UAlbany Program Undergoes Critical Review
By Marc Parry, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.
Aug. 23–The freshmen in University at Albany’s Project Renaissance program live and study together. It creates a small college atmosphere in a big school, something lots of universities try to do.
But a new report by outside evaluators suggests that UAlbany’s decade-old project has developed some distinctive characteristics:
“Most members of the Executive Committee of the University Senate who spoke during the reviewers’ lunch meeting were openly hostile toward the program and were discouraged that it appears to attract second-rate students to the university.”
“Project Renaissance instructors have very little if anything to do with others on campus … and seem to the reviewers to have adopted a bunker mentality in the face of what we imagine to be regular overt and covert assaults on ‘their’ program and professional qualifications.”
“A thorough review … revealed an obvious liberal political and social bias in selection of course content.”
“Members of the University Senate leadership see the number of good grades coming out of Project Renaissance as ‘astronomical grade inflation’ (according to one member) and the higher graduation rates of Project Renaissance as evidence that students are being given easy A’s in their first year.”
The routine review had good things to say about the program, too. Students feel engaged with the school. They find the program’s faculty accessible. They generally have higher GPAs than students who are not in the program.
And the faculty, at first mostly tenured or tenure-track professors but now “term-appointed” instructors who only teach first-year courses, keep their spirits up despite “low prestige” within the school.
“By any measure, they are doing a superb job, yet it must appear to them that the reward for their success is more opprobrium,” says the review by three outside educators. “The continuing high morale of the group in such an Alice in Wonderland world is truly remarkable.”
One UAlbany veteran took issue with that tone, saying regular faculty have sympathy for, rather than hostility toward, the program’s instructors.
The program is considered part of former President Karen Hitchcock’s legacy. UAlbany spokesman Karl Luntta sent Campus Notebook this statement on behalf of current administrators:
“We value the report and thank its authors for their efforts on our behalf. While we note that the report states the program is ‘very beneficial to students’ and engenders high retention rates, the administration and faculty are in discussions and assessing the report’s full recommendations. Our review will be ongoing through the fall semester, and we will share it at an appropriate time.”
Will Dix didn’t mean to dis Schenectady.
The college counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School was recently quoted in a New York Times story saying the only problem with Union and Hamilton colleges was their location in upstate New York.
“I tease the kids and say, ‘If they were in Massachusetts, you’d be all over them,’ ” Dix told the Times.
After we noted that in a recent column, Dix e-mailed Campus Notebook to clarify some things.
“My intent in teasing my students about Union’s and Hamilton’s locations was not to disparage their hometowns, but to say that their quality is comparable to Amherst’s or Williams’s,” he wrote. “They just happen to be in a part of the country that isn’t ‘branded’ for education the way New England is.”
“Although people often say they’re looking for ‘quality’ when they’re looking for a college, they just as often mean ‘well-known brand’ so others will know they (or their children) have the requisite taste and qualities to get into a famous school.”
We appreciate the thoughtful e-mail. Unfortunately for Union, this subject won’t seem to go away.
This week, Union topped the Princeton Review’s “More to do on campus,” list, which the college guide describes as the “stepsister” of its “great college towns” list.
Under Union were Tuskegee University in Alabama, West Point in New York, and New Jersey Institute of Technology.
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