“University of Michigan (UM) has a world-renowned reputation, but what makes it?” Philip J. Hanlon, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the UM gave the answer by decoding “UM’s management system and operational mechanism” on SJTU 46th “Focus Forum” for the central group of SJTU in B418 Meeting Room of New Administration Building on Minhang Campus on the afternoon of June 1.
Chairperson Ma Dexiu of SJTU Council, Vice Presidents Su Ming, Xu Fei, Lin Zhongqin, Chen Gang and Li Jianqiang attended the forum. Vice President Xu Fei moderated the forum and Ni Jun, Dean of UM-SJTU Joint Institute (JI), assumed the on-site interpreter.
UM was founded in 1817 and is one of the oldest universities in the US with a world-wide reputation. Dr. Philip J.Hanlon, a University of Michigan faculty member since 1986, has held administrative leadership positions for the past decade, serving as associate dean for planning and finance in the College of Literature, Science and Arts from 2001-2004 and as vice-provost for academic and budgetary affairs from 2004-June 2010. He assumed the position of Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs on July 1, 2010. In these positions, Dr. Hanlon has worked to develop and support academic programs, implement long-term cost savings, and increase transparency in the budgetary process. As vice provost he led campus-wide initiatives on interdisciplinary learning and teaching and established new policies and processes that are leading to more effective use of the University’s space and facilities. The University of Michigan has recognized his commitment to teaching with an Excellence in Education Award and a Thurnau Professorship.
Dr. Philip J.Hanlon firstly briefed how American public universities operate and the basic situation of education, teaching, research and social work at UM. Then he shared his working experience at UM, esp. in the organization structure and the internal management of UM.
Dr. Philip J.Hanlon said that the biggest difference between American public universities and private universities is that part of the funding of the public universities in the US comes from the tax funding of the state government, and therefore the main responsibility of public universities is social service.
As Provost, Dr. Philip J.Hanlon mainly works as an “Academic Executive” and “Budget Executive”; in Dr. Hanlon’s own word, his position is equal to “COO”, in charge of operation while president is equal to “CEO”, responsible for decision making. “What makes me happiest is that all the good ideas come to me and I am to assess and budget and raise fund to support those good ideas and projects,” said by Dr. Hanlon when he introduced his major work.
“If a professor has no interest in talent training, then UM is not the place where he should go.” Dr. Philip J. Hanlon briefed another responsibility of an Academic Executive: to assess professors and assess all the future development plans of all subjects at the university by emphasizing “a world-class teaching group and high-level students are the best resources for our university”. He briefed how UM has managed to attract and maintain a high-level teaching group in several perspectives, including professors’ learning, academic environment, assessment mechanism, discipline establishment and communication. He also briefed the “three-level scrutiny” policy for UM professors.
“The budget principle at UM follows the way of incentive mechanism,” said Dr. Hanlon and he briefed the fund operation situation at UM: the fiscal fund for the subject development is 2.8 billion U.S. dollars annually, with 37% from tuition fees, 37% from the federal government as R&D funding, 13% from donations and 13% from other areas such as UM’s investment; the more projects, the more budgets. With the money from the university, each school manages to pay for the facilities, courses, teaching assistants and scholarship. 5% of the tax of all the fees used by the university is at the disposal of the Academic Executive. When mentioning this, he added, “The biggest challenge facing the Academic Executive is how to coordinate the cooperation among schools. Some newly-rising subjects are inter-school and if no school is willing to use its own money, then on behalf of the university, I am to coordinate. That is why there is 5% tax fee to support such new cooperation among schools.” In the end, Dr. Hanlon highlighted the academic credit system and the transition from focusing on classroom teaching to focusing on action-based learning at UM.
During the forum, Dr. Philip J.Hanlon and leaders of SJTU had interactions in all kinds of fields, including the fund expenditure, human resource cost, future trends, post setting for professors, professor’s project filing, public facilities construction, university investment, faculty quality assessment, talent raising adaptability, curriculum adjustment, student entrepreneurship, global strategy promotion and so forth.
When mentioning global strategy, Dr. Hanlon stressed that the global strategy of UM is not only to attract more and more oversees students to further their study at UM, but also to feed more and more UM students to the world. Based on JI model, UM would fully roll out its “Going Global” policy. He expressed that “the cooperation with SJTU is very important and meaningful to UM.”
