Report on growth emphasizes restraint
BY RAY DELGADO
Although the university's research areas and its personnel will continue to grow over time, the university cannot continue to grow as quickly as it has over the past decade without serious consequences for the institution's overall health and its relations with neighboring communities, according to a report presented last month to the Faculty Senate.
According to the senate's Planning and Policy Board, faculty should be more involved in decisions that affect the university's growth and direction, and the university should establish mechanisms for sustainable rates of growth to help curb the expansion that has led to an additional 3,500 university employees over the past decade. The report, commissioned in the fall of 2002 by the senate, aimed to study a variety of university growth-related issues and the impacts they might have over a 20-year period.
"Stanford will continue to innovate, continue to stay at the forefront of teaching and research, and there's probably going to be growth in our future," said geophysics Professor Mark Zoback, chair of the board. "The real question is how to grow most beneficially and how to minimize the negative consequences of growth."
Many factors have contributed to the rapid expansion of the university as a whole and the medical center in particular, including dramatic increases in funding for research from the National Institutes of Health, an array of new interdisciplinary programs and growth in engineering and science initiatives at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
The growth comes with a price tag, however, with new programs and initiatives requiring additional research and research-administration staff, the report noted. The growing research endeavors also place significant demands on the university infrastructure, including new buildings, construction, parking and utilities, and increased traffic and congestion at the university and within the surrounding community.
Although much of the research is funded by outside sources, many times there are funding shortfalls that place a financial burden on departments, schools and the central university, and lead to fewer resources to support faculty and staff, the report noted.
The report also mentioned faculty concerns that continued growth in the sciences and medical fields inherently would change the overall mission of the university, given that other fields evolve more slowly. The report noted that "nurturing, funding and excelling" in some areas of social science and humanities will take special efforts from the university to ensure that Stanford remains a "balanced institution."
The board came up with six recommendations to deal with future growth:
- Mechanisms should be established to develop (and enforce) sustainable rates of growth in the number of staff and the amount of incremental space utilization on the core campus. The board recommended that faculty be involved in that process and that new facilities should be established off campus when necessary.
- There should be faculty representation on the provost's capital planning group to bring their voice and perspective to building and planning issues that are part of the annual capital plan.
- The true cost of new initiatives must be fully addressed before they are undertaken. Faculty associated with the development of new initiatives must help assume responsibility for their long-term economic viability.
- The development of new initiatives (and hiring in new fields of study) should be closely related to the consolidation and evolution of disciplines, programs and departments. In other words, staffing new initiatives with billets made available through retirement or departures offers an alternative to growth of the professoriate. Maintaining a low rate of faculty growth is one essential aspect of limiting the rate of university growth at sustainable levels, the report noted.
- Additional support is needed for faculty-initiated interdisciplinary research and teaching programs. Fundraising for new interdisciplinary research and teaching programs should be a major priority for the university.
- A faculty committee on community affairs should be established to incorporate faculty with university administrators in maintaining good communications and relations with the university's neighbors. Various university-commissioned surveys of residents in surrounding communities have shown high marks for the university's role as an academic institution and employer but lower responses about the university as a supporter of public schools and as a land owner.
Provost John Etchemendy expressed willingness to consider implementing many of the recommendations, but he also said that faculty participation in decisions that affect growth is already high within various departments before school deans send proposals and recommendations to the executive cabinet for consideration.
"This really is an academically run institution, amazingly so," Etchemendy said. "And so we have to remember that. It's not as if there's the faculty that don't have any say and then there's somebody or other who's running the university."
Philip Pizzo, dean of the Medical School, expressed concerns about what he perceived were negative comments made by some senators concerning the growth patterns in his school.
"We actually offer fairly credible perspectives on what we thought [about] the greater growth which was manageable from the point of view of the school," Pizzo said. "And we have done a lot of work to achieve and accomplish that. And I think what appears in the report is less analytic and more impressionistic and offers a view of the future that is not necessarily consistent with certainly one that I have and others might have who have been studying this pretty carefully."
Zoback said the report was not trying to express opinions on how certain fields were growing but wanted to highlight some of the concerns so that they could be addressed.
"We did not sit around talking about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing," Zoback said. "[We just thought] it is something to watch and it is something to think about as we look at the university in sort of a holistic manner and how it is evolving from year to year and perhaps from decade to decade."
Zoback said the report and its recommendations would be forwarded to next year's senate for possible implementation.
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