SEPTEMBER 10, 1998-vol30n3: Mail

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 3 THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1998

The Mail

Statistics: from a vibrant enterprise on an upward slope to a dwindled, demoralized group

To the Editor:

When the statistics department was transferred to the medical school, its marching orders were to pay special attention to biostatistics and statistical consulting in health sciences.

My 1993 appointment letter from Dean Naughton promised two additional faculty to help bring this about. Sadly, these promised additional resources never came to pass. Fortunately, faculty turnover enabled me to hire two biostatisticians and one statistician with a pronounced interest in biostatistics, while our overall size remained much the same.

We also launched a statistical laboratory that has been actively consulted by many hospitals and departments.

All this and much more is discussed in my annual reports. These reports are very specific and detailed, and cover teaching, research productivity, consulting services, seminar series, faculty and staff, as well as lists of accomplishments and shortcomings. To the best of my knowledge, these reports were filed unread: at least I never received any response to them.

From this documentation it is evident that by 1996 the future looked bright. Even as our department was flowering, the School of Medicine was wilting. Many medical faculty no longer generated grants, the lifeblood of medical schools. Unlike core faculty, professors in medicine can never earn their keep with teaching: they become deadweight. The resulting resource crunch was the reason the commitments made to statistics were never honored.

An exception to the general malaise is the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, SPM. They are physically next door to us, and use statistical expertise with a vengeance: the study of epidemics and large-scale longitudinal studies involve much data analysis. They have statistical expertise on their own staff, just as many departments have faculty well-versed in the use of (as opposed to the production and design of) statistical techniques.

What transpired when is still not clear to me, but when both SPM "in-house" statistical gurus indicated they would leave in 1996, their chair, Dr. Trevisan, touched base with Dean Naughton, who consulted with Provost Headrick, and overnight this triumvirate decided to subsume the statistics department wholesale into SPM. Word of this development filtered through to me slowly via SPM students and secretarial staff. When it dawned on me that the rumors were premised on fact I protested fiercely, but the decision had been made.

The two years that lapsed between 1996 and 1998 were not used to study the relevant information or invite faculty governance input, but rather to let the department lapse from a vibrant enterprise on a steep upward slope to a dwindled, demoralized, internally somewhat divided group. Its faculty is now, with death, departure and retirement all taking their toll, down to three.

The administration believes that it will be possible to have a statistics unit in SPM that will do what all regular departments do, and then some. Whence this optimism? The chair of SPM is on record that he is not interested in developing statistics. If the earlier notion that the medical school would be a nurturing home for the statistics department, rather than a cannibalistic tribe, proved to be so false so quickly, what hope is there in this new structure?

Of all the miseries encountered, I can understand the failure to make good on written commitments best. I bemoan this in my annual reports, but never went to the barricades, mindful of the general difficulties faced by health sciences.

What I find more difficult to understand is the personal meanness. I came in good faith, and accomplished much in a short time. Yet, I am considered a pariah. My annual reports are unread, my contributions unacknowledged, my name is not mentioned, my professional reputation is ignored.

For the record, I can stand the pressure; I can live with the insults; I know it reflects on my detractors and not on me. Yet, it is grating, especially since this vindictiveness is so gratuitous. For Provost Headrick indicates that the real problem is institutional priorities vying for scarce resources. We are not such a priority. Rather, empty seats in a stadium, law school, gender studies, exotic languages, a Center for the Arts that is a huge white elephant, a development office that advertises for "many, lucrative" positions-a list devoid of intellectual pursuits and/or market-driven resource allocations.

What I don't understand at all is the gleeful attitude of the administrators perpetrating all this, the Greiners, the Headricks, the Naughtons, the Wrights, the Levys, the Triggles, the Goodmans. They appear to positively enjoy this diversion, quoting Alice in Wonderland and other inanities, calling our demise "biting the bullet" over and over again, and acting throughout even before decisions have been made. In another context, Greenspan spoke of irrational exuberance. In another context, Goldhagen spoke of willing executioners. As for Guttman, I am so dumbfounded words fail me.

-Irwin Guttman, Professor

The enhanced undergraduate experience--an enhanced bureaucratic experience

To the Editor:

Through the formation of the College of Arts and Sciences was premised on the need "to enhance the undergraduate experience," it was mentioned as a positive externality that it would streamline the bureaucracy.

I took this with scepsis, but harbored some hope that the legion of staff which surrounds deans would rejoin the faculty. Courtesy of the Reporter, we now have the scorecard.

One undeaned dean has become senior vice provost for educational technology. His assistant has become associate vice provost for educational technology.

The other supernumerary dean is now senior advisor for planning and operations of the college. His right-hand man is senior associate dean of the college.

Other staff of the old decanal bureaucracies have also safely landed: as associate dean for sponsored programs of the college; as associate dean for graduate studies and research of the college; as associate dean for educational technology of the college; and as associate dean for undergraduate studies of the college.

The (old) dean of the Undergraduate College is recycled to a deanship with another name, and three of his staff have redefined functions. Never fear, he promises that several additional functions will be created (including a recruitment-and-retention specialist).

These are not examples of positions crying to be filled, but of persons crying for a position. To add insult to injury, in many cases there is not the slightest indication that the appointed dean has any demonstrated or credentialed competence in the relevant area. In no case was the position advertised or subject to an affirmative action search.

It is clear that part of the "enhanced undergraduate experience" will be an "enhanced bureaucratic experience."

-John C. G. Boot, Chairman,
Department of Management Science and Systems, School of Management