Sunday, September 14, 2014

Could UVU Have a Park City Mountain Resort-Level Failure?

Sometimes a business does something so trivial, so careless—and so catastrophic—that the mind fails to understand how the people involved could have reached a position of responsibility in a modern corporation. Powdr, the operators of the Park City Mountain Resort ski area, had a sweetheart lease on its terrain, and the opportunity to renew it on the same terms. Having made massive capital investments in a base right in Park City to access the terrain, you would think they would be absolutely on top of renewing that lease.

You would be wrong.

Powdr missed the deadline by a few days, and spent the last few years litigating to try to win back the terrain that gave their base its value. They lost, and last week sold the base to Vail Resorts, who had leased the terrain while Powdr was litigating.

It’s the corporate equivalent of a crash skiers call a “yard sale.” Such a disaster raises the question of what UVU could do to “yard sale” the university. Let me thus suggest conditions that are (1) either within our control or for which we might adequately plan (2) that have a realistic possibility, however low, of occurring, and (3) pose fundamental threats to our ability to function as an institution of higher education?


One way in which UVU could yard sale is with conditions that undermine our ability to operate. If any of these things happened, we might not be able to fully operate as university.

Overexpansion. UVU is projected to expand to over 46,000 students by 2024. We’re short on room as it is; finding room for half again our current student body is a major priority for the institution. But what if those projections are wrong? If for-profits keep growing, the state legislature continues shifting the burden of paying for higher education from the public to students themselves, and the disruptive innovators innovate and disrupt (this week’s disruptive innovation: nanodegrees, brought to you by the guy who put together Udacity and then declared it a “lousy product”), the action we take now to meet expansion could leave us with a herd of white elephants: new satellite campuses that empty, faculty that can’t fill their courses. And fewer students to pay the bills for all of these things.

Geneva Property Cleanup. We got a great deal on it, but let’s not forget that it was a Superfund cleanup site. All involved believe that it is remediated to the best of our skills and other powers, but there is always some uncertainty with environmental issues. Should we discover a major hazard after we have built out the site, the costs could be dramatic both from the environmental issues themselves and the lost use of the site.

Earthquakes. We love taking pictures of Mt. Timpanogos and putting them on our web pages. And who wouldn’t. But we sit less than four miles from the Wasatch Fault that makes Mt. Timp so grand. That fault produces a 7.5 magnitude quake every 350 years, on average. The last one was 400 years ago. Luckily that was on the Provo segment, so the next quake is most likely a bit further away. But having lived through the Northridge quake in 1994, and been nearly on top of the 1992 Landers quake's epicenter, I know that even at a distance a magnitude 7-ish quake can be disruptive. (Also, that may tell you something about the likelihood of a quake while I'm at UVU.) If the next Wasatch Fault quake is on the Salt Lake segment, large numbers of students—and a much larger proportion of faculty—might not be able to reach campus. That’s a very sudden and substantial loss for the university.

Several other operational issues have greater uncertainty in their effects. All of these tie to UVU’s ability to offer financial aid, the loss of which would be devastating. But I’m not convinced that any of these possible threats would actually be levelled effectively against a large state university.

Loss of accreditation. Certainly this would be disastrous. A few schools lose regional accreditation annually (anecdotally I’d say two or three in a typical year, but there doesn’t seem to be any source of centralized numbers on that). In every case that I have seen, dire financial circumstances have been the main culprit; City College of San Francisco, for instance, had three days’ cash reserves when WASC said it would revoke its accreditation a year ago. All of the problems described above could lead to that. But CCSF is why there is so much uncertainty: it is still running. Extensive lobbying, including support from the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and litigation has kept WASC from revoking accreditation so far. Only small schools and for-profits on the brink of bankruptcy seem to be successful targets for lost accreditation.

PIRS. The proposed Postsecondary Institution Ratings System is supposed to tie accountability measures to schools’ Title IV eligibility. The ratings are proving problematic in themselves, but creating ratings is something within the power of the Department of Education on its own. Tying ratings to financial aid requires Congressional action, since the standard for aid eligibility is written into law. You may have noticed that it has been quite a while since Presidents and Congresses have been cooperating on much. I don’t expect this to happen soon, especially since the universities with the best lobbyists (the for-profits) are the ones most likely to be on the losing end of any ratings that take cost, job placement, and loan default rates into account.

