History of School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences, University of Texas, Dallas.

The history of the school cannot be separated from the history of university as whole, or indeed from that of the U T System and the state of Texas as a whole, so we will have to move back and forth between developments at the various levels over time.

The Texas Legislature passed the act accepting the Southwest Center for Advanced Study, renaming it UTD, and making it a part of the U of Texas system in 1969. In fact, they passed it and then re-passed, with some changes. The act sought to affirm the legislature’s support for SCAS’s research program and for enhancing the technological potential of the area, and of Texas, but at the same contained important safeguards to assure schools already in the area that UTD would not compete with them.

UTD was authorized to begin undergraduate programs in the social sciences from the Fall of 1975.

The first President was Bryce Jordan. Jordan had a Ph. D. in music and had served as Vice President for Academic Affairs at U T Austin in the very difficult times of campus upheaval attending the Viet Nam war. He was installed as President July 1, 1971, having been vetted and approved by a faculty committee of scientists who had been part of SCAS. Lee J. Smith joined UTD a month later to serve as Dean of the Faculties. According to informal accounts, his task had been to assure that UTD had the most up to date computer assisted operational infrastructure then available, from the admissions process through the library. But when he suddenly left (with his secretary) in June, 1974, to become President of TSU at San Marcos, nothing had been put in place. Alexander Clark was hired from the LBJ School to replace him and serve as Academic Vice President. He also served as Acting Dean of the School of Social Sciences for a few months over the summer of 1975. The library did what it could under Edward Walters, its first director, and our registrar borrowed software from U T Arlington.

The new programs were divided through four schools: Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies (also sometimes called Individual Studies). The schools of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Management already existed. Natural Sciences and Mathematics was formed by relabeling the programs of the Southwest Center for Advanced Study (more often referred to as SCAS). The school of Management had been formed in 1972.

The internal policies and organization of the university were strongly influenced by outside constraints. Texas has no constitutional firewall between the legislature and the universities; the legislature can require anything and, in principle, the universities have to do. By the same token, the governor can exercise a line-item veto. The legislature appropriates the budget for each campus in the UT System separately, but if the governor dislikes an item, he can remove it, which Governor Clements did for a new university mainframe computer for UTD in about 1980. For UTD, the most important of these legislative constraints was what amounted to a “non--compete” understanding

1 with the higher education institutions in the area that already existed. The enabling legislation required that our admissions standards would be no lower than those of U T Austin, which necessarily meant that the would be substantially higher than any other institution in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and the Coordinating Board assured that our graduate programs would not duplicate any already in the area, which why we lacked convention programs in Arts and Humanities as well in the social sciences. Our status as an upper level institution, taking only Juniors and Seniors (and hence not competing with the Community Colleges) was also a part of this, although this has been a practice in Texas for many new campuses, until they build up. For those recruiting new faculty, the required academic standards were a selling point, and for at least many of those who were recruited it was an attraction.

The undergraduate programs in the School of Social Sciences were , , Economics, Geography, Government, and . Only one graduate program was authorized: Political Economy. The overall orientation of the new programs was articulated primarily by a group of new faculty from the humanities and social sciences Regina Kyle, Robert Plant Armstrong, Carolyne Galerstein, Alexander Clark, President Jordan, and others.

There were two main watchwords: “interdisciplinarity” and a specific kind of “relevance” that included practicality and saliency. The advertisements for faculty positions in the social sciences also emphasized an interest in “phenomenology.” This primarily reflected the interests of Robert Armstrong, although Regina Kyle was probably also sympathetic to the orientation. Armstrong had previously been editor of the Press, which he made a major publisher in this tradition. The advertisements certainly conveyed the impression that something interesting and unexpected was happening in North Texas.

Interdisciplinarity was the more widely prominent theme in our hiring advertisements and represented a stronger bond of common thinking between the pre-existing programs in the sciences and business, but did not have an agreed upon meaning in any but a negative sense. We would not have the conventional departments, isolated and self-contained, catering to equally isolated and self-contained groups of students. By the same token, we would not have the conventional courses in the conventional sequences, although what we would have was not at all agreed upon. “Relevance” was meant to designate the alternative. Courses would be on important topics, whether they fell with one discipline or across several, and curricula would be designed by combining courses around such topics whether or not they fell within one program or across several.

