By comparison, Owens Community College averaged 19 students per lecture section. On its main campus, 36% of Owens' students were in classes which had 20 or fewer students. Thus according to these OBOR statistics, the local community college students have fewer students in their classes than at UT allowing each Owens instructor more time to focus on individual students. That's part of being student-centered. 

We note the following flaws in the Jacobs Administration letter of January 7.

• The letter points out that UT will continue to offer small classes, but they will not count as part of our teaching workload. What does this mean? If the courses are not counted, who will be paid for teaching these courses? Under the 13th Amendment, an employer cannot force an employee to perform uncompensated labor. And no employer with high moral standards and ethics would invite employees to do unpaid work.
    
• The Jacobs Administration has announced that students can now graduate in three years. However, the Administration has cancelled numerous courses this Spring semester and will cancel many more next fall. The requirements in the January 7 letter will lead to fewer and fewer options for students, making it much harder for students to graduate on time, let alone in three years.
   
•  The letter says that only externally funded research that pays for a faculty member's salary (or part of that salary) will earn teaching reductions for research faculty. Since many external grants do not pay research faculty salary, or only a small portion during the summer, faculty will have to do their funded research and spend significant time applying for new grants, on top of their full teaching load. Externally funded research at UT has dropped over 37% in the past two years. Funded research will continue to decline under these policies.
    
• The letter requires graduate courses to enroll 15 masters students or 8 doctoral students. Among the Higher Ed masters' courses this Spring Semester, only one graduate course has more than 15 students. Among the MIME graduate-level courses offered this semester, only four classes have enrolled more than 15, and two of those courses are in India. These are good graduate programs which students find attractive, often because of the opportunity to have more time to work closely with their instructors. The Jacobs Administration's new instruction parameters will decimate our graduate programs. 
   
• The Jacobs Administration appears to have forgotten that we recently created the designation of "Research Intensive" courses in order to promote opportunities for undergraduate students to work on collaborative research with their teachers. With a mandate of 30 undergraduate students per class and 15 graduate students per class, this initiative is dead on arrival.

On this coming Monday, January 14, the UT Board of Trustees will vote on a revision to the University of Toledo's mission statement that will insert the word "research". We will now "serve as a diverse, public metropolitan research university." According to the new revisions proposed to the mission statement, we will no longer be known for our "strong liberal arts core", but rather for our "distinctive exploration of the relationships between the liberal arts and science and technology." Also new is the emphasis on our "exceptional interdisciplinary core."

The Jacobs Administration letter of January 7 is in direct conflict with the proposed new UT "research" mission statement. Funded research at UT has dropped by more than $30 million over the past two years. The Jacobs Administration has done little to improve UT research. The bottom line is that the Jacobs Administration's new instructional policy as set forth in the January 7 letter is grossly unfair to students and is also unfriendly to both funded and unfunded research.

Link to Provost's Letter