There is a proposal before the University Board of Regents to consolidate the departments of education under the leadership of the department at University of Alaska Fairbanks. Although understandable in the face of relentless budget pressure and lack of political support, this move is a chimera and smells of desperation. It must be resisted with vigor.
The department of education at Fairbanks is the old workhorse of education degrees in Alaska. In some respects their long history creates its own liability — the Fairbanks department of education is not about education degrees, forward thinking or innovation. It’s about deep background inertia, internal university politics and institutional defense. You can see this hand at work under the present proposal.
On the other hand, University of Alaska Southeast is pretty much the skunk works of the system, put in place as a result of a vigorous student demand and new thinking to make use of individuals with existing degrees. In its role as the skunk works, it is characterized by shirt sleeves rolled up, achieving fast and successful program design. Although it is a bad idea, if consolidation is inevitable, go with UAS and pray they do not loose their skunk works character. Fairbank education department should not take the lead just because they are the oldest and most practiced at internal bureaucratic influence.
When the cohort of nationwide university management professionals see a consolidation move on the part of University of Alaska statewide, it will diminish UA’s place in the university world and it will diminish the university’s ability to recruit faculty and students. This is because it is a clearly recognizable defensive move. It can be seen as loss of depth. When you put all your management into one basket you have less program depth and next to no flexibility. It’s too easy to say no and too difficult to say yes. The university will be stuck with the status quo, and it will become dated and start losing students in a hurry.
One summer Jerry Komisar, president of UA from 1990 to 1998, took a trip to Europe and toured a double handful of universities there, some of them east of what had been the iron curtain. Dr. Komisar laughed and said that those European universities had managed under the Czars, under the White Russians, under the 1917 Bolsheviks, under the Nazis, under the cold war communists, under guys like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and now under a sort of fledging and clumsy democracy. Komisar said that university managers there had defensiveness built into their bloodstream, and you could just forget about making any program changes in a single generation. This is where a continued budget crisis atmosphere and non-existent political support leads, and for its own soul and the benefit of student citizens, the UA system needs to defend eroding freedoms and fading options. Do not consolidate the education departments, least of all under UAF. Consolidation is a self-destructive action.
The Board of Regents takes its authority from the constitution, and in my view they should declare a constitutional crisis on the basis that the Legislature has abdicated its commitment of support for the state’s university, a commitment they clearly made in funding and helping create programing that by its very nature implied the need for steady support over time. By the numbers, UAS education programing is at the top of success in the system. Allowing the university to contract and destroy this development work of decades as a response to short-term economic politics is a morally bankrupt position. The Legislature is already there, and the Regents should not follow this failure by acting as their own hangman.
The population of Alaska does not live in Fairbanks. The population lives all over the place, and those who need and use the university, which over time includes just about everybody, need the variety of regionally developed programs. Fight this battle on a different level than that of adopting bad structure, and with luck and fortitude we will end up with a vibrant university with its head held high and an education available to all who seek.
• Eric Forrer was appointed to the University Board of Regents by former Gov. Steve Cowper in 1989 and served on the board until 1997. He has lived in Alaska for 55 years, with 40 of those in Juneau.
