Annapolis and College Park are separated by far more than the 30 miles of U.S. 50.
"It's a case of the University of Maryland faculty having too light a teaching load to support their salaries," said state Sen. Julian L. Lapides, a Baltimore Democrat who will step down at the end of this year.
"We're talking about people who are extraordinarily dedicated," University of Maryland College Park President William E. Kirwan responded. "If most of the nation's work force had a comparable work ethic, productivity in the United States would be even higher than it is."
This year, frustrated with the messages they received from officials at UMCP and other state colleges, state legislators withheld $21.5 million from this year's budget, $9.8 million earmarked for College Park.
The money has been held hostage to a study detailing what professors at all the state's public campuses do with their time and a policy stating what is expected of faculty.
The university system approved the policy in August and filed the report by Dec. 1 -- meeting the legislative deadline. Legislative committees will have until the middle of January to respond. Then the money will be released unless lawmakers take further action.
Concerned legislators wanted to force the university system to address widespread public concern that professors do not work hard, officials said.
"What I said to the university Board of Regents privately was that you all better do this yourselves or it'll be done to you," said state Sen. Barbara Hoffman, a Baltimore Democrat. "They didn't like it. It's like your mother telling you to take your cod liver oil."
The workload policy approved by the Board of Regents in August required teaching loads already met by professors at most of the colleges. The policy appears to demand more teaching of College Park faculty, but the compromise negotiated by university and state officials -- essentially, changing the definition of teaching -- may mean that little will change there.
At the research campuses, it is not abuse of the system that limits the time professors spend in the classroom. The system itself accomplishes that.
The academic culture and the reward system for faculty demand not only research in the hard sciences like biology, mathematics and physics, but also scholarship in literature, philosophy and anthropology.
Raises based on research
Expected to spend time on conducting and publishing research (and on seeking grants to support it), the average professor at College Park teaches three courses a year. Hiring, promotion and pay raises are based largely on research.
State legislators want a great university to educate the sons and daughters of the state's taxpayers. For legislators, that means a heavy emphasis on teaching.
The campus, by contrast, considers itself part of a national system of research universities. For campus officials, greatness
means research -- the key to enhancing the university's national reputation.
When asked what purpose research serves, University of Maryland system Chancellor Donald N. Langenberg, arguing that is hard to tell what will develop from new knowledge, cited the reply of British scientist Sir Michael Faraday to the same question from Queen Victoria: " 'Madam, what good is a small baby?' "
"Take the distribution of prime numbers," Dr. Langenberg said. "Who the hell cares? That is at the heart and core of every system for maintaining the security of every [computer] system we have and ever will have. Who could have predicted the connection? No one, 20 years ago."
Defenders of research universities such as College Park said that, without this system, distinguished professors would not be in Maryland at all. Without them, they argue, the state would lose some of the most innovative minds counted on to drive the region out of its economic lethargy.
And doing cutting-edge research, they say, makes them fresher and more stimulating teachers.
But that's not always the way it works out, students and state officials said.
They complain about huge lectures, courses taught by graduate students and part-time instructors, classes filling up so quickly that many students cannot take the courses they want.
"The faculty is there to teach. Eighty percent of their clients are undergraduates," said Shaila R. Aery, state secretary of higher education.
"It just costs so much more to go to college now. Everybody's squeezed, so it just infuriates you when your son isn't getting taught by professors."
'Ideal relationship'
Paul Mandell, president of the university system's student council, said some students have trouble making contact with their professors. "Look, what's most important to students, disregarding cost, is the relationship with faculty," said Mr. Mandell, an honors senior majoring in government and politics at College Park. "The ideal relationship is one in which students could speak often with their professors. It is difficult at a very large university to have that relationship."
But Mr. Mandell said the system works well for many students at College Park, which tries to balance large lecture courses with small seminars for upper-level students. Undergraduates appreciate the research done there. "It is difficult to assess the direct value of research on the institution, but I don't think anyone would vote for research to be shut down," Mr. Mandell said.
In the UMCP physics department, which said it produced 810 journal articles and attracted $15.9 million in research grants and contracts last year, only one-fifth of the department's 80 professors taught less than the expected faculty workload -- but that expected workload was only two courses a year.
(Figures on scholarly productivity can be difficult to interpret, however. For example, if three College Park physicists write a journal article together, it is counted three times, and the total also includes articles by some research professors without permanent or state-funded positions.)
Academic laissez-faire
The most prestigious schools tend to operate under a philosophy of academic laissez-faire: Departments are largely left to their own devices.
Physics chairman Stephen J. Wallace defended his department's practices, which he said are consistent with those at physics departments elsewhere. "We are one of the very best departments at College Park," Dr. Wallace said. "If you change the rules drastically, we could lose that standing."
