Did Hard Grading Spur UNC Greensboro’s Cuts?

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on September 16, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.

Earlier this year, the Martin Center’s Ashlynn Warta wrote convincingly that faculty opposition to academic cuts at UNC Greensboro was best understood as an act of self-preservation. We stand by that analysis. Nevertheless, the Martin Center has since learned that the cuts in question may well have been unethical in part. If that is the case, UNCG should reconsider whether all of its announced retrenchments are indeed in students’ and taxpayers’ best interests.

As the Chronicle of Higher Education recalled in its own investigative feature last month, UNCG’s “academic-portfolio review” (APR) was conceived in late 2022 as a collaboration between university administrators and the consulting firm RPK Group. Intended to rescue the institution’s finances in the wake of a 10-percent enrollment decline since 2017, the APR took place alongside attempts to outsource custodial operations, right-size the secretarial pool, and merge redundant campus-police processes.

Yet, predictably, cuts with the potential to affect faculty assignments received the most pushback. In January of this year, the UNCG faculty senate voted to censure both Chancellor Frank Gilliam and then-Provost Debbie Storrs, asserting that the pair had “not initiat[ed] consultation with the Senate at the start of the APR process [or provided] a clear rationale of the choice of program closures.” When, on February 1, Gilliam announced his approval of 20 program discontinuations proposed by Storrs, the faculty responded with a vote of “no confidence” in the latter—Storrs resigned in April, citing health reasons.

Were these actions the mere lashing out of a wounded professoriate? It is tempting to assume as much. The Martin Center has since discovered, however, that among the motives governing program retrenchments were administrative concerns that professors in some affected departments were holding general-education students to too high a standard. Such considerations, if real, would appear to violate not only academic norms but the very intellectual foundation of the university. Administrators may appropriately decide that offering certain courses no longer makes financial sense, or that the institution is not attracting students who can succeed in the highest-level technical disciplines. What they mustn’t do is coax, threaten, or cajole professors into awarding more passing grades in their core-curriculum classes—especially in the context of widespread academic pullbacks and possible job losses.

According to the Martin Center’s sources, however, that is exactly what happened to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Department of Anthropology. In numerous emails over the past weeks and months, Drs. Tom Lewis—math—Anatoly Miroshnichenko—astronomy—and Robert Anemone—anthropology—set forth strong claims that university administrators took so-called DFW rates into account when deciding to shutter the BS and BA in physics, the MA in mathematics, the PhD in computational math, and the BA in anthropology—DFW rates refer to the percentage of students who receive a “D” or “F” or who withdraw from a course. These assertions are supported by other colleagues’ recollections and, in several cases, by uncovered emails. The story told by this testimony is one of egregious administrative meddling that, if left uncorrected, could damage the academic integrity of the entire institution.

The professors’ most important assertion is that the math, physics/astronomy, and anthropology departments were targeted for cuts in part because of the DFW rates in some of their courses. On January 31 of this year, one day before the official announcement regarding program discontinuations, Chancellor Gilliam and Provost Storrs met with members of the physics/astronomy faculty at the professors’ request. At this meeting, Miroshnichenko and his colleagues attempted to defend the department but were repeatedly rebuffed with DFW-related remarks. As Miroshnichenko recalls, “When I made a comment about the Three College Observatory, whose director I am and which is a unique North Carolina research facility, the only question from the provost was about DFW rates in my [introductory astronomy] courses.” A second source present at the meeting confirms this recollection: “DFW rates came up several times.” Moreover, the chancellor and provost “cited introductory astronomy and general physics as specifically offending their DFW criteria.”

Similar pressure on the anthropology department seems to have been just as intense. According to Anemone, a spring 2024 meeting between Gilliam, Storrs, the anthropology faculty, and dean of undergraduate studies Andrew Hamilton devolved into a debate over DFW rates in the department’s general-education and undergraduate courses. As Anemone remembers the meeting, “The faculty asked why our department was marked for discontinuation” despite “a very strong record of departmental strength as revealed by the APR process.” Instead of disputing this characterization, the provost “replied by telling us that our DFW rates were too high and that we were, in effect, damaging UNCG’s four- and six-year graduation rates.”

Lewis, the math professor, tells a similar story. According to him, College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) dean John Kiss “informed the math department during a departmental meeting that the provost had threatened to ‘pause’ our graduate programs if we did not improve the DFW rates in our service-level courses.” While Lewis speculates that the university’s long-term plan is to replace departing math faculty with adjuncts—since the latter “can simply be replaced if they fail too many students”—he is adamant that administrative dissatisfaction with the department stems from the fact that “students’ grades [in general-education offerings] have not been artificially inflated beyond what is in alignment with their course performance.” As a result, he maintains, “our timely and successful advanced programs in mathematics have been discontinued.”

One professor who asked not to be named told the Martin Center that “there has been a general culture of obsession around DFW rates at both the college and university level for some time.” Faculty would “hear periodically from the department chair that ‘the Dean’s office is concerned about DFW rates in core courses’ or something along those lines. It’s been part of the background noise.” Communication from the provost’s office supports this claim. A 2022 email from Storrs to UNCG department chairs encouraged faculty to enroll in an instructor-certification program designed to “decrease DFW rates.” Participating faculty, Storrs remarked, should have their “commitment” recognized “in annual evaluations”—no small matter for faculty members either on or off the tenure track.

While the document in question does not mention DFW rates specifically, the resignation letter of CAS associate dean Charles C. Bolton, filed earlier this year, makes much of Storrs’s “egregious behavior” during the APR process. According to Bolton, Storrs “pressured” Dean Kiss to add the BA in anthropology and the MA in mathematics to the discontinuation list despite the fact that “both [programs] scored in the ‘Meets Expectations’ section of [a] rubric that the administration … developed and approved.” Bolton went on: “I believe that [the math and anthropology cuts] are equally heavy-handed and capricious decisions made by one individual (Provost Storrs) in an unfair, nontransparent, and uncollaborative way.”

Another Bolton missive, sent this past January, raised the DFW question far more explicitly. In an email to Dean Kiss and others, Bolton made plain that administrative dissatisfaction with math and anthropology had largely to do with the difficulty of departmental courses. “I don’t think claiming [math] and [anthropology] have student-success problems is a sound argument,” Bolton wrote, before attaching to his email a further three pages of DFW-related graphs for his recipients’ consideration. Clearly, DFW rates were at issue as administrators discussed the future of certain UNCG programs.

Reached for comment, UNC Greensboro media-relations staff told the Martin Center the following:

Decisions to curtail programs were made mainly for considerations regarding staffing and student demand. Student success was but one factor in the holistic reviews performed by the deans. Even before the APR process began, improving student outcomes was a university priority (particularly given the introduction of UNC system-mandated metrics). Monitoring DFW rates for all courses is a best practice.

As implied above, there are subtle distinctions to be made when considering the propriety of academic cuts. It is perfectly reasonable to decide, for example, that UNC Greensboro doesn’t need an undergraduate physics major. Not every school in the UNC System can support graduate degrees in math. What is unreasonable—indeed, scandalous—is to imply or outright declare that professors must give higher marks if they want to keep their programs. That is a recipe for worthless credentials—for physicists who don’t know their particles and mathematicians who can’t count.

Did UNCG cross this line when conducting its recent academic-portfolio review? The evidence suggests that it did. Doubtless the institution could produce any number of acceptable reasons why the discontinued programs had to go, but the process by which they went is nevertheless a concern. In Greensboro, administrators meddled with professors’ grading. That should worry all of us.

Image of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro — Wikimedia Commons