Initial hiring for the social sciences was done mainly by Robert Armstrong and Alexander Clark. Armstrong had a PhD in Anthropology and was Professor of Anthropology. His area of expertise was African art, and he had a notable collection of Benin heads. Alex Clark had a PhD in Sociology and strength in the sociology of law. Alex once said that the search involved interviewing over two hundred prospective

2 faculty; both Clark and Armstrong traveled widely meeting candidates in various cities. For Armstrong this involved overcoming a very strong antipathy to flying, which he had acquired in the course of surviving the crash of passenger plane in south-east Asia.

1974-75 was a very bad year for faculty jobs nation-wide, although of course it would have varied by discipline. There must have been very large numbers of initial applications for every person interviewed. Most faculty hired were non-tenured, and Alex Clark has said they hired with the expectation that there would be substantial attrition in the first few years. Tenured faculty were brought to campus for interviews by a faculty committee drawn from the Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The committee included Polycarp Kush and Ivor Robinson. Dr. Kusch had shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics, and had come to UTD a few years before from being the equivalent of Academic Vice President at Columbia, and finding that he preferred not to continue to confront student protests associated with the Viet Nam war and that University's policies regarding cooperation with the United States’ government in that connection.

Total faculty in the University in the Fall of 1975 was about 217. Social Sciences began with 24 tenure track and tenured faculty. Since he was a Sociologist, Alex Clark should be regarded as the first social scientist hired with tenure. The second was Armstrong, both at the rank of Professor. Associate professors were Murray Leaf (Anthropology), John W. Sommer (Geography), Robert Firestine (Political Economy), Lawrence Redlinger (Sociology) and Stephen Weismann (Political Science). Weisman was hired without tenure. According to the 1976-77 catalog, the Assistant Professors were Geoffrey Alpert (Sociology), Marvin Cohen (Political Science), Francis J. Cummings (Political Science), Francine Daner (Anthropology), Rockwell Gray (Philosophy, but housed on the ground floor of Green), Donald Hicks (Sociology), Leanne Hinton (Linguistics and Music), Richard Hula (Political Science), Wayne Ruhter (Economics), Peter Skafte (Anthropology), Alex Stepick III (Anthropology), and Bernard Weinstein (Political Economy). Instructors (who had not completed their PhD’s at the time they began teaching here) were David Craigie (Sociology), Ronald Lah (Anthropology), Robert Norton (Economics), Paul Peretz (Political Science), David Raddock (Political Science, transferred from the Business school), and John Rees (Geography).

In addition to beginning its undergraduate programs in its first two years, UTD also had to conduct a self-study for accreditation. We had been accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, but only for the graduate programs. The self- study began in October 1974, with Daniel Harris, Professor of Chemistry, as its Executive Director and Chairman of the Self-Study Steering Committee. Unfortunately Dr. Harris became seriously ill in Spring of 1975, was hospitalized, and died in the summer of the same year. A basic organization had been agreed on, but nothing had actually been compiled. Vice President Clark appointed Murray Leaf to be the Executive Director, and Dimitri Lang and Wolfgang Rindler as co-chairs of the Steering Committee, all effective October 1, 1975. Professor Lang was the university electron microscopist, and Professor Rindler is a mathematical physicist. The Steering Committee was made up entirely of faculty, mainly from the former SCAS and the

3 Callier Center for Speech and Communication, which had also become part of the new university. The arrangement had an oddly useful effect; discussions of issues that came up in the self-study organization often led to the resolution of problems and issues that were emerging and creating difficulties in the emerging academic organization.

One of the main findings of the self study was that the Academic Governance organization was incoherent. The Self-Study visiting committee agreed and charged the University to make the changes. President Jordan appointed a committee consisting of Murray Leaf and John Kimmeldorf to make recommendations. The model they recommended was based on the Senate system of the University of California. The essential points are that the Senate is the overall policy making body, and the Senate committees are executive committees, speaking for the Senate in the specific subject areas they are charged with. This contrasts very sharply with the usual Texas model, in which the Senate committees are “advisory” to the Senate and the Senate, in turn, is nothing more than advisory to the administration. The faculty and President Jordan adopted their recommendations with one major change. President Jordan insisted that the Chair of the Senate meetings should be the President. His reason was that given UTD’s small size, we could afford to do it, and the close communication would be a great advantage. The faculty agreed that it was worth a try. So far, the system has worked very well.

