Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412120009
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV5 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
The challenge ahead seemed academic.
When Fred Carlisle left his job as provost at Miami University in Ohio to become chief academic officer at Virginia Tech in 1989, his charge at this large land-grant university was simple: Re-emphasize undergraduate education without losing Tech's research focus.
But it was only a matter of months before Carlisle, a soft-spoken Whitman scholar, also became the enforcer behind unprecedented budget cuts that have sheared $40 million from Tech's budget in the last five years.
Now he's quitting his job as provost to return to teaching. But first, he's planning a late-spring trip to Africa. He hopes to meet writers in Zimbabwe, and performing artists in Zambia.
His reasons for resigning are simple.
"I didn't want to do it any longer," said Carlisle, who will become an English professor at Tech after his semester sabbatical.
Carlisle, hired as top lieutenant for Tech's late president, James McComas, will be remembered for initiatives such as promoting diversity in faculty hiring. During his tenure, progress has been slow but steady: Women in tenure-track faculty positions, for instance, have risen from 11.9 percent in 1986 to 15.7 percent last year.
He helped to engineer $4 million in tuition waivers for graduate teaching fellows, and find money to aid undergraduates' work.
But mostly, Carlisle will be remembered as the administrator who rode herd on the university's budget cuts and the massive restructuring plan that ensued. He is the person who issued the hard decisions - some of them unpopular, some still debated on campus.
Once he made his decisions, he stood behind them. And people admire him for that.
"I think that he has had an extremely difficult job at a very difficult time for the university, and I think he understood what was necessary and what had to be done a lot earlier than most of the other people around," said history professor Larry Shumsky, president of the faculty Senate.
Restructuring to merge degree programs and academic departments, to trim administration and prepare for an influx of baby bust students was mandated a year ago by the General Assembly. Gov. George Allen is so serious about seeing cost-saving change that he may withhold nearly $7 million in state funding from the six colleges and universities, including Radford, that missed a deadline for submitting solid restructuring plans.
Tech, whose plan was approved as soon as it was submitted to the state this fall, saw the writing on the wall some time back.
"When budget reductions started, it became clear we could not make reductions in as thoughtful a way as we needed to," Carlisle said. "In the first year, we started talking about a deliberate, thoughtful review."
By the summer of 1993, for instance, the College of Agriculture had lost the equivalent of 300 workers, and had merged and shifted programs to fill the holes.
But it was Carlisle's mandate to the College of Education that arrested attention on the Tech campus. In a letter issued last February, Carlisle ordered the school to focus on K-12 education alone, and in the process cut $1.6 million over several years. That's 20 percent of its annual operating budget.
Jim Buffer was dean of education the day the cuts came down.
"Yes, I was surprised," said Buffer, whose faculty had been meeting and planning for change. "I didn't have any indication there would be such a massive cut.
"The next question was the rationale for it. ... He was the provost, the person who had primary responsibility for identifying the academic mission. My responsibility was to be a champion for the College of Education.
While respecting Carlisle for pushing what he believed, Buffer also cautioned that the university does not yet know whether, in the long run, it will suffer from cuts in his department.
Buffer took another job within the university, as director of the new Hotel Roanoke-based think tank called the Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement. Wayne Worner, a professor in the college, stepped in as interim dean.
Like Buffer, Worner admits he didn't like seeing his college singled out, but he admires Carlisle for having the courage to make the hard choices.
"He's a straight shooter. He didn't duck the tough issues. He did it, and he did it in a business-like way. Given that, I think he's a class act," Worner said.
"As difficult as it was to confront the issue, [that] the college is going to fare relatively less well, once that decision was made, he gave us the tools to go about doing the things that have to be done," Worner said.
When the College of Education was cut and its focus narrowed, the other colleges sat up and took note. The cut was widely seen as a sign of what might happen elsewhere in the university.
Although he will not pre-empt his successor's decisions, Carlisle does not discourage such speculation.
"My sense is, the university probably isn't finished with substantial restructuring," Carlisle said. The university "may well find" there's more to come.
And it may turn out to be far more political than even the College of Education's shift.
Just last week, the state Senate Finance Committee, meeting at The German Club in Blacksburg, heard that retrofitting all the colleges and universities may not save as much money as each institution is going to need.
Enrollment will grow by 10 percent, tuition raises have been limited to the rate of inflation, and tax funding will continue to drop.
Restructuring at Tech recently has stripped department status from studies on women, African-Americans and religion and formed them into a new alliance. This type of arrangement is a first attempt to figure out how to deal with the coming change, according to the finance committee staff.
On campus, that may be reason for worry.
"There's always the concern that people will get tired of restructuring. People get weary. There's a [concern] for backlash against a systematic reallocation," Carlisle said.
"The sense of a university community is fragile," continued Carlisle, who has studied and worked at five other campuses in his academic career.
Tech's vast size can divide into factions, blunting efforts to galvanize a faculty in a "greater sense of common purpose," he said.
But amid the state's ever-strained financial picture, those factions may have to hang together - if they want to commit to undergraduates, or promote diversity. Carlisle continues to promote diversity, because "something about the education of young people and faculty requires some kind of attention [on the campus] so it looks like the nation at large," he said.
Those who work closely with Carlisle will miss him.
"I'm in tears," said assistant provost Pat Hyer, who has overseen his program to help fund jobs for minorities, women or faculty spouses who have sparse job opportunities in this region.
Carlisle, meantime, plans to do some writing. His wife, theater professor Barbara Carlisle, and he hope to spend more time with their five daughters and eight grandchildren, none of whom live in the area.
With all of the politics currently showering down on higher education in Virginia , the departing provost predicts that whoever takes over is unlikely to escape the tough decisions forced by restructuring.
"I don't think the outside pressure is going to stop. The university thinks it has done a lot. It may be just getting started," Carlisle said.
by CNB