Farrell: Sizing up the challenges of being provost

Patrick V. Farrell, executive associate dean of the College of Engineering, was named provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs on March 8 by Chancellor John Wiley.

Farrell, who begins the job April 3, recently took the opportunity to reflect on his 24-year history with UW–Madison and also look ahead at some of the issues that will shape UW–Madison’s future.

Wisconsin Week: Think back to the first year you arrived at UW–Madison from Michigan in 1982. As a newcomer, what was your strongest impression of the place?

Farrell: UW–Madison was held in very high regard in the state; success for the state and its university seemed more important than individual agendas. UW–Madison athletics was sort of up and down — except for hockey, which was always up.

UW–Madison felt like an institution in transition — at that time there seemed to be a number of faculty with little research activity who were dedicated to quality teaching, but there was a growing number of faculty with strong research programs. As some of these senior faculty were retiring, new hires tended to be more teaching and research focused. Research work was most often single-investigator type; I saw few really interdisciplinary, collaborative research groups.

WW: Now that you’ve been here 24 years, how would you describe the character of this institution today?

PF: In many fields, multiple PI proposals are the norm, not the exception. Infrastructure (space allocation, overhead return, tenure criteria) has had to adjust or still is adjusting to that. The relative ease with which faculty can do interdisciplinary teaching and research has turned into a substantial advantage for UW–Madison over many peer institutions.

Overall, we seem to be in a more pressured and heavily scrutinized environment. These pressures are from external as well as internal expectations for administrators, faculty, staff, and students. In many cases, these pressures and the scrutiny are part of the current culture in the state and the nation.

WW: You have been involved in the Teaching Academy and other curriculum reforms over the years, including a hands-on design course for freshman engineers. How did that class impact the undergraduate experience in engineering?

PF: The freshman design course was great fun to create, because it allowed a group of faculty and staff to be as creative as we could be. We tried to draw from a wide range of existing research and experience on how to create a classroom experience that would result in students feeling connected to the discipline and their peers in a way that was consistent with the values they brought with them. In terms of numbers, it has had a significant impact on retention of students; it appears the quality of their subsequent experiences (performance in later math and science classes) was improved as well.

A somewhat unintended consequence was that it created a vehicle for faculty to cycle through the course as instructors and join in a team-teaching experience that many might not have tried on their own. Those experiences have in some cases been carried back and used to modify other courses these faculty teach.

While not particularly novel now, at the time it was also unusual to build on the idea of engineering for the community — making connections between engineering and improving peoples’ lives.

WW: How do you intend to promote a culture of innovative teaching and learning across campus?

PF: This issue is challenging, but I like to see innovation as an opportunity to move toward improving learning for today’s students, not a repudiation of successful current or past practices. Re-examining current practices seems sensible, given that students are in many ways different from 20 years ago, as are faculty, as is the world into which students graduate.

Most faculty and staff appreciate the responsibility of the university for undergraduate and graduate teaching. Innovation in teaching and learning usually requires good ideas, substantial time and energy, and often some specialized support (like for instructional technology). Faculty and staff can supply the ideas and energy, but if we expect substantial innovation, we will need to invent ways for the time and support to be available, in addition to ensuring that innovators are recognized in ways that matter.

WW: What would you consider the two biggest challenges to UW–Madison today, and how would you address them?

PF: A first big challenge is to recruit and retain outstanding and diverse faculty, staff and students, and to support them so they can be successful.

A second major challenge is to improve our connections with people outside the university. There seems to be a strong element of mistrust and suspicion in current relationships with many outside of the campus, including, but not limited to, the legislature.

WW: You mentioned an intent to “burn a lot of shoe leather” in your first few months, getting to know all corners of the campus. Where do you consider your learning curve to be the steepest?

PF: I am reasonably familiar with much of the physical and biological sciences part of campus — though there is still much more to learn — but not so familiar with the humanities and social sciences parts. I hope to be able to visit with a broad range of faculty, staff and administrators to learn their perspectives on what excellence looks like in their respective fields and how we can attain or maintain that excellence.

WW: State revenue, as an overall portion of UW–Madison’s budget, fell below 20 percent in 2004-05, marking a three-decade free-fall from about 50 percent in the early 1970s. What is most at stake in this trend?

PF: Most at stake are affordability and access.

I assume we intend to maintain, if not increase, the quality of the education we provide. I also assume we need, on behalf of the state, to remain a major research institution. That requires the highest quality faculty and staff for teaching and research, and we must compete nationally and internationally for them. We need to be competitive in terms of salary, space and support, and faculty and staff salaries are where most of the money goes.

As state support declines, we would need to increase tuition substantially to maintain the current resource level, or decrease the size of the faculty and staff to accommodate reduced resources. Faculty and staff reduction has the unfortunate multiplier effect of reducing research activity and funding by substantially more than the salary reductions themselves. Faculty and staff reduction also suggests we either reduce faculty-student contact (fewer faculty) or reduce the size of the student body (difficult, given the demand on admissions to UW–Madison). The problem is we are over-constrained. Hoping that all constraints can be satisfied at reduced resource levels is not realistic, I think.

WW: Five years from now, what would like to have your tenure as provost most recognized for?

PF: If I could pick one thing, it would be that we have begun to understand who we educate and, more broadly, how we educate. I expect the students who come to campus will continue to change in composition, interests and background as well as presenting a more varied distribution of each of these. To most effectively teach these students, we will probably need to re-think what we do and reconstruct our notion of teaching to match these students. Beyond campus, I think there is great opportunity for us to expand the “who we educate” part to larger numbers of learners who can’t come to campus. As those with experience with adult learners know, these students are significantly different from our on-campus students, requiring yet more flexibility in how we teach.

This is a pretty concrete set of issues, but my hope would be that if we can begin to address the real intellectual challenge that goes with this kind of flexible teaching and learning, we will be able to expand that notion of flexibility and agility to a wide range of university activities and programs.