FACULTY LABOR AND INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL: FURTHERING DISCIPLINARY DEVELOPMENT AND INSTITUTIONAL POSITIONINGIN THE URBAN PLANNING ACADEMY

by
Bruce Stiftel
Professor
Florida State University

Presidential Address delivered at the
41^st annual conference of the
Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
23 October 1999
Chicago, IL

Last week, the UN announced that the world’s population topped six billion.  That’s on the order of four million persons per Urban Planning professor, worldwide.  There are 38,000 local governments in the United States.  That’s about fifty local governments per U.S. Planning professor.  Our ratio with APA members isn’t much better; it’s about forty to one.

So, roughly speaking, each of you is responsible for producing and disseminating planning knowledge to serve the needs of forty APA members, fifty local governments, and four million people.

More telling perhaps, is that the most recent edition of the Guide to Graduate Education in Urban and Regional Planning listed 36 areas of faculty specialization.^[i]  That is an average of 22 faculty members per area of specialization.  So, not only must you serve the needs of forty APA members, fifty local governments and four million people, but together with only 21 colleagues you must sustain the intellectual development of a major area of study.

How you do this is a remarkable phenomenon.  The productivity of your individual labors, of course, depends on the level of capital, both intellectual capital and institutional capital, available to support your efforts.  Furthering this intellectual and institutional capital is the charge the next ACSP administration has accepted and the subject of my brief talk today.

An outsider would think that planning scholarship was blessed with unlimited opportunity: 

 ---The central questions of the Sustainability movement^[ii], are restatements of long-standing urban planning objectives.

 ---A so-called Smart Growth movement has achieved the patronage of leading politicians at all levels of government in North America.

 ---A New Urbanism  has directed renewed attention to the effects of city plans on quality of life.

 ---An Environmental Justice movement has drawn many new interest groups in land use matters.

 ---Concerns surrounding Multi-culturalism have forced governments across our country and around the world to think about legitimacy and consensus building in new ways.

 ---University presidents are lining up behind the notion of Community Engagement recently championed by the Kellogg Commission.^[iii]

 With the attention and excitement created by Sustainability, Smart Growth, New Urbanism, Environmental Justice, Multi-culturalism, and Community Engagement, you would think that the urban planning academy should be enjoying unprecedented attention, bulging enrollments, limitless funding and great respect.  Part of the empirical picture suggests this is true:

 –-- Applications to our graduate schools were up 8.2% per year from 1987 to 1995.^[iv]

 ---Enrollment was up 3.2 % per year over the same time period,^[v] suggesting that we are also getting somewhat more selective.

 ---Manuscript submissions to our association’s journal, JPER, rose 332% from 1990 to 1997^[vi]; and new journals are appearing, with the most recent being the announcement of the creation of Planning Theory and Practice by the Royal Town Planning Institute.

 ---Attendance at this conference grew 57% from 1990 to 1998.^[vii]  This year’s conference boasts 757 conferees, up from 445 persons in 1990, and a record high attendance.

 ---Despite the small overall size of our field, we have member Planning schools at 43 of the 88 Carnegie Research I universities^[viii]; at 25 of the top 35 institutions in terms of award of doctoral degrees^[ix], and at 20 of the top 35 institutions in terms of federal R&D dollars^[x].

But these rosy numbers do not tell the whole story.  Many of us do not realize how expensive planning education has become. 

The University of Delaware compiles data on instructional costs and productivity for 152 universities.^[xi]  Data for the most recent year show that the direct instructional expenditure in our discipline averaged $411 per student credit hour, an amount exceeded by only 9 of the 125 disciplines examined in the study.  The only disciplines that were higher cost than Urban Planning were: Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical Engineering; Biengineering and Biomedical Engineering; Materials Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Public Administration; Public Health; Veterinary Medicine; and a small residual category labeled "Miscellaneous Physical Sciences".  Our sister environmental design disciplines of Architecture and Landscape Architecture cost only 50 and 59% as much as we did per credit hour; and the social sciences all cost a small fraction as much as we did, with Economics at 33% of our cost and Geography at 34% of our cost. 

I don’t know about you, but when a provost combs over these data to look for high cost programs that she might cut, or cut back on, I don’t feel very comfortable with her asking whether Biomedical Engineering or Urban Planning is the discipline the university could better stand to lose.

