UMM recently hosted the University of Minnesota board of regents, and we got a look at the status of the whole U of M system. It’s not a happy story. We have an administration with ambitious goals (that’s good), but they seem to be a bit divorced from reality — they want to turn us into one of the top three public research universities in the world. That sounds like a great 50 year plan, but I’d rather see an ambitious and feasible 5-year goal, myself.
One of my colleagues at the Twin Cities branch campus has analyzed some of the statistics. The most telling one to me is that, despite our goals, our increase in research spending is the least of all of our competitors — we aren’t keeping up. It’s fine to be at the tail end of the pack in a race and plan to pick up your pace to win, but to talk big while slowing down does not give one much confidence.
Here’s a summary of the summary:
Is it really credible to continue on with this “ambitious aspiration” to “become one of the top three public research universities [in the world]?” Let’s admit we have some serious problems here and concentrate on fixing them. Let’s also commit to getting the University of Minnesota at least to the mid-point of the BigTen rankings outlined above. That will be a difficult enough task.
The ultimate problem is declining investment in education, both in higher ed and our source of students, the Minnesota public schools. Rather than touting grand dreams, it might be wiser of our administrators to highlight the deficiencies in the support our government is giving us, and get them to quit taking the UM system for granted.
Oh, and throwing money into stadiums doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited resources.
I once read a study which tried to predict which school students in a severely disadvantaged environment would go on to achieve financial independence. They found that one factor which gave a clue was looking at how they answered “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
The ones who said “I want to be a nurse” or “I want to work with computers” often did okay, whatever they later became. The ones who said “I want to be a lawyer” or “I want to be President of the United States” usually did not.
I’m sure there were exceptions, but not the way to bet, as it turned out.
Welcome to the real world… private industry (where I unfortunately work) is getting worse and worse every month… cutbacks, layoffs… it never stops.
Oh – and to your point about spending tons of money on football facilities – a local high school spent just a hair under $10 million on a facility that “had a recruiter from the University of Michigan gawking,” according to the local news. This is the same district whose teachers did not have enough textbooks for each student to take one home in order to study. Nice priorities.
Baby steps Bob.
Hm.
Research.
Is that because they care about research, or because they want to siphon 40% off of increased grant money?
Will research make the professors better at teaching students?
I’m cynical. If someone is more familiar with the connection between research and quality of education, please enlighten me. Because the whole thing makes me nervous.
My supervisor professor is a brave man. He once mounted a campaign to get rid of the university football team (which isn’t much good anyway).
Needless to say, he was overwhelmingly defeated.
That sounds a lot like what happened at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Our glorious former President Hundert wanted to make us “the most powerful learning environment in the world.” What he got was ousted and one of the most mocked statements in university history.
If you’re worried about your education, you can go to a non-research college—there are many very good liberal arts colleges where research is not the top priority. If you want to have the chance to work with professors that are working at the cutting edge of their fields, go to a research university. The education you get through classes is probably going to be worse, but if you take advantage of research opportunities, you very well could end up better off in the end.
Of course, it all depends on what you want to do with your life and the type of environment that is best for you. There’s no single choice that’s right for everybody, and that’s part of the reason there are different types of post-graduate education.
The idea behind having teaching and research done by the same people is that it is guaranteed that these people will actually know what they are talking about. They are also less likely of feeding stuff to their students that was disproven 10 years ago.
Of course, not every good researcher is automatically a good teacher, and vice versa…
The idea behind having teaching and research done by the same people is that it is guaranteed that these people will actually know what they are talking about. They are also less likely of feeding stuff to their students that was disproven 10 years ago.
Of course, not every good researcher is automatically a good teacher, and vice versa…
Sorry to shoot you guys down, but when a university – especially a large public university – invests in football, it usually benefits the entire system. It produces immense returns in merchandising, ticket sales, and alumni donations. Without good athletics, you can get closer and closer to relying completely on tuition for operating costs. That’s not a great situtation.
I think you will need to do something about the weather in MN, BEFORE you are able to compete with the Big Boys.
Good luck, but even my 14 year old knows that for goals to be realistic, they must first be perceived as attainable.
Doesn’t it get a little chilly up there? From like, November until the first thaw @ June 1?
This sounds like the answers that Kucinich, Richardson, etc., give on the Sunday morning talk shows.
