at the university is to help students get a degree. If we don’t do that, nothing else really matters.

Jordan: The job that Dr. Robinson has now: vice provost of diversity. That was formerly for institutional diversity in education, which implicitly meant “let’s look at their curriculum, let’s take a look at everything that the UA does vis-à-vis diversity.” Has that changed? It seemed that in the announcement, the emphasis was placed more on recruitment. This is my opinion wading in here, it seems that a lot of people outside the institution take a narrow view of diversity and say, “If you have a diverse enrollment that you’ve accomplished your goal.”

Gearhart: It is a change of emphasis. It’s not that diversity in the classroom, diversity in the curriculum is unimportant. It is still very important. However, we have not really made significant strides in bringing people of color to the university. We’ve done some good things, but frankly, it’s been one area that we’ve not been able to crack. What I’m trying to do is send a message that there is nothing more important than increasing the diversity both among the student body and among our faculty and staff. In order to do that, we need a champion.

Jordan: What is the state of the University of Arkansas?

Gearhart: I think the state is very good. We have made unbelievable strides the last 10-12 years, particularly the quality of our student body. I think we can stand toe-to-toe with just about any institution, certainly in the SEC and many of the 54 that we benchmark with. We have a student body that is first rate. I think we have made great strides being able to retain, promote and hire faculty. I think we’ve done incredible things with the physical plant.

I would say that John White left this place in very, very good shape. I feel privileged to step in at this time.

Some of the areas that we’ve got to work on: We’ve got to work on legislative support. We’ve got to fix up some of our buildings that we’ve probably let go too long because we were focusing on new facilities that we needed.

We’ve not made the progress that we’ve needed to make on salaries for faculty and staff.

Probably the one thing that has been most difficult is lack of resources. That has plagued every chancellor that has been here, every president. We don’t have a lot of resources to do the kinds of things that we need to do and particularly to plug holes where we have problems. We have a huge balance sheet that show that we are very healthy, and we are, but 98 percent of those funds are earmarked to particular programs or projects and can’t be used to fix a roof or to buy a piece of property.

We’re committed to trying to build up a reserve that will have $10-15 million that we could tap if we have a major problem.

I hope that we’ll have the opportunity to have another major capital campaign. It’s probably going to be another couple of years before we can seriously entertain that, but my hope is that we can and then maybe make another sort of that proverbial quantum leap. We’ll see.