Across America, universities are under enormous pressure to restructure and corporatize.  Distance Learning is the new darling of university presidents and provosts, as they hope to find cheaper or more efficient ways to deliver credit hours and degrees.  State legislatures across the country have been paying attention to faculties’ level of presence in the classroom and to the institution of tenure.  Today the fraction of faculty in the U.S. that are part-time has risen to 52% from just 22% in 1970.^[xii]  

ACSP, founded as an association of schools 41 years ago, has always worked to support the interests of planning schools in responding to such institutional challenges. The successful creation of an accreditation process, jointly sanctioned with APA and AICP, is one of our great accomplishments.  The Guide to Schools, soon to be in its 11^th edition as a consolidated guide to programs at bachelors, masters and doctoral levels; and our newer websites have become important tools in recruitment.  Our Strategic Marketing Committee, chaired by Dowell Myers, produced a concise “Anchor Points” statement distinguishing us from other disciplines and professions.  In 1997, we initiated a biennial Administrators’ Conference for the training of and exchange of information among planning department chairs and deans, most recently hosted here in Chicago by Dean Wim Wiewel of UIC.  And, outgoing President Sandi Rosenbloom and her staff at the University of Arizona are now at work on our first ever national Institutional Data project, which will provide school administrators with valuable comparative data on enrollments, productivity, and resources.

While institutional challenges are troubling, we can take consolation in the view that they are not of our own making.  We cannot be so smug in viewing our own success as a discipline.  How well are we doing in fostering scholarly behaviors that allow us to advance our discourse, improve the lessons we teach, and show productivity within the competitive structures of our universities?

In an analysis presented to this conference Thursday, Lew Hopkins argued that for many planning professors, the community of scholars with whom they have substantive intellectual conversation is not a community within the planning academy.^[xiii]  Planners reach outward to sister professions and to the more traditional disciplines, in part because the numbers of us working in given problem areas is so small  – remember my count of 22 planning professors per area of specialization.  Hopkins believes that the “science of discovery” is underserved in the planning academy, as we give less credence to small increments of cumulative work than to integrative and singular work, yet it is through such small increments that we are able to engage each other and develop common frames of reference.

I believe it is very telling that when we publish in planning journals, we seldom cite the work of other planners.  Chuck Connerly and I examined submissions to JPER over the five years of our editorship and found that only 31% of submissions cited any prior work in JPER and only 35% cited any prior work in JAPA.^[xiv]  Harvey Goldstein’s analysis finds similarly low levels of citation of prior work in JAPA among articles published in JAPA.^[xv]

Also damaging, is that when we publish in planning journals, the results of our work may be difficult to find by those using standard bibliographic sources.  Of a list of 48 core urban planning journals compiled by my colleagues at Florida State, only 19 journals are indexed in Social Science Citation Index or the other databases of the Institute for Scientific Information.^[xvi]  So, because a majority of the planning journals are not in the ISI data base, if you search for citations to a planning article in that database, you are likely to find less than half of the citations that exist. 

As we combine the pieces of our radically diverse scholarship into educational programs, we are often unable to make choices, except when prompted by external constraints.  Linda Dalton argued at this conference that accreditation has been successful in establishing a minimum level of school performance, but that like the zoning ordinance, in practice, the minimum often becomes treated as if it were the maximum.^[xvii]   It may be that planning educators, themselves, are the worst enemies of progress in planning scholarship because, out of our diversity in intellectual backgrounds, we bicker endlessly to the point where change is frozen out, or so Klaus Kunzmann recently suggested.^[xviii]

Given these observations, a critically-minded look at the planning academy might well conclude that we are not organized as a discipline in such a way that we foster efficient, synergistic growth in our intellectual capital.

About two decades ago, ACSP reached beyond its accepted mission as an association of schools and began to behave as a learned society in direct response to these kinds of issues.  In 1979, Jay Chatterjee and Ed McLure, among others, pushed us to start our own independent conference and to begin our own journal, which will shortly leave the care of Mickey Lauria and Robert Washington at the University of New Orleans and move to its fifth editorial home at the University of Oregon.  Recognizing the importance of these two initiatives had profound effect in catalyzing growth in the intellectual capital of our discipline. 

Let me ask Jay Chatterjee to stand.  Dean Chatterjee has announced that, at the end of this year, he will step down from his 18-year tenure as Dean of the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati.  Please join with me in saluting this singular figure who has meant so much to his university and our discipline!

We have undertaken various efforts to promote faculty and student diversity including the guidebooks, resume books and mentoring efforts of the Faculty Women’s Interest Group.  We have helped define the ethical obligations and limits of our scholarship through association studies and reports.  Our Committee on Re-assessing Scholarship, building on the work of the so-called, Checkoway Report, has been working to remold and refine our notions of the complementarity between research and outreach so as to help better define and legitimize useful interaction between planning practice and planning research.  And, our Joint ACSP:AICP Committee has been, amidst controversy, seeking ways to highlight and reward scholarship that speaks to the practitioner in ways he or she readily identifies with.

Strengthening our discipline does not mean we have to weaken our ties to other disciplines.  Operating in an interdisciplinary nexus and in an area of professional practice, planning scholarship must continue to draw from, interact with and contribute to other similar professions and a wide range of disciplines.  But, even when we draw outside, we must share inside.  We must endeavor to put the best of our specialty-based work in urban planning journals and in urban planning conferences in ways that highlight the commonalities and synergies among our specialties.  The most powerful letters in support of promotion and tenure of our colleagues should not come from disciplinary figures outside our own academy.  They should come from urban planning scholars.

