The following letter was submitted by the Student Re-Visioning Committee on November 5 to President James Wagner via Vice President Gary Hauk and directly to Dean Robin Forman.
Dear President Wagner,
The Student Re-Visioning Committee (SRC), an organization of faculty, staff, and students, is concerned that the recent cuts, developed by Dean Forman and approved by you, have fundamentally weakened Emory University and the Emory community. We are troubled by the unrepresentative and intentionally secretive process through which these cuts were developed.
The administration has repeatedly failed to provide a consistent and comprehensive defense of its general decision to cut programs. Moreover, Emory’s administration has been unwilling to clarify how specific programs were selected for reorganization or termination. Finally, these cuts disproportionately affect women, people of color, and other minority students and faculty; we therefore have concerns about the administration’s commitment to diversity.
Like you, President Wagner, we envision a university that continually strives for excellence and that works to build a strong, integrated network of employees and students. In order to begin repairing the distrust that these cuts have generated in our community and to create a stronger Emory for the future, we demand:
1. An unequivocal reversal of the cuts 2. Formal and meaningful student, faculty, and staff participation on all key decision-making bodies 3. Full disclosure and investigation of the entire Emory College Financial Advisory Committee (EFAC/CFAC) proceedings
We appreciated your willingness to accept a copy of our statement and a list of our questions at the State of the University Address on October 30th. Unfortunately, the limited length of the question and answer session at the event prevented us from broaching other important issues.
We also felt that some of your responses were too generalized to be informative, lacked supporting evidence, or raised additional questions. We have therefore included, along with our three primary demands stated above, a list of questions we wish you and Dean Forman to address in a written statement. We respectfully request that your response be presented at a public venue by November 16, 2012, so that we may have an opportunity to discuss these matters more thoroughly.
The questions we would like you and Dean Forman to address in a written statement are as follows:
1. These cuts and reorganizations disproportionately affect women, people of color, and other minorities. How is Emory’s commitment to diversity reflected in these decisions?
2. These decisions deeply affect our relationship with the Atlanta community. By eliminating the Division of Educational Studies (DES) in particular, Emory University is eliminating long- standing ties to Atlanta schools. Given the current socio-economic climate, these schools need teachers and DES outreach programs that aid disadvantaged students more than ever. What specific plans does the administration have to ensure Emory maintains these kinds of programs with Atlanta schools?
3. Local and national media outlets have commented on the administration’s opacity in this restructuring process (Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2012; The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 17, 2012). In defence of its actions, the Emory administration has claimed to be adopting decision-making procedures utilized by peer institutions.
Yet it seems that Emory’s lack of transparency is anomalous when compared to processes used by other universities to evaluate how to invest their academic funding. Recently, the University of Hartford carried out its own restructuring of academic departments and administrative units using large committees with strong faculty representation (Inside Higher Ed, October 2, 2012).
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has recently announced that an 18-member faculty committee will evaluate all PhD programs to determine their continued viability. UIUC also publicized some of the specific metrics and data that departments would be evaluated on, including confidential student surveys (The News Gazette, November 1, 2012).
What other universities have recently restructured their academic units using small committees whose mandates were unpublicized and whose actions were carried out in secrecy? What were the metrics used to evaluate departments under Dean Forman’s five broad themes? Was the data used to evaluate departments produced specifically for this process? If so, who generated this information?
4. The Emory administration claims that faculty from the affected departments were made aware of the restructuring decisions ahead of time. Since the College Financial Advisory Committee (CFAC) records are not public, it is nearly impossible to determine when departments were informed that they were being considered for restructuring or elimination.
It appears that CFAC worked in a secretive manner. Even Governance Committee members, charged with overseeing CFAC, were unsure of what the body was doing (Governance Committee Minutes, April 20, 2011; The Emory Wheel, October 29, 2012). Moreover, CFAC’s chair, Dr. Michael Giles, admitted to lying to colleagues about CFAC’s work since the committee’s earliest days (The Emory Wheel, September 20, 2011).
