Something’s Fishy in Holladay Hall – What Fisheries Management And University Administration Have in Common

Larry A. Nielsen

Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

North Carolina State University

Remarks to

NC State Student Fisheries Society

February 7, 2006

Thanks for the invitation to meet with you this evening and express a few thoughts about two things I love—fisheries management and university administration.   People are often amazed that a fisheries biologist is the provost of our university, but I don’t know why.   In fact, I’d like to argue that we fisheries folks are naturally well equipped for such high office.

For starters, fisheries management and NC State are both about the same age.   Fisheries management started in the mid-1800s, perhaps getting its most officially acknowledged start in 1872 with the creation of the U.S. Fisheries Commission.   NC State started just a bit later, in 1887.   And both of these fine institutions started for basically the same reason.   Our nation was in the early stages of the industrial revolution, and it became clear that the benefits of science needed to be brought to the homes and work-sites of the people in general.   For fisheries, that meant figuring out how the new technologies were affecting fish catches; the U.S. Fisheries Commission was formed to study and improve that situation.   For agriculture, natural resources and engineering (called mechanical arts then), land-grant universities were started to teach regular people (not just the elite), to conduct applied research and to get the results out to the entire population; that remains NC State’s mission, stated today as teaching, research and extension.

Furthermore, we know a great deal about what makes nature and people tick.   For example, when dealing with difficult people, I know to get them together in pairs, based on the fisheries rule that you should pick up crayfish two at a time, so they bite each other rather than biting you.   Regarding fund raising, I know that you have to keep trying because the only way to win a largemouth bass tournament is to keep throwing great big, noisy, bright lures into the thick weeds (that analogy may be a little more true than I intended).   And, of course, we know that anglers are the best liars—what better preparation could there be for university administration (“…and the size of the budget cut is THIS BIG…”)!

Seriously, though (or at least as seriously as this topic will allow), university administration and fisheries management do have a lot in common.   Let me give you four examples of what used to occupy my time in fisheries and how close it is to what occupies my time now.

First, let’s talk about marking and tagging.   I wrote a book on the subject—not a best seller, mind you, but at least it was short and cheap, How to Mark an Aquatic Organism So That You Know Where it Started From and What Its Journey Has Been—this is an important topic in fisheries.   And so it is in university administration.   Marking as many of you as possible with NC State official stuff is big business.   Every time you buy something with an NC State logo on it, my cash register goes “ka-jing!”   The royalties from all those sales go directly into scholarships, currently split equally between academic scholarships based on financial need, and athletic scholarships based on what we need!   And it isn’t easy designing the right university logo mark, either.   Recently, our Executive Officers at their bi-weekly meeting made a momentous decision—the switch from one official shade of red to another.   And, with equally great trepidation, we approved some “clean-up” of Tuffy the Wolf (yes, his name is Tuffy) so that apparel manufacturers can more easily sew him accurately on shirts and hats and whatever you like Tuffy to appear on.   So wear your NC State logos proudly and often—we want our migration routes well marked!

Second, we all know that the aquatic environment is dense.   So is Holladay Hall.   No, I didn’t mean it that way; let me explain.   Fish live in water, which surrounds them intensely with a an imposing and challenging medium—it’s hard to swim through, chemicals keep leaching in and leaching out, and it gets chilly and dark if you take the down escalator.   That was one of my first lessons in Holladay Hall—it is an intense living environment.   I thought that as provost I’d have considerable autonomy for making decisions, even more than I had as dean.   Wrong.   Dean is the most autonomous job in the university.   Provost isn’t, because at this level virtually every decision that I might make has impacts on lots of other parts of the university—and vice versa.   So, as provost I constantly have to make sure that my decision to go upstream or downstream, to the surface or the bottom, to swim or lie still, is thoroughly negotiated with a clingy environment of vice-chancellors, Board of Trustee members, faculty senators, student leaders, vice-provosts, legislators, department heads and, especially, Vicki (don’t want to mess with Vicki!).  