“I’m in it to win.” “I will be the next president.”
These are mandated speech acts that no one takes seriously, but the system we have guarantees that they will come up every now and then. Likewise, I am sure that university regents must perform speech acts like “We will foster an environment of excellence” and “We are going to be one of the top three research universities” as part of their job description.
(These speech acts have a lot in common with “God exists outside of time and space”…)
J-Dog:
Speaking as a U of Minnesota alum now in graduate school in computer science at CMU, I can say that the Minnesota weather has been a big advantage to my career so far. All the students from the top CS schools in California waste the months of November-June whining about the Pittsburgh weather, while I’m working at max happiness and productivity throughout the winter because Pittsburgh is basically a tropical paradise.
That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger… thank you Minnesota!
Colin
I don’t know how many boomer aged people have told me they could earn enough in the summers to go to the U of M. Well, they got theirs, and after they hit the job market they voted consistently for tax cuts and education funding cuts.
Now I’m about to graduate from college. I’ve been working nearly full time and I’m tens of thousands of dollars in debt to boot. What shall the nickname of the boomer generation be, if we call their predecessors the Greatest Generation?
I like football. I was real proud of my little brother, Adrian, in the Vikes game against the Bears last Sunday. (OK, he’s not actually my brother.) But I’m sick to death of sports getting this bizarre pass. If they can earn themselves nice stay-de-eye somehow, fine. No problem. But as entertaining and edifying as I think sports can be, the exceptions we make for athletes and athletics are simply obnoxious. A nonrelated case in point was mentioned a couple of weeks ago on the new PBS series, “Wired Sciences” (yeah, I know–“Wired”–boo, hiss), in a story on the impossibility of finding decent chemistry sets for kids. Too dangerous for companies to take a chance on, due to liability. To which a chemistry teacher who did do some more risky (and far more interesting) experiments in his class pointed out that there were many, many more injuries on the football field than there had ever been in chemistry class. All of this comes down to what we value. If we continue down this path, the best we can hope for is probably to put on trained monkey shows for India and China. Beefcake, cheesecake, jesters to the world. There’s your brave new world–on pay-per-view.
Man, don’t get me started on using public dollars to pay for sports facilities. You have been warned.
Right now, NY is getting the shaft (Yankees), Orlando is getting the shaft (Magic), the NBA tried to give Seattle the shaft (Sonics) after having given them the shaft with the Seahawks and the Mariners, so voters there overwhelmingly responded with I-91, the NBA is trying to give Sacramento the shaft (Kings)…
I think if your college team is in, say, the top 64, your university MAY be about breaking even with sports. But seriously, why would you go to an excellent school like UofC, Cal, UCLA, Stanford, Duke, and so forth, if your intention is to be a pro athlete in the end?
This is where we need to adopt the German “Gymnasium” system; scholars take one path, and non-scholars take other paths.
So, sorry, Fishy, I think the burden of proof, as with anyone who makes assertions, is to show those assertions are true. That’s what PZ does here; he throws the scientific method at it.
For a nice examination of stadium boondoggles, start with http://www.fieldofschemes.com.
And by the way, I like pro sports. I just don’t like them to pilfer the general funds of local government. Examine what’s going on in San Antonio right now, where the Spurs have already asked for (demanded, really) for ANOTHER $160 million to upgrade a publicly-funded arena that’s less than 10 years old.
If this was Japan, the answer would be simple. Just keep calling them “boomers”. There is an Anime called Bubblegum Crisis in which some huge quake hits Japan, leaving them with a ruined city and a labor shortage. Thankfully, some dude recently invented a new type of AI, which when put into advanced cybernetic and human like bodies could do all the work. They where quickly dubbed “boomers” because of the incredible improvements they brought. Well, at least until people started to figure out that a) boomers where completely stupid, b) Genom, who made them was a money grubbing insane bunch that where more interesting in building weapon systems (and testing them in the getto like parts of the city) than building service machines, and c) some of the boomers proved to have what could be deemed to be serious psychological problems, leading them to go on killing rampages. The term seems to fit quite well, and you don’t even have to change it. lol
On a side, it probably wasn’t intentional, but I found if damn funny how, in the new Battlestar Galactica, Boomer turned out to be a cylon. The irony of that name, combined with having watched that Anime series… lol
Here’s a few other things the University of Minnesota could use some improvement on:
Seems to be a bit of a disparity between the goals and the reality.
