Provost David Figlio gave the following speech at the August 2022 Faculty Senate meeting
Good afternoon, everyone.
It is a pleasure and a privilege to be your colleague. I have had my eye on joining the faculty here ever since I was on the job market as a newly minted PhD in 1995.
I’m an economist, but I interviewed with our remarkable Political Science department. My scholarship was squarely in political economy, and one of my graduate fields was in American Politics, and, frankly, there were few places for an economist like me as desirable as Rochester Political Science. I’ve told this story to a few poli sci colleagues who say that the department made a mistake, but I can assure you, you didn’t. I’ve grown a lot as a scholar since then.
Nowadays, I’m better known as a labor and public economist who studies issues related to education and human development and educational organizations. I’m thrilled to be a member of the faculty of the Department of Economics in AS&E and the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development. Political science colleagues, I’d be overjoyed to join you too – but no pressure!
You’ll hear me talk a lot about how excited I get about opportunities for transdisciplinary exchange. I want the University of Rochester to be at the vanguard of this exchange, a place where the frontiers of our disciplines emerge.
I’m mentioning my scholarly fields because they are some of the most important lenses through which I see my job. I’m lucky that I’ve had the chance to work in and lead multidisciplinary units, so I’ve begun to absorb many other disciplinary perspectives as well. Thanks to that cross-pollination, I’ve even had the chance to coauthor papers with not just political scientists, but also psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, computer scientists, human biologists, learning scientists, and medical researchers.
A few of those papers were published in general science or interdisciplinary journals, but mostly they were published in traditional disciplinary outlets. This experience – and my 17-year experience as an editor of leading disciplinary journals – has convinced me that, just like much of the most delicious food can be found where cultures intersect, much of the most exciting research and creative work happens where disciplines interact. You’ll hear me talk a lot about how excited I get about opportunities for transdisciplinary exchange. I want the University of Rochester to be at the vanguard of this exchange, a place where the frontiers of our disciplines emerge.
That’s the Rochester tradition… We need to do everything we can to ensure that when people are asked where exciting things are happening, they say the University of Rochester.
That’s the Rochester tradition. From music and visual arts to optics to plasma physics to moral philosophy to positive social science, just to name a few (please don’t take offense if I didn’t name your discipline!), the University of Rochester has played an outsized role. We need to do everything we can to ensure that when people are asked where exciting things are happening, they say the University of Rochester. We can’t do everything – we’re a relatively small university among our peer group. But working together, we can build on our excellence and become even more of a destination of choice.
Let me put on my labor economist glasses. In any employment scenario, we’re either recruiting or retaining. Retention doesn’t occur only when someone is threatening to leave. It begins at the moment people accept an offer of employment.
What should we do to retain our best and brightest? Well, I’m hardly an expert in psychology – though I’m fortunate to have Sarah Mangelsdorf right down the hall. But at the core, we all want to be heard, appreciated, respected, and empowered. These are the building blocks to help you want to stay here, year after year.
As an aside, that’s one of the reasons I appreciate the Faculty Senate and look forward to working with you. You are not the only measure of whether faculty feel heard and appreciated and respected and empowered, but you represent a very important indicator of how faculty feel. I am grateful to all of you, and especially to the Senate Executive Committee and Joanne and Courtney as co-chairs, for your efforts. I ask for your patience and your grace, but I also ask for your honesty. I know we’ll make great progress together.
We need to hire amazing colleagues, so our units feel more and more vibrant. We need to give our amazing colleagues who are already here a reason to keep investing in this place.
OK, so how do we make sure everyone feels heard, appreciated, respected, empowered? We don’t have unlimited resources, but we need to do everything in our power to ensure salaries that are competitive and equitable. We need to develop and maintain high-quality facilities. We need to hire amazing colleagues, so our units feel more and more vibrant. We need to give our amazing colleagues who are already here a reason to keep investing in this place.
This means trusting you as individuals to control your own destinies and creating the conditions for you can do that. And it means trusting you to identify the future of our fields.