Sexual Assault Investigations. The Departments of Education and Justice are investigating dozens of colleges and universities regarding failure to adequately address accusations of sexual assault among students. If substantiated these failures would be violations of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in educational institutions, and would also jeopardize those institutions’ eligibility to offer financial aid. I’ve heard UVU’s faculty and staff frequently praise the moral standards of our students, often implicitly or explicitly linking that to the high levels of religious involvement among them. That we are a non-residential institution with many married and non-traditional students, that our students have relatively low levels of alcohol use, and that we lack a culture of campus involvement reduce the likelihood of sexual assault on our campus. Those same conditions, however, do make it difficult for women to report sexual assaults and increase the likelihood that assaults that are reported will be improperly investigated—victims dismissed or blamed, perpetrators protected, and the aim of action being to make the case go away. Moreover, the presumed rarity of incidents does not excuse how we treat those that do occur. A failure on this could still be quite serious.

The operational challenges are the biggest and most obvious ones. But we should be aware of challenges to our legitimacy as a university as well. Situations that undermine our ability to speak sincerely and honestly to our core values compromises our standing in the community, and sets us on a path toward long-term decline.

Academic Freedom. Higher education has confronted a series of controversies over academic freedom in the last year, the case of Steven Salaita being to most vocal recent one. As I understand it, UVU has a several faculty members that joined us following perceived challenges to academic freedom at BYU, and who are quite sensitive to the issue here as well. But students, too, are concerned with the issue, and to some extent from the opposite perspective. I noticed more than a few complaints from students that faculty were hostile toward their religious beliefs. I think UVU does a decently good job of holding the balance here (and I really appreciate the coffee at the Staff Fall Forum, a nice recognition that at UVU, “we” aren’t all members of the LDS Church as I’ve heard people say more than once). A less deft hand in either direction could ruin that and with it an important aspect of our mission.

Accreditation Sanctions. NWCCU has options beyond revoking our accreditation, and accreditors seem much more willing to put institutions on notice for purely academic concerns such as failure to demonstrate student learning. The most likely issues for UVU in this case are the lack of a culture of assessment and, as some policy commentators have recommended, new standards regarding full-time to adjunct faculty ratios. There is no evidence for or against the claim that these sanctions have any effect on the institution (as opposed to the individuals at the responsible for the conditions leading to sanctions). Indeed, CCSF had a long history of comments and notices regarding its academic weaknesses, but only lost accreditation when its financial position was compromised. It seems that the most likely effect is the broad public perception of the institution, something that UVU has had great success building over the past decade.

There are some areas that we might be too quick to assume are ripe for disaster when they really aren’t. The consequences of some circumstances aren’t nearly as bad as we may think. This is a problem, though, in that we are likely to divert resources from things that matter to being overprotective of areas that don’t demand more than routine attention.

Compliance. PWDR was brought down by its failure to comply with the legal requirements of its lease. So it seems like we should look there first. But the reality of regulatory compliance is that routine regulations, when violated, have routine consequences. If we fail to complete IPEDS submissions on time we can be fined. Those fines are not inconsiderable, but they don't undermine our ability to function as a university. Even a catastrophic IRB failure that cost us our eligibility for federal grants affects a relatvely small portion of our revenue, unlike a research university. And the worst case penalties are relatively rare. Compliance needs due diligence, but not undue paranoia.

Violence on Campus. We had the active shooter drill last December. (I skipped it. Been there, done that, got the bird, ball, and chain.) If that should happen on campus it would be emotionally devastating for UVU, a truly deep tragedy. But like Virginia Tech, I suspect UVU will go on, as an institution and a community. We have a deeper strength, I suspect, at UVU than many institutions because of the ties many of our students, faculty, and staff share within the larger community. I would hate to have that happen here, but it poses no more threat to us as an institution than terrorists do to the United States. That’s not a reason to dismiss the threat, to not prepare for it, and to not respond to it if it happens. But we should understand it in its proper frame.

Innovative Disruption. There are always fads in higher education. There is always something changing, seemingly too fast for us to keep up with. The reality is that those fads tend to die off quickly. The University of Virginia tried to fire its President for moving slowing on MOOCs not six months before “the MOOC is dead” became the mantra of the month in higher ed. And now the University of Texas is experimenting with large online sections in their classics courses, and having success after thinking about pedagogy before technology. (Disclosure: I’m consulting for the university on that course.) We won’t be left behind by moving deliberately, and we won’t be destroyed by experimenting.

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