Go the State of Vermont’s official web site-Vermont.gov-and you can find links to 109 state agencies, alphabetically from the Access Board to the Commission on Women.

What you won’t find is the University of Vermont; it isn’t part of any state agency.

That’s not how it works in most states, including Vermont’s neighbors. New Hampshire’s public colleges and universities are a part of the University System of New Hampshire. In Massachusetts, the public universities are a division of the Department of Higher Education, and the State University of New York is governed by a 17-member Board of Trustees, 15 of them appointed by the governor with the approval of the state senate.

Similar systems prevail in most states, said Richard Novak of the Washington-based Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Whether called trustees, regents, directors, or something else, he said, the people who govern public universities are “representatives of both the state and of a public entity, so the burden really falls on them to be defenders of the public interest.”

Not in Vermont, where nine members of the 25-person Board of Trustees, which “has full legal responsibility and authority for the University” are not chosen by any public body or official. These are the “self-perpetuating” members. Every other year these nine trustees-they alone, with no participation from the other 16-elect three people to six-year terms. Institutionally, at least, these trustees owe allegiance to nobody except the nine who chose them.

This doesn’t mean the public is shut out of governing the university. The governor is always an ex officio member, and the governor chooses three other members.  Using the same process of choosing three members every other year, nine members are elected for six-year terms by the Legislature. Not surprisingly, the lawmakers invariably choose one of their own, though it is not clear that they are required to do so.

The president of the university is also an ex officio member, and there are two student trustees, each serving a two-year term.

Novak said that “only a handful” of other state university systems are run by boards with self-perpetuating members, and the only two he could think of were Pennsylvania and Delaware . But in Pennsylvania, only a third of the board members are self-perpetuating, and the power of Delaware’s board is buffered by a 13-member Higher Education Commission  made up of the heads of the state colleges and universities and five members chosen by the governor.

Of all the systems of public higher education in the country, then, Vermont’s appears to be the least public, not only because the state provides little more than 10 percent of UVM’s total  revenue, but because the people who govern it are less beholden to the public than their counterparts in the other 49 states.

It is also probably the only state university in which most students are from out of state.

“UVM is less a state institution than the others,” said State Rep. Harry Chen of Rutland County, one of the nine lawmaker trustees.

If nothing else, this is a historical irony. The university’s iconic building, right at the corner of Main Street and University Place, is Morrill Hall, named for Justin Smith Morrill,  the Vermont U.S. Representative (1855-1867) and Senator (1867-1898) who sponsored the law that lead to the creation of state universities, primarily so that the children of farmers and workers could go to college. But his own state’s public university comes farther from meeting that goal than any other.

Beyond the irony, the university’s public-private hybrid status raises the question of accountability, one of the arguments of faculty members battling the administration’s plans for cutting the budget by some $28 million.

“What kind of accounting assumptions have been going on for the last five years,” asked English Professor Nancy Welch, a leader of United Academics, the teachers union which opposes the way President Daniel Fogel wants to cut the budget. “We’ve had real revenue accumulation. The General Fund is up some 50 percent but (Fogel) says we have a budget deficit.”

Many of the other faculty members don’t doubt that the deficit is real, and that cuts are needed. But many of them wonder whether they have all the information needed to judge how much should be cut, and where.

Behind that immediate question is a larger one: Who looks over UVM’s books?

The university itself, of course, as do all universities, and then its findings are examined by one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, in UVM’s case KPMG, from its local office in Colchester, according to university spokesman Jeff  Wakefield.

But it is no secret these days that audits by a “Big Four” firm, while necessary, may not be sufficient. The big accounting firms sometimes don’t question all those “accounting assumptions,” instead accepting the client’s contention that expenses are necessary. Besides, KPMG, no matter how skilled and thorough, does not represent or report to the people of Vermont.

Those nine legislative trustees do, and Chen said he and most of the others “are engaged in the board.”

But another legislator, outgoing Senate Education Committee Chairman Donald Collins of Swanton, said that the legislative trustees “are at a real disadvantage” on the board. “They don’t have the background,” said  Collins, who was once on the board of the State College system, and is a retired educator. “They don’t even know what questions to ask.”

The Legislature itself doesn’t keep close tabs on UVM either, Collins said.

“We’ve had Fogel and the others in to explain their programs,” he said. But Vermont legislative committees have tiny staffs. The lawmakers themselves are citizen-legislators who have day jobs. If a legislative committee wanted to, it probably could not conduct an in-depth examination of the university’s finances. At any rate, it hasn’t. Neither has the Auditor of Accounts.

None of this means that Fogel and his top administrators can do as they please. But they can do much of what they please, and during Fogel’s five years, they have pleased to expand-buying old buildings and putting up new ones, starting new programs (such as the Honors College), adding students, faculty, and administrators.

As a result, UVM is a better university. It’s also  more expensive , and it spends some $250 million a year. Most of that money does not come from Vermont taxpayers. But all of it is spent in the state’s name, without the state paying much attention to what is going on.

That may be changing because the faculty union and the faculty senate want to take a look at the books. From what they’ve said, it’s not clear that many of them know how to read those books; accounting has its own language, easy to misinterpret

But big bucks is big bucks. UVM has been spending some.

And wasting some? Tune in tomorrow.—Jon Margolis

G

UVM President Fogel

Before Daniel Mark Fogel became President of the University of Vermont in 2002, the school had been losing students, faculty, and reputation.