Now to segue to my public economist lens. Public economics is the study of the role of government in the economy. What do governments do? They create the rules and legal frameworks through which societies are governed. (Hello, Faculty Senate.) They determine and enforce property rights. And they work to resolve market failures. Let me discuss two market failures common in universities.
One involves what economists call externalities – when someone does something that affects other people without taking those effects into account. Externalities can be good – for instance, people who invest in higher education not only benefit themselves but benefit society more broadly. And externalities can be bad – for instance, businesses often pollute the environment.
In a free market, we do too few good externality-producing activities, because we’re only thinking of our own benefit. And we do too many of the bad externality-producing activities for the same reason. Governments work to “internalize” these externalities, in order to induce more positive and less negative.
We must change our academic finance model so that it works for you, so we can have the right public goods at the right levels and the whole is greater than the sum of our parts.
Another market failure involves what economists call public goods –things that benefit everyone, like parks or roads or clean water. Study after study shows that without government, we wouldn’t have enough public goods. Not only that, but if public goods are provided at the hyper-local level, we may create additional negative externalities. Think about a gated community that pays for its own security and then withdraws support for public safety in the community. Or the system of individual fire insurance that predated the modern version of municipal fire departments in this country, where uninsured homes would be allowed to burn to the ground, no matter the danger imposed on neighbors.
At the University level, this means that some decisions need to be made in Wallis Hall, and some decisions need to be made in Lattimore Hall (that is, if you’re in AS&E; we don’t want decisions made in Lattimore Hall to create negative externalities for Eastman or for Simon or for the School of Nursing), and some decisions need to be made at the department or unit level, and, of course, many decisions need to be made at the individual or sub-departmental level. We need to make a decision about what SHOULD be decided in Wallis and what SHOULD be decided in Lattimore and what SHOULD be decided in the departments and what SHOULD NOT be decided collectively at all.
And then we need to align our university financial model so that the right levels of the university are making the right decisions, instead of aligning public good provision, say, to where the funds flow. With apologies to our musical colleagues, letting the money drive how the university functions seems to me like conducting a symphony using only your chin – there might be music being played, but you’re bound to hit a lot of wrong notes. I welcome you to correct my metaphor during the reception to follow!
We must change our academic finance model so that it works for you, so we can have the right public goods at the right levels and the whole is greater than the sum of our parts. So that we can have more of the externality-generating activities we want and fewer of the externality-generating activities we don’t want. So you have the incentives to engage in the kinds of entrepreneurial activity that will allow your units to accomplish more of your goals, while at the same time not having to eat only what you catch, which we know leads to far too much conservatism in areas we care about. So that we generate fewer risks that threaten the health of this institution, and more of the activities that allow us all to flourish.
I look at this university with incredible optimism. This university’s excellence runs wide and deep… I get a front-row seat to all the ways you are learning, discovering, healing, and creating, and I am privileged to be in a position to help you better your pursuits.
In the note I sent you all when I started as provost, I quoted a line from Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything”. Here’s another line from that same masterful album, this time from “Doo Wop (That Thing)”: “How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?” Lauryn Hill was referring to an individual, but the same could be said for some of the logical consequences of the academic financial model that has governed this university for decades.
Let’s do everything we can to win.
I look at this university with incredible optimism. This university’s excellence runs wide and deep. There is so much collaboration that takes place even when the incentives are not there. I’ve had more than 150 conversations with faculty members so far, and I’m struck by how invested you are in this place, how much you want to be here, and how much you seem to like each other. Imagine what we can do when we have a financial model that works for us all, and when decisions are made in the right places.
Being provost is awesome. I get a front-row seat to all the ways you are learning, discovering, healing, and creating, and I am privileged to be in a position to help you better your pursuits. I look forward to working with you, and our other faculty colleagues, and our staff, and our students, and my talented colleagues in University administration, led by the remarkable Sarah Mangelsdorf, to create the conditions under which you will want to choose again and again to make the University of Rochester your forever home, and will attract amazing colleagues who will want to do the same.
Meliora.