Prompted by budget cuts in 1996 and 1997, the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for Planning and Budgeting—formed in response to a Southern Association of Colleges and Schools recommendation that there be greater participation in university planning—issued a report calling for the establishment of two committees, one that would examine and evaluate all academic programs of the institution and the other that would examine and evaluate all nonacademic elements of UT Knoxville. Chancellor Bill Snyder appointed both committees.
The APEC committee, composed of 12 senior faculty members, was charged to “develop a long-term view of the university against which to evaluate the academic achievements of the campus, make recommendations on which academic programs should be enhanced, which should be dropped, and which should be combined with other programs.” Members of the APEC Committee included Dr. Harold Black (finance); Dr. Marianne Breinig (physics); Dr. Al Burstein (psychology); Dr. Don Dessert (education); Dr. John Haas (speech comunication); Dr. Lee Magid (chemistry); Dr. Dan McLemore (agricultural economics); Dr. Barbara Moore (broadcasting); Dr. Johnnie Mozingo (nursing); Dr. John Prados (chemical engineering); Dr. Debbie Tegano (child and family studies); and Dr. Joe Trahern (English).
In February 1998 Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs John Peters, members of his staff, and 16 academic deans released a report to the APEC structuring priorities for academic excellence and student learning. The report identified 42 academic programs as being the university’s best and recommended that those programs should receive additional funds when resources permit and should be protected from budget cuts. The deans spent nine months reviewing all academic programs before issuing the report.
Priority areas established were environment, natural resources, and species preservation; intellectual and cultural expression; economic development; health and biomedical sciences; children and families; computational and informational sciences; and ethics and values in the professions. The report also provided proposals for changes in existing programs, including those that might be discontinued and those that might be considered for merger or realignment.
In 1999 the Academic Affairs Office approved the allocation of $800,000 to the thematic areas and established interdisciplinary councils of six to ten faculty members to determine how the money was to be spent in each area. The funds came from the 15 percent tuition hike imposed for 1999.