Susan VanderPlas, Associate Professor of Statistics and 2025 NSF Career Award Winner, shares her BOR comments.
Hi, my name is Susan VanderPlas. I’m an associate professor in the Statistics Department, and I’ve been at UNL since 2020. I teach statistical computing, and I also serve on the faculty senate executive committee.
I have had concerns with the speed of the budget process since the timeline was discussed in the Faculty Senate Executive Committee in August. When the Statistics department was proposed for elimination, I began trying to understand why the data-driven method used by senior leadership resulted in my department being poorly ranked.
This analysis would fail the standards I set for my students on multiple dimensions. My colleagues have highlighted some of these problems: inaccurate and out-of-date data, faulty statistical methods, and a failure to consider the real-world context of the data. Ultimately, the physics department and the English department do not compete for the same grant funding, and they publish the results of their research in different ways. Similarly, comparing the English department to community planning or architecture in teaching makes no sense, because one provides large service classes and the other does not.
Chancellor Bennett insists that he is following the process outlined in the APC procedures. I agree that APC is ensuring that the process is followed now that the ball is in their court, but the problems with the process occurred before APC was involved. Ultimately, to eliminate departments, the process must be fair, accurate, and transparent, and the data and analysis used here has flaws in all of these areas. Departments have not been provided with sufficient information to allow them to identify or correct flawed data, and we have been locked out of data about our departments, which could help us correct the record.
In this week’s hearings, Josh Davis, the Vice Chancellor, claims to have used industry best practices to evaluate departments. This is categorically false because both the data and the analysis are fundamentally flawed. I am concerned that the use of this analysis to terminate departments might lead to successful wrongful termination suits and erase any budget savings produced from the reduction process.
I urge you, Regents, President Gold, and Chancellor Bennett, to stop the current process and consult with external certified professional statisticians before coming up with a new budget reduction plan. Using this faulty data and faulty methodology leads to faulty conclusions that will cost UNL dearly. Simply proposing to cut the Statistics department has already damaged UNL’s reputation as a major research university. Statistics and data science are very in-demand, and eliminating these programs will hurt the Nebraska information and digital agriculture economy, contribute to brain drain, and threaten the research engine at UNL that is central to our standing in the Big Ten.
As a state, we cannot afford to eliminate Statistics programs because the university administration misused statistics.