For example, I recently approved a change that the College of Engineering wanted to make in numbering of some courses from 800s (doctoral) to 600s (masters) because they said that the content and student population are more fitting to masters courses.   Simple, right?   Nope.   Because the university is funded on a complex   “12-cell matrix,” our state appropriation will go down since 800-level courses earn us more funds than 600-level courses.   Hence, we’ll miss our budgeted enrollment target, and we’ll be forced to admit more freshmen to make up the loss (and I mean lots more freshmen because they count for considerably less than doctoral students in the funding formula).   That means that I have to fund more instructors in English, history, biology and the like because they teach the general education courses.   And we’ll need more dorm rooms and dining hall seats.   And most of those will be in-state students, so our out-of-state percentage will go down, and that’ll make our selectivity go down, and that’ll make our ratings go down, so that’ll make our popularity go down, and—well, you get the picture.   So, being the provost is a little like standing in a muddy stratified pond in mid-summer:   your head is hot, your feet are freezing, you can’t see anything in the water, and something is wrapping itself around your ankles.

But, hey, we’ll also sell more NC State logos, so maybe it’ll all even out in the end!

Third, let’s talk a little about population dynamics—your favorite subject, I know.   That was my specialty for a while, until I discovered that trying to figure out people was a lot easier than trying to figure out differential equations.   Okay, the fundamental stock abundance model has inputs of recruitment and immigration and outputs of natural mortality, fishing mortality and emigration.   Figure out all those dynamic processes, and you can figure out how many fish you’ve got in the stock.

We do exactly the same thing in Holladay Hall, only our stock abundance is students, not fish, and we call it enrollment planning rather than population modeling.   Each year, we have to predict how many students we’ll have enrolled next year and the year after.   About two weeks ago, we sent in our final model for our enrollment for 06-07.   We predicted that we’ll have exactly 31,072 students enrolled (you realize that for a fisheries model, the confidence limits on that would be about –2,082 students to 65,407 students; our enrollment models are a bit more accurate than that).   Just like in fisheries, it is all based on models associated with recruitment rates (applications x admissions per application x acceptances per admission x actual people who show up per acceptance = recruitment yield), graduation rates (the equivalent of natural mortality—not a pretty thought, eh?), and what we might call “fishing mortality”—those that get the hook for one reason or another—and transfers in and transfers out.   There is a lot riding on this model, namely the state appropriation for next year.

And, like the fisheries model, if we’re wrong, we’ve got to adjust.   For example, our models had been based on a fairly constant “natural mortality rate” (that is, graduation rate) of about 64% after six years.   But, over the last two years, our graduation rate has increased first to 67% and then to 70%.   We didn’t realize this change early enough and hadn’t changed our recruitment model, so our stock abundance was down in 04-05, and we suffered a couple of million dollars of loss in appropriations and tuition.   When we figured this all out in the early winter of 2005 and adjusted the model, we had to crank up the recruitment rate by admitting more students for 05-06 at the end of the admissions season, and we luckily made our total enrollment projection (our hatchery managers, the deans, weren’t all that happy about the pressure that we put on them to produce!).   But all these fish are not the same, especially as it relates to the state funding formula.   A little short on engineering students, and we’ve got to recruit many more students in other majors. And that means—well, all the things I described before.   That’s right, crank up the logo sales again!

Fourth, let me just mention one more thing that we find increasingly important, and that has been a major motivation for me my entire career.   You find it important in your work also, and you call it conservation biology—the science of recognizing, valuing and promoting biodiversity.   We now are paying attention to all the flora and fauna in our aquatic ecosystems, not just the game fish, and we’re creating and protecting habitat that meets all their needs.   The value of that biodiversity is a little hard to catalogue quantitatively, but we know it is valuable, and most of you are probably as interested in conservation biology as you are in game-fish management.

The same is true for human diversity at NC State.   We now realize and understand that we are part of a big, wide, wonderful and wonderfully diverse world, full of diverse people of all kinds.   We need to embrace that human diversity as much as we embrace biodiversity, because that diverse world is the world in which we will live, work, play and worship now and in the future.   I encourage you to value the people around you as an essential part of who you are and will be.

I could go on.   For example, migration routes like Dan Allen Drive are important, and putting up fish passage barriers like the new stop sign at Dan Allen and Sullivan Drives can have an impact. So can creating a new migration route, like when we get Varsity Drive open across Western Boulevard (we’re pretty sure folks will “home” to the new migration route without olfactory clues). Then there is habitat availability, especially in regard to parking spaces.   And the price of a fishing license, called tuition and fees.  

So, you see, fisheries management and university administration are both pretty similar—perhaps a jerk on one end of the line waiting for a jerk on the other?   But I wouldn’t change it for anything.   I love my job as provost, and especially as your provost.   NC State is a great fishery to be managing, and I won’t settle for anything short of Optimum Sustainable Yield—with a NC State logo sewn on!

 

Thank you for listening.