In the School as well as the University, the fundamental problem for the first five years or so was to establish good policies and practices. One of the first and most important debates concerned standards for retention and promotion. One prominent view in the school was that we should concentrate on undergraduate teaching, and not try to impose the kinds of standards for research and publication expected in research universities. One book in a lifetime would be enough, and several faculty voiced a preference for genres more like opinion pieces and literary essays than research based articles and monographs. The other view was that while teaching was important and senior faculty as well as junior faculty should teach introductory courses, the research and publication standards should be that of a serious research university. One book and few articles in a lifetime would not do, and literary essays might be nice but would not be a basis for promotion and tenure. The latter view won out, and within about five years most of the proponents of the former view had left.

The second major debate concerned the nature or meaning of interdisciplinarity. Different faculty members gave it quite different implications, both at the level of the university as a whole and also in the school. Essentially, there were three major alternatives. One was anti-disciplinarity; we would simply ignore the conventional disciplines. They were obsolete intellectual straight-jackets, and be should cast off in the interest of true creativity. The second was multidisciplinarity: a course had to incorporate theories or ideas from at least two recognized disciplines and relate them to each other. And the third was substantive and synthetic: the first priority was to have a clear topic. Given that, a course (or a research focus) should bring in and expect to contribute to whatever present disciplines were relevant. In general, the first alternative soon disappeared from our policies and practices, leaving the latter two with an

4 inclination toward the last. At the university level, this decision was mainly embodied in the requirements for a set of courses offered under the label of “interdisciplinary studies” and designed to fill the function of breadth requirements in four-year programs of the more conventional sort. Each student was required to take 6 semester hours of Interdisciplinary Studies, and in addition many interdisciplinary courses could meet major and other requirements.

In Social Sciences, we had a further use for this synthetic idea of interdisciplinarity. In addition to the majors, we developed a set of cross cutting interdisciplinary “options”. These were courses that incorporated a single substantive topic but brought together the perspectives of a number of relevant disciplines. The options were urban studies, political economy, environmental studies, criminal justice, and social psychology. Different majors allowed students choices of different subsets of the options.

Interdisciplinarity also had organizational implications. The original plan, from 1974-75, was that undergraduate programs would be grouped into “colleges,” each headed by Master. The master would coordinate the offerings, including the scheduling, and handle functions like advising, degree supervision, catalog preparation, and extra- curricular activities like guest speakers, colloquia, and coordination with feeder schools. The model was the Oxford colleges, but of course ours could not be residential. Initially, the School of Social Sciences had two colleges, College VI and As . The colleges were designated by numbers rather than names partly as a bow to their quasi-residential rather than topical focus, although they did also have stylistic or orientational differences. College VI was intended to be more “quantitative” and in that sense “scientific.” College X was intended to be more “humanistic.” John Sommer was the first Master of College VI. Robert Armstrong was the first Master of College X. Extending the idea, it was also proposed that most or all of the degrees would be offered as both BA and BSc. The BA would be more “humanistic” and be assigned to College X, and the BSc would be more “quantitive” and assigned to College IV.

Interdisciplinarity was connect to the theme of the “wholeness” of knowledge. To implement it, the original plan included the idea that faculty would, in effect, sell themselves off to the different colleges. If you wanted to teach a course in X you would arrange with the master of X college, or a college that offered X. If you wanted to teach something Y-ish you would arrange with Y college, and so on. It did not take long to realize that this was impractical at the university level. It would leave colleges in a state of perpetual uncertainty regarding their available faculty, and could leave faculty in the position of not being able to cover their supposed salary in any given semester. It also made the concept of “100%” of a person or their time absolutely essential to define, and this is not the way academic systems work. The faculty discussed the problem and arrived at two major policy decisions, which the administration accepted. First, each faculty member would have one academic “home,” and this would be a school or department, not a college. Secondly, when a course was offered by a faculty under one or another discipline, the funding would not follow that disciplinary label. It would follow the faculty member. The idea, in part, was to avoid the type of turf wars that faculty coming from other places were all too familiar with, that drained energy and seldom

5 worked to the advantage of the students. Another part of the reasoning was to support interdisciplinary cooperation, It would not matter to a school which disciplinary label its faculty taught courses under. Of course this meant that Master’s were relatively less powerful in the revised organization, while deans and department heads were relatively more powerful

The implications of making the School of Social Sciences the administrative home of the faculty, and hence also of not having each college as a financially autonomous unit capable of buying faculty time, was that the colleges also should not have separate budgets. The upshot for the school was a series of administrative changes that first resulted in Professor Sommer being appointed Acting Dean and Professor Armstrong becoming the Master of a single College, called simply Social Sciences. Then William Hanna was hired as Dean of the School replacing Professor Sommer, and then Professor Armstrong migrated to the School of Arts and Humanities with several of the faculty, mainly from the Anthropology group. Dean Hanna then appointed Richard (Rick) Hula Master of the College for the 1976-77 academic year. Dean Hanna served as Dean only briefly, but the organizational remained.