Given the obfuscation surrounding CFAC’s activities, how could the faculty have known aboutthe process and evaluations used to plan the restructuring? How have faculty, department, and student interests been represented, considering the same small circle of administrators and faculty have overseen CFAC since its inception? Why would the administration have expected faculty to volunteer for a committee whose mandate shifted over time and whose work was unpublicized?
5. The dearth of graduate and undergraduate student voices in the decision-making process leading up to the cuts is troubling. Students play crucial roles in the university’s academic and financial functioning and are deeply affected by these decisions.
They support the university during their enrollment and throughout their lifetimes. Why did the administration feel student input was unnecessary? How will the administration ensure the formal participation of students in future decision-making processes?
We look forward to receiving your answers and to continuing our dialogue with you and Dean Forman in order to strengthen our university.
Andrew Zonderman and David Mullins, the authors of this editorial, are SRC Administration Liaisons
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Taylor Kim September 19, 2012 at 8:03 am
Emory economics people are lazy and their research output was disappointing, with some exceptions. The rise in their ranking was due to attracting some research active faculty from other universities and this cost a lot. Other faculty remain lazy and unproductive in terms of teaching, research, and supervision. Many of them are husbands and wives living easy life relying on the generousity of the graduate school. This type of faculty became a burden rather than an asset to the economics department. Everything became expensive with no hope of reaching excellence. Reallocation of resources became a must as Emory always has the capacity to compete internationally. Economics people failed and disappointed the graduate school and disappointed many grad students who left them to other programs. Lets ask ourselves a simple question, why Emory did not suspend the Business School doctoral programs? Simply because of the quality of the faculty. Goizueta Business School is competing with Wharton, Harvard, Stanford..etc. they deserve all the support from the university. The gap between the econ department and Goizueta Business School is soooooo wide. Emory’s vision is to support the programs that have potential to be among the nation’s top 10 programs. Definiately, this is not the economics program. To be honest, Emory known to have a much stronger undergraduate progran than a graduate one, and they should focus on this.
. emoryalum September 19, 2012 at 9:18 pm
In the last 5 years, Emory economics had hired nationally recognized, top-level senior economists and very high-level junior economists. It has been on an upward trajectory, going up from 70 to 40 in the rankings over a few short years. Yes, these people may be costly, but why were they hired in the first place if they were going to be marginalized and pushed out soon after? If you complain about Emory economics people being lazy, wait to see what will happen once they close the PhD program. Everyone good will leave and then you might as well save your money and go to a community college for economics. How is that good for the undergraduates when there is no access to top-notch faculty intellect?
. Taylor Kim September 20, 2012 at 4:50 am
The cost and admission criteria of Emory are nearly the same or close to those of Yale, Columbia and NYU…etc. If I am going to invest in my education in economics I should go to these schools not Emory. Give me one economic theory or principle, one economic idea, one major prize in economics, ever been attributed or given to Emory faculty, no way, you can’t find. Look at Harvard, Yale, UCBerkeley, Northwester, UPenn, MIT, UChicago…etc and compare. I really hate the idea of suspending any PhD program but priority should be given to the programs where Emory would lead the field. See how Emory attracted attention to its AIDS/HIV reseach and compare it with its economists achievments, be honest with your self. I would support restructuring their doctoral program to a specialized one that distinct Emory from other top programs. Can you imagine the reputation of UMinnesotta and ASU in macroeconomics, or UCSD in econometrics or UCSC in international finance. Yes, Emory needs one field to lead its reseach world-wide. Be honest with your self, as an economics graduate student at Emory, there is no difference between courses labled “econometrics” and those labled “advanced econometrics” , same applied to macroeconomics and other courses. Same contents with different lables. In reality, Emory graduate students find much better courses in GSU and GATech. This is shameful to happen in a great university like Emory. The resposibility for these drawbacks goes to the chairs and the directors of the doctoral program. Restructuring can start from there.