Graduation Rates for the Morris campus
Point 1: Last month our new Univeristy President hinted at the issues he faces trying to get money out of the lege to support the university system “One legislator, who shall remain nameless, asked me why the state should invest all this money into educating people when they’ll just turn around and leave because there are no good jobs here.” I’m mildly surprised that he didn’t resign in frustration right then and there.
point 2:
Bullshit. The money any University invests in football benefits….the football program, and to a lesser extent other parts of the athletic program.
Merchandizing, ticket sales, and, overwhelmingly, alumni donations based on athletics exposure benefit the athletic department alone. One of the largest donations over given to my school was for Athletics
I know this for a fact with my university, and for many public university systems, this can be proven, since the budget is open to scrutiny under public access laws.
The largest single donation ever given to the UA was to the law school, another institution that has never wanted for money.
On the up side, Bob McCall, best known for his iconic illustrations of the space program just donated a large number of paintings to the School of Art.
BruceJ is right; at those universities I am familiar with, the Athletic Program is at best self-supporting, and – even with income from TV, directed alumni donations – often subsidized.[Anecdote 1]–
The only value of an athletic program to a university is that it might raise the visibility of the university to the general public, which might not care about academics, and to the governor and the legislature (the university president can offer free football tickets (as a kind of bribe) to the governor’s office, state senators and representatives, in the hope that they will appropriate money for the university [or at least only cut the minimum, nowadays]). [Anecdote2]
[Anecdote 1] I remember that athletic fees on graduate students were raised at the U. of Maryland in the late 1970ies (the advertised benefit for graduate students being that they could buy tickets at the price offered to Faculty, which happened to be the price at which they were sold to the public), and a few months later, the student newspaper had a headline and front page article, saying that the UMd. Athletic Department is the only one in [some league] which is completely self-supporting, while all of Md.’s competitors got big subsidies from their universities. The clueless student newspaper, of course, didn’t link that to the recently raised athletic fees on all students, which was essentially a tuition increase without benefits.
[Anecdote2] At that time also some roundabout on the street into the campus was lavishly landscaped and planted, at a time when the university budget was not doing so well. It was claimed that this was necessary, because the governor – when driving to a football game – had made a remark on this spot being ugly.
You seem like the kind of person who would support five year plans.
Very few athletic departments make money. The Department of Education keeps stats on it.
http://ope.ed.gov/athletics/main.asp
My school has been trying to become the flagship of our state and a competitor amongst the best of the best. That would be great, but I think first we have to move beyond the third tier.
One objective is to increase the endowment by sending thugs to hit up alumni for money. Part of UT Austin’s success is, amongst other things, they have a huge endowment. Toss that suggestion at your university. Sure, state money would be great, but it can’t be relied on year after year (recall the UC article you posted earlier this month?). It’s better to shift efforts with the alumni, and play on their heartstrings to invest in the future of the school that tortured them years ago.
[[Sorry to shoot you guys down, but when a university – especially a large public university – invests in football, it usually benefits the entire system. It produces immense returns in merchandising, ticket sales, and alumni donations.]]
Sorry to shoot you down, but every serious study of the subject has found absolutely no link between athletic success and a university’s ability to attract donations to the academic side of things.
Look, I enjoy college football, and I’m willing to accept that–at the more successful schools at least–it allows the athletic department to offer a wide range of non-revenue sports and still be financially self-sustaining. At the very top of the pyramid–the Ohio States, Michigans, Texases and so on–it may even allow for an annual kickback of a couple of million dollars into the university’s general scholarship fund or library renovation. Beyond that, it does nothing for the university’s primary mission.
Think of it this way. If football truly drove total giving to a university wouldn’t Minnesota have the half-billion dollar endowment and Alabama have the two billion dollar endowment instead of the reverse which is the present reality?
Look, If football really does bring in revenue, then it can be sold off to private investors for immediate cash which can be used to bolster genuine academics. But the fact of the mater is, only a tiny minority of college football programs generate revenue.