Hanna was replaced as Dean by Jack Sommer in the Summer of 1978. Rick Hula was replaced as Master by Murray Leaf and Lawrence Redlinger, as co-masters. After one year, Redlinger was asked to serve as Acting Dean for General Studies. Murray Leaf continued to serve as Master until 1986. Mirroring the Council of Masters at the University level, Sommer and Leaf established a Committee on Undergraduate Studies (CUS) consisting of a representative of each undergraduate degree program. The primary tasks of the committee were coordinating catalog copy--hence also degree requirements--and course scheduling. The third major task was to coordinate advising, which at this time was done by the regular, teaching, faculty. There were no non- faculty advisors. Students were assigned a provisional faculty advisor on admission, but could elect to change with permission of the Master. The advisor signed the degree plan. Since at this time there were only upper level students, the degree plans consisted of courses in the major, electives, and at least two courses designated as “interdisciplinary studies,” intended to serve as upper-level breadth requirements. For the School of Social Sciences we also had a further class of interdisciplinary courses called “Social Science,” which could apply to two or more majors as major and related courses--such as statistics courses.

Another organizational question, debated at both the school and university levels, was whether to have distinct graduate and undergraduate faculties. Some of those in favor of the division were among the new faculty: those who wanted to teach and write essays, and did not see themselves primarily as researchers. Others were among the older faculty, including the SCAS veterans: those who wanted to do research and train graduate students and felt that they deserved more autonomy and recognition. The counter argument also came from both groups: those who felt that the best researchers should teach basic classes as well as advanced research students, those who felt that invidious distinctions were inconsistent a life of genuine and open inquiry, and those who felt that the danger of settling too comfortably into one’s own advanced

6 specialization was at least as great as the danger of having to explain oneself to those outside it. Polycarp Kush was a forceful proponent of having our most senior and eminent faculty, teaching introductory courses, and this value, and the reasons for it, had been incorporated in our initial plans. There was also a strong egalitarian tradition carrying over from SCAS; the first UTD identification cards did not even say whether the person they showed was faculty or student. There were also the difficulties of how we would combine the idea of a division between graduate and undergraduate faculty with the still somewhat messy relationship between schools and colleges. Since the colleges were undergraduate units, would the undergraduate faculty be assigned to colleges, and the graduate faculty to some other unit--as in the Claremont Colleges and Claremont Graduate Center? And finally, there was a long-run consideration regarding faculty quality. Most of the faculty were serious about building a research university of the first rank. The best way to do that was to be sure that all faculty hired were held to the standards that a research university required. We decided that there would be no division between undergraduate and graduate faculty; all faculty hired would, as a minimum, have the highest professional degree in their fields and show promise of a research career. This is reflected in the wording of the current U T D faculty peer review policies, which go back to this time. These considerations have not changed substantially since.

Over the next five years or so, several major policies and practices that originated in the School of Social Sciences became widespread in the university. These concerned scheduling, the programming meaning of interdisciplinarity, and to some extent a system of course numbering.

In about our third year, 1977-78, we identified an enrollment pattern that induced us to change to a new kind of course scheduling system. Murray Leaf had been tracking enrollment by course and time, and saw that wherever we had a course in the Monday- Wednesday-Friday sequence and the same course in the Tuesday-Thursday sequence, the latter had about 50% more enrollment. We followed this up with a survey of students in our classes, and found that most students were working and were trying to minimize the number of days they had to come to campus. It was better for them to take more courses on fewer days. An obvious possibility, then, was to offer courses on a consistent twice-a-week pattern: Monday-Thursday, Tuesday Friday, and Wednesday for long classes one day a week and meetings. We asked our students and they liked the idea. Dean Sommer then took it to the Deans’ Council, and they accepted it. As long as we held to this pattern, which was until 1996, undergraduate enrollments in Social Sciences went up fairly consistently at ten percent a semester. One reason we moved substantially to the twice a week from the 3x a week pattern in the early 1980s was the gas crisis. This also encouraged us to move more to 1x a week. I think you should mention that the demographics of the area was such that Wednesday evening class were impossible to offer Wednesday night class as that interfered with prayer meeting.

