Fears That Loss of a Math Ph.D. Program Figures in a Bigger Equation

The University of Rochester is scuttling its doctoral program in mathematics, a move that has surprised and angered scientists and educators nationwide, who worry it could signal erosion at America's research universities.

If Rochester could take such a step in tough financial times, they say, so could other leading universities. They are also concerned that it is a recipe for disaster at Rochester, a university respected for its strength in science and technology.

This is not good for Rochester, for American science or for the country," said Arthur Jaffe, a mathematician at Harvard and president-elect of the American Mathematical Society, which condemned the decision last month.

Professors at other universities in the United States and abroad have urged Rochester to reconsider. Dr. Steven Weinberg, a Nobelist in physics, in one of the many letters sent to Rochester's president, Thomas H. Jackson, wrote: "It seems to me extremely unwise to eliminate your program in an area like mathematics, that stands at the intellectual center of a large part of modern science."

The physicist Herman Feshbach, a former president of the American Physical Society and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, put it bluntly: "In one fell swoop you have reduced the University of Rochester to a second-class status," he wrote.

Rochester defends its decision as necessary and sound in a time of budget constraints, pointing to operating deficits and a math department of only modest distinction. University officials say Rochester is only facing up to what other universities will also increasingly be called upon to deal with, as universities face financial pressures because of declining Federal aid, tuition revenues and state support.

"This is an issue almost every university is going to have to wake up to," Mr. Jackson said. "Most universities are going to have to pick and choose. I'm very confident that as hard as this decision was to make, it was the right one."

But even as he reaffirmed the decision, he offered the mathematics department an opportunity to test whether science, engineering and other quantitatively-oriented departments really cared about the program by asking the other departments how much they would be willing to pay out of their own pockets to save the graduate math program. But where the university saw such a poll as a concrete measure of the interest of other departments, the math department saw "the tragedy of the commons," the classic problem described by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who said that the problem of the overgrazing of a common meadow cannot be solved by asking individuals to limit their cows from grazing voluntarily but must be addressed by a central policy reflecting the interest of all grazers together.

Now that the mathematics faculty members have rejected the idea of the poll, Mr. Jackson says it is up to them to make their case to the other departments.

"The math department needs to start opening the dialogue with other departments," he said yesterday. "They need to listen to them and try to persuade them. If they make headway, we will pay attention."

Mathematics is one of five graduate programs the university is phasing out; university administrators say they have not heard similar complaints over cuts in anthropology, comparative literature, linguistics and chemical engineering.

While the university will suspend its Ph.D. program, it plans to keep 10 of its 21 tenured faculty members and use adjunct professors for entry-level math courses. The cuts in tenured faculty are to be made through attrition.

"I don't disagree that mathematics is a core discipline," said Mr. Jackson. "But does that mean you have to run a Ph.D. program? To me, that linkage is much more tenuous than people in the mathematics community believe it to be."

The furor over the decision has struck a nerve, though, among many academicians worried about who will conduct and pay for research -- particularly theoretical research in subjects like mathematics -- if Federal money for research and higher education is cut. Universities like Rochester have been a large and important part of America's research base for half a century.

So far, Federal financing for scientific research, including mathematics, has held up: According to the National Science Foundation, federally financed expenditures for research in mathematical sciences at colleges and universities grew to $206 million in 1994, up slightly from $203 million the year before.

But many universities, including Rochester, have other financial problems. And there is a broad consensus that too many Ph.D.'s -- including too many mathematics doctorates -- are being produced nationally. When it comes to making cuts, however, there are differences over what should go.

"One can argue that there should be cuts," said M. Salah Baouendi, a mathematician at the University of California at San Diego who headed a committee of the American Mathematical Society that studied Rochester's cutback in math. "But one hopes these cuts would take place at the weaker programs, not the stronger ones, like Rochester."

Few are suggesting that Rochester will lose its standing as a research university. "There is not a standard-issue model of what you have to have to be a first-class research university," said Cornelius J. Pings, president of the Association of American Universities, a by-invitation coterie of 60 research universities, including Rochester.

Still, by cutting back mathematics, Rochester has touched an area long considered sacrosanct -- an integral part of many other disciplines, from engineering and the sciences to the social sciences.

"It is clearly a blow to the status of mathematicians and to their princely egos," said David Breneman, an economist who is dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. "But they're not killing off a premiere, top-10 program, and there are probably more institutions that should do something like Rochester has done."

When Mr. Jackson began as president of Rochester in July 1994, the university, like many others, had been running operating deficits for many years. An expert in bankruptcy law who had been provost at the University of Virginia, Mr. Jackson had a broad mandate to position the institution for the long term.

In November, he proposed a broad plan to give the university a new focus on undergraduate education. The plan called for cuts of 20 percent or more in undergraduates and graduate students, and a 10 percent cut in faculty.

To determine which departments to cut, administrators weighed factors that included departments' stature, their finances, their teaching skills and their interrelationships within the university.

The university deemed the math department one of only "modest distinction" (it tied for 58th among 139 departments in the recent rankings by the National Research Council), called its undergraduate instruction "less than optimal" and said that its interaction with other departments at the university was minimal.

The mathematics department contests many of the university's judgments. Not only are its national ratings higher than those of some of the graduate programs being retained, it says, but its teaching ratings have been better than average in the school of science, and its faculty has done better than those of many other math departments at winning outside financing and has more interaction with other departments than the university has recognized.

Joseph Neisendorfer, chairman of the math department, calculates that the annual savings from closing his graduate program, which does not have heavy laboratory and equipment costs, will come to less than $1 million, considering that the average faculty salary in his department is less than $60,000 and that the total annual cost of stipends for graduate students is about $180,000.

Professors have yet to tell him of any plans to leave, he said. But he -- like the university -- anticipates that the best ones, with the most mobility, will.

"I do think you can get a good mathematics education at a small college without graduate programs," he said. "No one would deny that. But they are devaluing the mathematics department in the context of Rochester remaining a research university with other graduate programs. Any mathematician who comes here will be a second-class citizen. How are we supposed to recruit good people in those circumstances?"