Fostering changes in response to the dual problems of institutional positioning and disciplinary strength will be the twin foci of this next ACSP administration.  We want to  better support the efforts of planning school administrators to lead their schools and represent their schools within their larger institutions; and we want to foster more effective disciplinary behaviors on the part of planning scholars within the schools.

The centerpieces of our efforts at disciplinary strengthening will be mentoring and role articulation; research agenda development; and furthering the internationalization of planning scholarship.

On Wednesday, the Executive Committee charged the PhD Committee with developing an ACSP Summer Ph.D. Workshop along the lines of a successful AESOP program.  Doctoral students from across North America would be brought together in a retreat setting for three days of sharing of research perspectives, review of individual work, and assessment of field-wide issues.  The hope would be to both advance individual skills and to build inter-institutional linkages that might last well into the careers of the individuals involved.

The Executive Committee has also just approved a Regional Recruitment Partnership Program intended to stimulate partnerships between our schools, on the one hand, and colleges with high African-American and Hispanic enrollments, on the other, in order to build long term prospects for increased minority enrollments in planning bachelor’s, master’s and PhD programs.

I will ask the National Conference Committee and the Executive Committee to re-examine and expand the role of the tracks that we now use to construct the program at this conference.  I hope that the tracks might come to function more like scholarly communities, with ideas for a variety of initiatives emerging from those who share interests in specialty areas.           

As a first step, I will ask that we initiate a series of research agenda projects in focused areas of planning scholarship.  For each ACSP conference track, one focused subject for assessment would be chosen, with preliminary papers presented at next year’s conference and a research agenda document prepared following the conference.

At the same time, Norm Krumholz, the new Chairperson of the AICP Commission and I will ask the Commission and the ACSP Executive Committee to initiate a joint project in which leading planning scholars and practitioners will work together to define an agenda for applied urban planning research.

These various research agenda projects are hoped to result in cohesive statements about what we should be doing that might serve as suggestions to investigators, especially young investigators, but that also would be used to market discipline-wide planning scholarship to foundations and government agencies in the hope of stimulating new programs of funding, efforts I will ask our association to undertake. 

I will ask the Executive Committee to consider a new award recognizing a singular contribution that has advanced thinking in our discipline.  Such an award would be intended to encourage planning researchers to think about impacts of a program of research, rather than individual projects.

Finally, I will encourage continued interaction between ACSP and the sister organizations that have grown in our image on other continents.   Following the efforts the Global Planning Perspectives Interest Group, we have, as you know, committed to participate in a World Planning Schools’ Congress to take place in Shanghai during July of 2001.  Through the efforts of Robin Boyle, we are about to firm up plans for a third joint ACSP-AESOP Congress to take place in the summer of 2003, probably in Brussels.  This past summer, with the assistance of the Lincoln Institute, we sent Bob Beauregard, Genie Birch and Judy Innes to represent us as the ANPUR conference in Brazil.  Next month, Bill Siembieda will travel to Caracas to represent us at an organizational meeting of a proposed Latin America-wide association of planning schools.

Recent years have seen renewed vigor in ACSP’s efforts to address Institutional Positioning.  Projects initiated in past administrations are only now coming to fruition.  Key among these is the Institutional Data project which will release its first results this Winter, the bi-ennial Administrators’ Conference, and the new consolidated Guide to Schools.

In new efforts aimed at institutional positioning, I will ask the Technology Committee to undertake an assessment of the significance and meaning of Distance Learning on planning education.

The AICP Commission has asked the ACSP:AICP Joint Committee, co-chaired by Barbara Becker and Roger Hedrick, to recommend arrangements for new continuing education activities organized by universities and tied to continued qualification for AICP membership.

I will ask the Strategic Communications Committee to prepare a Strong Schools Guidebook aimed at improving the marketing and constituency engagement of our schools.

I will ask the Diversity Committee to organize sessions at this conference and at the ACSP Administrators' Conference intended to help school leadership effectively build and maintain diversity in this eara of challenges to affirmative action.

We also will continue the decade-long trajectory of efforts intended to bring greater efficiency, institutional memory and productivity to the operations of our association.  The previous administration initiated a series of activities intended to get our organizational affairs in order.  A professional conference manager was hired.  ACSP’s first independent office was authorized.  We are now insured against disaster and are moving toward more comprehensive liability insurance.  We now utilize a budgetary format that shows muti-year transfers in a tractable way.  We are about to contract with an accounting firm to complete the first full review of our financial records.  Perhaps most significantly, an Institutional Governance committee, chaired by Pat Pollack,  is about to present findings concerning changes in governance that have become necessary as we have grown and expanded to take on functions of both an association of schools and a learned society. 

             As a group of schools we enjoy great opportunity and show many signs of health.  But, we are far from what we could become.  By concerted emphasis on institutional positioning and the fostering of disciplinary strength, this association will enhance our collective abilities so that our schools might become stronger and our disciplinary center might become more vibrant.