College athletics blows goats. I used to work at the University of Houston Athletics Department as a tutor. Why were these students more worthy of free tutoring than the Army Reservist who was the first of his family to ever even try to go to college? Why were these athletes more deserving of my help than the harried mother of two who dreamed of going to law school in her thirties? What about the clever, but woefully undereducated, black kid who has a brother doing 20 years for murder who’s doing pretty well in college, but sometimes gets a little behind? I just couldn’t keep working at the athletic center for reasons of conscience.
I say we should kill most college athletics programs.
Let’s remember: most administrators are politicians and they think in 5 year chunks. And their goal is to talk big, make some kind of splash, and move on to a more prestigious, higher-paying job ASAP. Upper administration positions at many universities have turnover rates like a mall Starbucks. Vision is difficult to maintain.
Two contrasting news stories about the University of Minnesota. First, an invitation to Desmond Tutu to speak was canceled because of pressure from a religious group that accused him of “anti-semitism”.
Second, a UM professor got the Nobel Prize for economics.
Tutu was not canceled at the University of Minnesota, but rather at the University of St. Thomas. They have since changed their mind and Tutu is now scheduled to speak.
Bonzo
I was an engineering graduate student at UofM from 1994 to 1997; the same BS about becoming one of the top three research universities was all the rage then too. Talk, talk, talk; that’s all it has turned out to be in almost 20 years.
It appears that the regents and the university would simply like to have a “Just So” story to reflect upon, rather than set any realistic or achievable goals.
As someone at another B10 university, here are my (way) off the cuff suggestions as to what a reasonable, attainable 5 year plan might look like.
1) The collectivization of agricultur…uhh wrong 5 year plan.
1) Admissions: Increase the percentage of freshman from the top 10% of their h.s. class to 50% and from the top quarter of their h.s. class to 90%/Increase the average ACT-SAT score of incoming frehsman to the median point for the either the Big 10/or benchmark group of universities
2) Doctoral Program/Professional School Rankings: set a realistic goal of how many programs should be top 15 and top 25 within five years and target resources to those departments/colleges best in a position to make that jump, then do it again with another group of departments in the next 5 year plan.
3) Faculty: exceed the average growth in National Academy members/Guggenheim Fellows on faculty in comparison with both the Big Ten schools and benchmark universities
4) Research Funding: same thing, set a goal of exceeding the average growth in research funding (overall, federal and private) for the Big Ten schools and benchmark universities–again not a grandious goal but, given the universities to which UM is being judges, it would be an impressive accomplishment.
Goals like these are in place at another B10 university that has been making huge strides in research, rankings and admissions selectivity. These goals while less grandiose are, however, more dangerous to a cowardly administration. UM fails to become “one of the top 3 public universities in the world” (look out Oxbridge), everyone just shrugs their shoulders because the goal was ridiculous to begin with. Set realistic goals and fail to meet them, however, and an administration opens itself up to some very serious and specific lines of criticism.
Any thoughts?
“Oh, and throwing money into stadiums doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited resources.”
Never is.
All of my long life I have thought few things uglier than institutions of learning devoting such astonishing amounts of time, effort and MONEY to sport. Oh yes, indeed there is a revenue benefit. But any person can find good reason to question where that benefit ends up. Every time. It’s disgusting beyond words.
You academic administrators wanna play? Okay. Make a break. I’m sure you guys have a pretty fair kitty to finance the split – and, hey, there’s potentially much bigger money in it, since that’s precisely what its all about.
Go devise up a “university of sport” system independently of the serious learning part. No, really. Make a COMPLETE break without riding on the coat-tails of scholarship. Get your funding EXCLUSIVELY from those who like to watch the oh-so-glorious spectacle of competetion – you know, the same folks who keep throwing money at you anyway, WITHOUT the hassle that part of it might actually be wasted on learning or research. You’ll do fine – probably better than ever before.
And the rest of us can remain undistracted by bullshit overtures to school allegiance based on team scores and standing as we concentrate on learning something useful.
I just read the Senate minutes of the research committee. One of the biggest obstacles the U of MN faces (at least at the TC campus) is that our departments are way smaller than most of their peers, B10 or aspirational, across the disciplines and colleges. Not enough faculty, spread too thin, can’t compete for the bucks/Guggenheims/rankings. I just sent the governor a letter begging that my building be renovated because, frankly, suburban high schools have better facilities than my department. Investment in infrastructure (facilities and core faculty) is not sexy, but without it, the rest is just wishful thinking.