We implemented the substantive/multidisciplinary conception of interdisciplinary in two different ways. First, we adopted an unwritten policy of avoiding the conventional

7 disciplinary way of naming and sequencing courses on the model of Introduction to Psychology, Intermediate Psychology, and Advanced Psychology. All course names were substantive descriptions of their subject matter, not the name of a discipline or sub-discipline. We also avoided requiring prerequisites unless they were genuinely, and very seriously, necessary. If previous course were useful but not absolutely necessary, this was indicated in the course description. There were many practical reasons for this, as well as intellectual reasons. We could not offer many specialized courses, and no redundant courses. So we did not want to have the same subject matter covered in two more or less identical courses in two different disciplines; one course should do for both. We also could not depend on the content of courses taken in the community colleges on the bases of the course titles, and students could not wait two semesters, or two years, for just one course to cycle around in order to meet one or a requirement.

The course numbering issue was related to this titling and sequencing decision. We had initially adopted a standard four digit course numbering system, in which the first digit indicates the level and the second the number of semester credit hours. The final two digits had no assigned meaning, so we tried to make them represent the relative level of specialization. Smaller numbers were more general; higher numbers indicate a course that was more advanced. It did not mean that there were specific prerequisites, but it usually did mean that the student should take one or two of the lower-numbered courses first. This was done in coordination with the other colleges, through the Council of Masters, and implemented in the 1976-77 catalog, although the coordination was far from perfect and other colleges used the course numbering (or the lack of a more definite course-number rule) to solve quite different problem--such working around the rule that we could not offer lower-division courses. A further complication was, and is, a coordinating board rule that once we use a number for one course title we cannot use it for a different course within a set number of years.

Another policy we adopted in this period, associated with our course scheduling system and focus on content in our concept of interdisciplinarity, was to group courses into overlapping multidisciplinary blocks that we called “options. beginning with the 1976-77 catalog. These were like minors, except that they ways to focus within the students major discipline rather than in a non-major. The number varied by discipline, but usually one was a disciplinary major, another was urban studies, and another was criminal justice. In addition, Economics and Political Science, for example, offered an option in Political Economy, and Sociology offered Social Psychology. When we went to the Tuesday-Thursday and Monday-Friday schedule, we generally offered the urban studies courses in one of the sequences, along with courses from one other option, and the criminal justice courses in the other, along with the other options. This allowed students with an interest in one area to chose from courses in multiple disciplines on their preferred day, and thus be surer to be able to fill out that day on campus and not have to come on the off-day. We also offered related courses under the Interdisciplinary Studies label that served to tie the options together across disciplines, and also met our university-wide requirement for interdisciplinary studies that served as our breadth requirement. This worked well for about six years. Class sizes became

8 more consistent and overall enrollments increased, advising problems went down, and scheduling was easier for everyone to understand. But the Coordinating Board decided that the options were actually unauthorized majors, or heading toward unauthorized majors, and required us to remove them from the catalog beginning with 1982-84.

In 1982, Robert Rutford became the second President of UTD. In 1984 the Texas legislature passed an education “reform” bill that required universities to define their missions. His response was to appoint ad hoc committees and ask administrators then in place to make recommendations. In 1987, on the recommendation of Dean David Dunn and Alexander Clark, he closed down the Program in Environmental Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, to be effective August 31, 1989. There were in all eight tenured faculty in these programs whose positions would be terminated. At the same time, also on Alex Clark’s recommendation, he shut down the Special Education program, which was housed in the School of Human Development. Two tenured faculty were terminated. The cases ultimately went to court, where the University lost, and then to 5th Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, where the original judgment was upheld in part and overturned in part. The latter case is Texas Faculty Association v University of Texas at Dallas, 946. 2d 379. (No 90-1672).

The graduate program did not develop as consistently as the undergraduate program. This was primarily because of its greater importance, or prominence. In consequence, it enjoyed consistently greater decanal attention and this attention. The consequence was that the graduate program did not produce a PhD until the summer of 1983, and that person’s supervisor was Wayne Ruhter. For the next four years, the numbers of PhD students graduated was 3 in 1983-1984 (supervised by Redlinger, Hicks, and Briggs), two in 1984-85 (supervised by Anthony Champagne and Margaret Barton), one in 1985-86 (Redlinger), and one in 1985-86 (Redlinger), although enrollments were between 70 and 80 students. In Spring of 1985, for example, there were 76 PhD students enrolled, in addition to 59 Master’s students.

In 1984, Professor Sommer went on leave and we searched for and hired another Dean, Jack Meltzer. Meltzer came from the School of Social Work. At about the same time, after fairly substantial faculty discussion, we agreed to take over the undergraduate program in Public Affairs from the School of Management. Management was not interested in keeping it, and we thought it would be a good logical complement to our other undergraduate programs as well as to our graduate Political Economy Program.