Not any more. Now there are more students, paying higher tuition, filling a university treasury that in turn is paying the more generous salaries of a larger faculty which is teaching students who have better test scores at an institution that is regaining its status as a high-quality school and a sought-after destination for smart, energetic (and affluent) high school seniors.

So why are the professors complaining?

Well, to begin with, complaining what college professors do. Maybe it’s because professors are scholars. They analyze systems and situations, often a prelude to criticizing them. It’s part of their job.

In this case, there also seems to be an inclination if not an insistence on opposing whoever is in charge, especially if they make a lot of money. A visceral populism, not really germane to the basic dispute, keeps popping up in the professorial rhetoric.

But complaints are not invalid just because the complainers are wont to complain, or because they clutter up their complaints with politics. Perhaps all those rosy statistics about UVM’s growth hide as much as they reveal.

To begin with, those higher faculty salaries owe less to anyone’s generosity than to the faculty’s decision to unionize a few years ago, and Vermont’s professors still don’t earn as much as their colleagues at public universities in most other states. The American Association of  University Professors divides faculty salaries by quintile, and English Professor Nancy Welch said, “we’re in group four in the AAUP salary scale. We used to be in five.”

But the faculty is not complaining about salaries. The dispute at UVM, which flared up at the end of the first semester last week and could continue for the rest of the academic year, defies the old, “it’s not about the money” rule: When anyone claims, “it’s not about the money,” it’s about the money.

This isn’t about the money. At least not about faculty salaries. The university and the union will renegotiate salaries before the current contract expires in 2011.

What the professors are complaining about is how the university’s money is allocated. They think too much of it has gone to fancy buildings and a bigger, high-salary, administrative staff, and not enough to teaching and research.

(The union is United Academics, affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AAUP. Full disclosure: I have been part-time adjunct faculty in the Political Science Department since 2004 and am a member of the union.)

Now that UVM, just like almost every other institution private and public, has to cut its budget-by roughly $28 million, Fogel says-the faculty union argues that the university should cut out more of those $200,000-a-year administrative positions and not fire as many junior instructors and researchers.

At first glance, there might seem to be an inconsistency here because United Academics also argues that UVM has been relying too much on junior instructors, many of whom are effectively full-time part-timers, teachers who are not on a tenure track and are hired for a year at a time.

In the last five years, enrollment has gone up by 28 percent, but the number of tenure-track positions has risen by only 14 percent.  In the view of English Professor Welch, one of the union leaders, the problem is not that these year-at-a-time hires aren’t good teachers. It’s that “professors should not just be teaching delivery devices.”

Instead, she said, “professors should be determining together what a degree from UVM is, what courses we should be offering.” Because the year-to-year hires don’t serve on committees or advise students, she said, they are not a part of this process, and the heavy reliance on them degrades the quality of  a UVM education.

“In the English Department. 91 percent of the seats for first and second-year courses are taught by (part-time) lecturers. This is bad for any kind of curricular continuity.”

At a time of almost-universal belt-tightening, many might consider this position a luxury, if not a conceit, that UVM and the taxpayers who help support it can ill afford. But it happens to be the almost-universal point of view of serious academics, probably including one-time English professor Daniel Fogel, who pledged to the university community last week his “abiding commitment to maintaining academic quality” as UVM struggled to cut its budget.

By almost all accounts, UVM’s academic quality has improved under Fogel, and it’s close to absurd to suppose that he would want to diminish that accomplishment. But what he wants to do now is cut the academic staff, to reduce the size of the faculty so that class sizes are larger.

Not, on the face of it, all that large. Fogel is aiming for a university-wide ratio of 16 students per faculty member, up from today’s 15.2-to-one. But as any student of statistics knows,  an overall 16-1 ratio could mean many classes that are much larger. Already, Welch said, many English literature classes have 35 students, which does seem to high for quality education in that field.

The same complexity holds over the question of budget cuts. In a letter to union president David Shiman, Fogel said the plan was for “academic units” to reduce their budgets by 4.7 percent while “other units” (the administration) would suffer a larger 6.5 percent reduction.

But that 4.7 percent is a minimum for  the academic units, many of which would have to cut more to reach their 16-to-1 ratio. Shiman, a professor of education, said the total reduction of this “ration penalty” for his school would be 9.25 percent, while the school of Arts and Sciences would see a cut of more than seven percent.

Fogel has pledged “an open and collaborative process” in working out the cuts, and on Friday he met with faculty representatives, including Shiman.

“His response was that we have time within the next few weeks to renegotiate and talk.,” Shiman said. “I’m hoping we can build a case. We’re not questioning the 4.75 (percent cut).  I think one of the positive outcomes of this whole thing is there is greater openness, more candor I have seen in years.”

Perhaps, he said, because the faculty and the union have refused to accept the administration’s effort to impose the cuts unilaterally.

To some extent, what is going on at UVM is a power struggle, and a fairly common one. Faculties and administrations battle over who controls what at universities all over the country. A few years ago, Harvard’s faculty effectively fired the university’s high-profile president. Against that backdrop, it is no surprise that a strong president who has built a larger and more powerful administrative structure would evoke a strong response from the faculty. That helps explains why the professors decided to unionize.

Not that faculty and administration are the only factions at UVM. There are the students and their tuition-paying parents. There are the non-professional maintenance and technical workers. And, of course, there are the government and the citizens-taxpayers of the state of Vermont. After all, UVM is a public university, is it not?

Well, only sort of. Details tomorrow—Jon Margolis[