. emoryalum September 20, 2012 at 9:49 am
I see – you come from “all or nothing”. Either perform at top 10 level or go away. I can understand that view, although I don’t personally agree with it. Putting that aside, what I don’t understand is how you can dismiss that this medium-level PhD program currently supports a thriving, high-level undergraduate program of 700 undergrads. Once the PhD program is gone, what will be left is a dying, low-level undergraduate program taught by adjuncts. Gosh, the PhD program may be worth keeping just for the sake of the undergrads! Can’t believe folks don’t see that. And BTW, top 40 is really not that bad and is much, much better than 10 years ago.
. Someone September 22, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Taylor Kim while your argument is sound on some levels the administrations decision does not seem like one that is focused on building a department. It will take a lot more resources to build the program to be even something like UCSC, a department outside of the top 50 that is strong in one field. They likely will need to hire 3 or 4 top senior people and convince them to come to Emory in order to restructure the program at the same time. These people will likely have better outside options so it will take effort to convince them it is worth coming. It can be done, but its not cheap. I do not see how suspending the program can help rebuild the department as they will likely have to start from scratch. I do not see how losing all the productive faculty, which is going to be what happens over the next 3 years, will help them rebuild the department in the long term.
. Taylor Kim September 20, 2012 at 1:52 pm
First of all, Emory economics PhD program is not in the top 40, they will be lucky if they ranked in the top 70 out of 115 programs. Emory consistantly ranked in the top 20 for more than 20 years. The Goizueta undergrad program ranked top 4, the Rollins School of Public Healh programs ranked top 5. Here, I will mention a low profile information that may explain much of what behind the suspention of the econ PhD program. From the Graduate School point of view, econ faculty had some issues during the last 5 years. Many complaints has been filed against a number of faculty for harassment, discrimination, unfairness, low quality teaching, and violation of copy rights (imagine a faculty sold copy righted solution manuals to his students for $25, unbelievable), and lack of resposibility. Those faculty were behind the loss of many promising graduate student who left Emory program to NYU, Michigan, PennState USC, among other programs. Currently, the recruiting process to their graduate program is far away from being subjective or professional. The Russian professor recommends a Russian student, the Indian, the Chinese, the Iranian…etc do the same thing. Admission criteria were mixed with personal preferences that drove it away from professionalism. The Graduate School has more issues against the Econ people and intends to target those faculty for the coming 5 years and then decide to keep it this way or introduce a new model of economics education with graduate program that match Emory standard.
. Someone September 22, 2012 at 5:34 pm
There are some questions about what job market for economics Ph.D looks like. In contrast too most academic fields its decent. Its not easy one, but there are very few unemployed fresh graduate students and majority do find full time jobs that will help them start a career.
Generally students from top schools ranked within the top 50 have a reasonable chance at finding employment at a research oriented institution and a large subset do place into tenure track jobs at major research universities. Others find jobs with the federgal government either usually in quasi-academic jobs that involve doing some mixture of scholarly research and policy analysis. Another subset simply goes into the private sector where they do mostly some kind of data analysis work.
Economic benefits from being a technical field, which limits the number of students pursuing Ph.Ds and having an annualized centralized job market that places most students into some type of job.
A school like Emory only produces a few students and I imagine a lot of their students go to teach at small state universities, liberal arts colleges or private sector. Everyone once in a while they will place students into major academic universities. The decision to suspend the program is pretty dumb and their administration is likely ignorant. Economics job market is flexible enough and Emory’s faculty are good enough that their best faculty will have outside options. I doubt Emory will be a top 50-60 department in 5 years. It will be surprising if they have top 100 department.
. Taylor Kim September 23, 2012 at 12:13 pm
Emory econ department maybe saved if it merged with the Business school, if possible. But the B-school won’t accept I guess. In case it is possible, then they may introduce a rare PhD program in financial economics along with a couple of specialized masters in fields such as financial engeneering, quantitative economics and risk management, macroeconomics and finance…etc. These programs are offered only in few universities and the demand for it still strong.