Meltzer oversaw a complete turnover in the School’s administrative personnel and left the Deanship in 1986, although Alex Clark asked him to continue serving on the University Development Board for several years thereafter. Anthony Champagne served as Acting Dean while we carried out the search a replacement. Royce Hanson was appointed as Dean beginning the Fall of 1987. When Champagne was acting Dean, faculty received personal computers for the first time. They also, for the first time got voice messaging on their phones.

9

Royce Hanson came from being Associate Dean and Professor of Public Affairs at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota. He had substantial experience in practical politics and the creation of American public policy at the interface between academics and government. In this period the faculty reorganized the Political Economy program and curriculum into the form it retained until 2002 when the Coordinating Board finally recognizes that Texas needed more graduate programs and abandoned long-standing its policy of requiring that if we asked for a new program we had to close down an existing one, and in quick order allowed us to begin graduate programs at the Master and PhD level in Public Affairs (2002), GIS (2003), Economics (2004) and Political Science MPA (2003). The school also reduced the teaching load from three courses per semester to two.

Royce Hanson was the last Dean of the School of Social Sciences to be hired by Alexander Clark. Clark retired and was succeeded by Bryan Hobson Wildenthal in 1992. Dr. Wildenthal was a physicist by training, with family roots in Texas higher education. He had previously been Provost at the University of New Mexico

President Rutford resigned in 1994, and was succeeded by President Franklyn Jennifer. Jennifer came from Howard University.

President Jennifer was supportive of the Academic Senate and the Senate supported President Jennifer. Proceedings in the Senate with President Jennifer chairing were initially somewhat formal but became less so, and discussions often led to mutual agreements that resolved complex problems that would have be much more difficult if we had to rely only on exchanges of written documents. One important example was the problem of administrative “pocket vetoes” of Senate guidance. Although from the inception of our present system, in 1977, the Senate committees have been intended as executive committees interpreting policy for the faculty, the relevant administrators have not always agreed, and have not always agreed also have not always bothered to say so. They have just followed their own lights, leaving the committee in the dark and creating unresolvable confusion on the policy in question. We raised the problem with President Jennifer and agreed on a solution. The Senate cannot bind the President, since the President is ultimately responsible only to the Regents. But the Senate and President can agree on a common process, and we did so in the Fall of 2001. The Senate approved a Memorandum of Understanding on Duties of RUOs on Senate and University Committees . The gist of it is that if the RUO and Committee disagree, the RUO is obligated by the President to forward the issue upward through administrative channels, while the Committee is similarly obligated to advise the Senate, where the matter can be discussed and resolved. President Jennifer did not feel he could sign the memorandum, as he would have if we had been representing two sovereign states, but since the minutes would record that he was present, chaired the meeting, and did not object. It could be assumed he concurred and accepted the obligation it described within the limits of the law. President Jennifer also encouraged the formation of the Staff Council.

10 Royce Hanson resigned as Dean in 1996, but continued as Professor in the school until 1998, when he took the first of several positions he has held at George Washington University. He is currently (2010) in charge of the Planning Commission of Montgomery County, Maryland. He continues to be listed on our faculty and helps the School and the University with programs and concerns in the Washington D. C. area. While Hanson was Dean, the ratio of PhD graduates per year to students in the program increased from 1:76 in 1983-1984 and about 2:75 over next three years to 6:88 in 1995- 1996.

In 1997, the University adopted a policy on Post-tenure review. This was entirely in response to the legislature.

Hanson was succeeded by Rita Mae Kelly, who had previously been chair of the School of Justice Studies at the Arizona State University and Professor of Justice Studies, Political Science, Public Affairs and Women’s Studies. Kelly was appointed Dean and Professor holding the Andrew R. Cecil 1 Distinguished Chair in Applied Ethics. Her focus was women’s rights, as the titles of her previous positions indicated, and she continued to maintain a very active program of publication and conference organizing while at UTD. Kelly appointed Bobby Alexander Master 1999. Alexander was the first Master who was not tenure track faculty, but rather a Senior Lecturer hired primarily for this purpose. By this time the Committee on Undergraduate Studies had dissolved, and undergraduate course planning had devolved to the programs. About 2000, the title of Master was replaced by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, in line with changes in all the other schools and at the level of the office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. Kelly Appointed Euel Elliot Director of t he MPA program from May 1996 and then Director Graduate Studies in August of 1998.

