Many blame Lazerson for Education School's problems

For members of the Graduate School of Education, this has been the winter of their discontent. With multiple complaints pending with the University Ombudsman and two warring academic factions threatening to tear the school apart, some senior faculty have compared the school's internal situation to "Bosnia." And while the faculty are mostly blaming each other, several senior GSE professors are also pointing fingers at the school's former dean, Interim Provost Marvin Lazerson. "This school looks great on the outside, but it's riven with problems on the inside," Educational Leadership Professor Peter Kuriloff said last week. The school's problems have a long history which predates Lazerson's tenure as dean. According to a confidential GSE document, obtained by The Daily Pennsylvanian, there has been a history of faculty harassment of administrators, failure to follow admin- istrative procedures, a neglect of students' concerns and "exploitation of women and A-1s." A-1s are the University full-time employees who are paid monthly. There has been "a continuous failure to use orderly processes, vetoes on the part of Deans and Associate Deans that violate process? [and the] suspension of faculty approved programs without faculty approval," the document states. The two-page document, written by a GSE ad hoc committee, also states that the atmosphere at the school has intimidated junior faculty members and associate professors seeking promotion into silence. In addition to the problems outlined in the document, several senior faculty members said that a war between two of the schools four academic divisions, Educational Leadership and Psychology in Education, has enveloped almost every faculty discussion, including hiring, tenure and promotional decisions. Numerous complaints between and against members of the school have been taken to the Ombudsman over the last several years and many are still pending, a senior GSE faculty member said. The faculty member, who requested anonymity, also said that Lazerson failed to take an active role in resolving these grievances. Ombudsman David DeLaura, who is new to the job, said last week that because of the nature of his office he cannot comment on any specific cases he is handling. Lazerson said Monday that this interdivisional fighting stems from philosophical differences with which education schools across the country are struggling to come to terms. "The biggest issue has to do with the relationship between activism, or school improvement, and research," he said. Lazerson said education schools have studied education for years, but played no role in actually trying to change public schools until recently. Now, he said, schools are caught in a debate over how to improve public schools while also conducting first-class research. "Some of [these differences] are generational, some of them are personal and some are philosophical," he said. Lazerson said faculty disagreements come to a head when searching for new people or dealing with promotion issues. Psychology in Education Division Chairperson John Fentuzzo, who was recruited under Lazerson's deanship, said he agrees with Lazerson, adding that GSE's problems are mostly "contextual," and not related to Lazerson or any other individual's actions. Fentuzzo said tight budgetary pressures at the University in general, especially during a time when GSE has an acting dean and the University has both an interim provost and president, exacerbates "academic turf wars." And he credits Lazerson with changing the culture at GSE, focusing more on grants and fundraising. While Kuriloff and other senior faculty credit Lazerson for building up GSE's financial base and agree that other education schools have some of the same conflicts, they say his inability and unwillingness to deal with faculty conflict exacerbated problems at the school. And other faculty members, like Associate Educational Leadership Professor Richard Gibbony, say Lazerson's emphasis on endowment building and grant getting left them alienated and without a voice in the school's internal structure. Kuriloff said Lazerson has good interpersonal skills and that he is a good fundraiser. He also said Lazerson was able to create a GSE Board of Overseers, something that the school had been missing for a long time. But, he added, Lazerson has "a constitutional problem with dealing with conflict." Lazerson admits that he did not always do a good job of handling internal fights. "I spent a lot of time mediating [the conflict] and I would say I was not very effective," Lazerson said. "I would give myself a D plus for effort and a C minus for success." Lazerson said it was hard for him to decide when to intervene when some faculty wanted him to be more authoritarian -- asserting his own agenda more strongly -- and another group wanted him to let the faculty make more of its own decisions. "I tried to steer a middle road and my philosophy on this is that issues that are generally the faculty's concern really need to be left to the faculty," he said. "The toughest job for any dean is the question: when do you put yourself in the middle of a faculty debate?" Lazerson added that while he did not have much success in resolving GSE's internal schisms, he was successful in increasing the school's faculty base and financial prowess. "It was one of these situations where I was not successful in calming the waters, but we were enormously successful in recruiting wonderful teachers and scholars," he said. "That will be remembered long after I'm forgotten." But Gibbony said that Lazerson's emphasis on GSE's external image marginalized some faculty members. "I have been harassed by [Lazerson] and the GSE administration for criticizing the direction in which the school was going," Gibbony said. Gibbony also said that Lazerson was "neck deep in the establishment" and he alienated scholars, like himself, who are critics of the established order in public education and within the University. "With Lazerson, it's almost that whatever you do that puts money in the bank and accrues prestige within the establishment is an educational and social good," he said. Gibbony added that Lazerson never "would take a risk on anything that wouldn't get applause from the gallery." GSE Board of Overseers Chairperson Gloria Chisum, who is also Vice Chairperson of the University Board of Trustees, said Tuesday night that she did not know about the internal problems the school was experiencing. She commended Lazerson's leadership. "The only thing I can say is that Marvin Lazerson took a school that was a prime candidate for closing and turned it into an outstanding, nationally-recognized education school," Chisum said. "There are always tensions that build up between people, that's what we've been working on all year, but [Lazerson] really turned around a school that needed significant attention." While many GSE faculty members agreed with Chisum, they also said that Lazerson's lack of internal leadership has taken the school to the point where it is now considering splitting its divisions into separate departments. In a school with only 30 some faculty members, that is a major shift. Some senior faculty members said they came forward with problems at GSE out of fear that Lazerson, despite all his previous denials, is being considered for the permanent provostship. "He'd make a terrible provost," said one senior faculty member, who wished to remain anonymous. "He doesn't know how to clean up an internal problem."