The zoology department, by contrast, requires its professors to teach five courses per year. Then again, 83 percent of its faculty members were granted exemptions from that load last year, according to the university system report.
Give me a professor with an intense research project, Dr. Wallace says, and I'll give that scholar an exemption. Often, a grant includes enough money to hire a replacement instructor. In university parlance, that's known as a "buyout."
"We are moving toward a policy of not allowing buyouts," University of Maryland Baltimore County Provost Jo Ann E. Argersinger said. "Philosophically, I'm against them." While she will not rule out all exceptions -- she will intervene to help department chairs keep selected superstars -- the buyouts send the message that teaching is a chore to be avoided, Dr. Argersinger said.
The pinch of finance
The current attention to faculty workload has been driven in large part by tightening budgets.
When the University of Maryland system was created in 1988, UMCP was designated the "flagship" institution.
Over five years, the state would spend an additional $105 million on the university, and the campus promised to generate another $50 million in nonstate revenues from contracts, grants, private gifts and tuition increases.
The plan worked exactly as expected -- until 1989, when the recession struck and the state university system, one of the only nonmandated programs in the budget, resembled nothing so much as a sluggish mallard at the start of hunting season.
The system was slapped with a 20 percent cut in funding and UMCP's enhancements were scrapped, leading College Park to drop 32 degree programs, seven departments and a college.
UMCP has raised tuition and fees -- now at $3,480 for Maryland students -- 53.5 percent in the last four years. Then, legislators asked what would happen if each professor were asked to teach one additional course a year.
The short answer: They would find a way to get out of it.
In its March 1994 report, the Maryland Higher Education Commission recommended that faculty at the research universities -- UMCP, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, the University of Maryland at Baltimore -- professors teach at least five to six courses a year.
A 3.2 average
For the last academic year, the Maryland Higher Education Commission found that at College Park, only 20 percent of professors taught as many as four courses, the ostensible campus standard. The average was 3.2 courses per professor per year.
At colleges like Bowie, Towson and Salisbury state, professors already are meeting their new standards of teaching seven to eight courses a year.
Under the policy to take effect next year, professors at the research campuses will be expected to spend 45 to 55 percent of their time on teaching and only 35 to 45 of their time on research. But they have redefined "teaching."
Dissertations count, too
Professors receive no formal credit for overseeing a graduate student's dissertation -- the book-length manuscript aspiring Ph.D.s write for their degree and, often, for publication. That's intense, one-on-one teaching, as is supervising undergraduate honors papers or laboratory work, professors argued.
Balancing state and campus concerns, officials at the University of Maryland system created a formula to create course equivalents.
Supervising 10 credits of dissertation or doctoral level studies, for example, will be considered a course. Two graduate students seeking doctorates easily could consume those 10 credits over a year.
No one is quite sure how the numbers will compute in practice.
"It's a compromise. Who knows? Who really knows the value?" University of Maryland system Vice Chancellor George L. Marx said of the workload policy that he helped to forge. "It still doesn't go to the question of what society values as important."
Research's value questioned
Some Maryland citizens appear to be questioning the value of its public research universities.
Dr. Kirwan and top academic officials at UMCP said they are aware of concerns about teaching. Indeed, Dr. Kirwan is credited there with revitalizing undergraduate education in the past five years.
Under the leadership of Maynard Mack Jr., the honors program has grown into broad-gauged curriculum that incorporates seminars, dormitory sessions and cultural events for the top 10 percent of the class. Professors said the program will keep some of Maryland's brightest students in state.
The newer College Park Scholars program takes the next highest 15 percent of students at UMCP and ensures exposure to senior faculty from the outset of their college years. Dr. Kirwan also has overseen a review of the campus' remedial education efforts for the bottom quarter of the undergraduate student body. And a new center for teaching excellence is intended eventually to enhance the quality of education for the rest of the student body.
The new policy, Sen. Hoffman said, represents a large step in the right direction. The real question, she said, is how faithfully department officials adhere to the policy.
The discipline of tracking and compiling reports on workload will itself prove a check upon dead-weight professors, said UMCP Provost Daniel Fallon, the campus' chief academic officer.
Despite the new policy, he said, professors in the hard sciences are unlikely to have to teach more next year than they already do. Even the compromise that takes note of course equivalents does not adequately account for the intense personal instruction offered in labs, Dr. Fallon said.
Splendid isolation
Faculty members describe life at a research university like UMCP as one often spent in splendid isolation of intense reading, contemplation, and writing, with periodic bursts of instruction.
"The kind of work most academics do is very creative -- it's more like the creativity of a novelist, a painter and a musician," Dr. Kirwan said.
RTC "To be successful it requires a certain spark."