Kelly served for five years, until 2001. She worked hard to increase the school’s productivity and international reach. In her last year, however, she was largely sidelined by her struggle with the cancer that ultimately proved fatal, at age 61. While Kelly was Dean the University hosted several successful international conferences on women’s rights, and several efforts were made to forge connections with other institutions where there were other women in similar positions and with similar concerns and ambitions-- not for women exclusively but for higher education and professional life in general.

Kelly was succeeded by Jim Murdoch, Professor of Economics, in October 2001. Bobby Alexander continued as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, and Euel Elliot continued as Director of Graduate Studies. Faculty meetings were more frequent, well attended, and cooperative.

1 Andrew R. Cecil had retired as Dean of the School of Business and Education at McMurry College, Abilene, Texas. From 1979, he sponsored the Andrew R. Cecil annual lectures on “Moral Values in a Free Society” and subsequently endowed the Andrew R. Cecil Distinguished Chair in Applied Ethics. His personal view was that a society had to hold a coherent system of moral beliefs. For American democracy, these beliefs were what he called “enlightened Christianity.” The speakers in the lecture series generally reflected similar positions.

11 In August 2002, the school adopted its first bylaws. This addressed a long standing problem in the school and the university. Essentially, the question is “who are the faculty?” The question had been answered at the university level by the development of the Senate and the Senate and University Committees. Between the University and the Schools it had been answered for the undergraduate programs by the Senate’s formal recognition of the Council of Masters. But there was no comparable policy or legislation concerning the schools. Obviously in some general way the faculty of the schools were also faculty of the university, but what way? Leaf and others had proposed writing school bylaws to Royce Hanson after he had announced his intention to resign, but Hanson said that did not want to tie the next dean’s hands. It did not appear that the idea would be any more favorably received by Kelly. But by August of 2002, the need for such bylaws in all the schools was recognized in the Senate and supported by President Jennifer. We had a well developed system of academic policies that the schools should be carrying out, but there was no specification of the organizations in the schools that would actually do so. Moreover, many of these policies, probably most, reflected state or Regental mandates. In that month, therefore, the Senate passed a resolution that schools should have them, along with guidelines on what the bylaws should contain. For the schools that had departments, an additional guideline was provided for departmental bylaws. The Senate resolution required that the bylaws be developed and approved by the faculty of the school by majority vote, and then by the Senate.

In the School of Social Sciences, the drafting committee was Anthony Champagne, Jennifer Holmes, and Murray Leaf. Leaf was also involved in drafting the Senate legislation and guidelines. The School faculty approved the draft bylaws unanimously.

The Bylaws of the School of Social Sciences specified that faculty were faculty of the school as whole, not the several programs. Meetings of the faculty were called for at least once a semester. Additional meetings could be called by the Dean. All meetings were open to all, except those involving personnel decisions, which were limited by university policy. The bylaws established an elected Executive Committee, serving for staggered two year terms. Program heads were appointed by the Dean in consultation with the Executive Committee. Program faculty membership was specified only as faculty “who teach in that program.” School wide committees were established as required by university policies. Coordinating committees for undergraduate and graduate studies were specified, under their respective Associate Deans. Members were the concerned program heads. Program committees were also established, but membership was left unspecified; faculty could associate themselves with any number, according to their interests and concerns.

The bylaws clearly assigned to the faculty responsibilities over curriculum and academic policy, parallel to the powers of the Senate (hence the faculty) at the university level:

The faculty shall, consistent with the policies of the University of Texas at Dallas establish and/or approve (1) educational policy for the School, including approval of academic programs, curricula and requirements for degrees or certificates offered by the

12 school, (2) standards and procedures for the appointment, promotion, and tenure of faculty, (3) the strategic plan of the School, and (4) such other procedures and policies as may be necessary or desirable, from time to time, for the governance of the School. (Section 1.2)

While Murdoch was Dean, the number of graduate programs began to expand rapidly. Because of overlapping submissions, approvals by various levels, and a few restarts, however, it would be confusing to recount their story chronologically. Table 1 simply lists all of our present degrees with their start year.

1. GRADUATE DEGREES WITH CATALOG YEAR OF FIRST APPEARANCE

Doctor of Philosophy in Criminology 2006-2008 supplement Doctor of Philosophy in Economics 2004 Doctor of Philosophy in Geospatial Information Sciences Authorized in 1995 but put in abeyance. Offered again in the 2006-2008 supplement Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science 2006-2008 supplement. Began in 2008. Doctor of Philosophy in Public Affairs 2002 Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy and Political Economy 1975

Master of Arts in Political Science 2003 Master of Arts in Political Science - Constitutional Law Studies 2008 Master of Arts in Political Science - Legislative Studies 2008 (but no students signed up so CB agreed to reset the start to Fall 2009) Master of Science in Applied Sociology on or before 2000 Master of Science in Criminology 2006-2008 supplement Master of Science in Economics on or befor e 2000-- originally approved as Applied Economics Master of Science in Geospatial Information Sciences Fall 1998 Master of Science in International Political Economy 2006-2008 supplement Master of Public Affairs 1994 Master of Public Policy 2006-2008 Supplement

13 It takes from one to three years lead time to initiate a program and get the necessary approvals. Notice that two new programs begin in 2000, and three between 2001 when Murdoch became Dean and June of 2005 when he left the position. Six begin with the Fall term of 2006

David Daniel was appointed the fifth President of the University of Texas at Dallas in June, 2005. There was no interregnum. President Jennifer had announced his intention to retire well in advance and agreed to stay on until the position was filled. It was clear that the new President would have a greatly intensified need to raise endowment funds for the university, and that he in turn would have to put similar pressure on the deans. There were several reasons, but the most salient was the arrangement called the “Emmitt Plan,” after the Dallas Cowboys football player famous for suddenly turning up in unexpected places on the field. This was an agreement arrived at between the President of Texas Instruments and the Texas Governor and legislative leadership to provide about $200 million worth of support for U T Dallas in exchange for TI keeping fabricating plant for large scale integrated circuit microprocessors in this area. The university, in the person of President Jennifer, had not been involved in the initial negotiations. The university was, however, required as a condition of participating to raise another $100 million on its own. At that point, our total endowment was about $60 million, so this was a substantial increased commitment.

Recognizing this situation, the faculty concurred in the appointment of Brian Berry as dean--as an appropriately weighty and forceful person to assert our interests with the new president and with those he would be engaging.

He appointed Marianne Stewart Executive Vice Dean, and pushed the School more toward a departmental type of internal organization with a substantial revision of the school bylaws. The changes focused primarily on administrative matters and on the administrative structure. Powers and responsibilities of faculty remained the same. The elected Executive Committee was replaced by an Executive Committee consisting of Program Heads. The new programs were included with the old and program committees were established to manage them, chaired by their program heads. Programs were described as “academic and administrative units of the School” (Section 4.0). Program Heads were appointed by the Dean after consultation with the program faculty (instead of the Executive Committee). The program committees were to be elected by the concerned faculty members. Eligibility for election to the program committee was limited to faculty “ who have declared the program to be their administrative home and/or have declared that at least 50% of their demonstrable intellectual and teaching interests reside within it.” A second body, the Faculty Advisory Committee, was established apart from the Executive Committee to meet with the Dean to give advice. The minimal size of this committee was six, with two thirds elected by the faculty and one-third appointed by the Dean. Additional committees, established in accordance with university policy, were the Faculty Personnel Review Committee to review faculty for consideration for promotion, the School Peer Review Committee elected to advise the

14 Dean of periodic performance evaluation (post-tenure review), and Committee on Effective Teaching.

By way of implementation of the more sharply defined concept of a program faculty, faculty members were asked to explicitly assign themselves to programs, with estimates of effort for each that should add up to 100% for the school as a whole. Also, programs were grouped into functional units for purposes of budgeting and an administrative assistant was assigned to each--taking much of the detailed approval process for minor running expenses out of the Dean’s office. The bylaws required one general meeting of the faculty each semester. These revisions were adopted in August 2005.

A further set of revisions was proposed in August 2007. These added six more programs. The position of Executive Vice Dean was abolished leaving the Associate Deans and Program Heads as the School officers. Additional specification was added to the process for electing program committees. The name of the school was changed to the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences. These were approved by the faculty on 31 August 2007.

The last revisions were approved by the faculty in September 2008. These added the following paragraph to Section 2.0, on faculty:

No tenure-Track and newly appointed faculty are assigned to programs by the Dean upon the advice of the School’s Executive Committee as the final step in the appointment process detailed below.

Subsection 2.3, also new, specified the process by which a program would ask for a search for a new faculty position.

On March 24, 2010, Provost Wildenthal invited the faculty to a morning meeting in the McDermott Suite at the UTD Library and announced that the next Dean of the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences would be James Marquart, present Professor of Criminology and Vice Provost. Coffee and banana bread were served afterward.

Murray J Leaf U T Dallas, March 2010

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