RE: OT: UC President Search
There should be some control. If you consider the California system to be the gold standard for American public higher education, well, that's a very structured and regulated system. Cal State campuses are legally forbid from doing basic research or offering Ph.D programs. The law and medical schools are also restricted to the the UC campuses. In essence, the Eagleson Bill was the California Master Plan before the California Master Plan was. Even within the UC system, there is a hierarchy. Does one really think it would go over well if the Chancellor of UC-Davis started writing op-ed pieces demanding co-flagship status with Berkeley? No, he'd probably be out of a job by the end of the year. The problem with Ohio's system was that when Rhodes threw out the Eagleson Bill, he went way overboard. All of a sudden, every school was free to start adding doctoral programs and trying to turn themselves into Berkeley. Everybody got a trophy, and if everybody got to be special then nobody (including Ohio State) was special.
I agree that Ono making a big deal out of being named a co-flagship was nonsense. The time when the state making such a designation meant something for the future of the university was a century ago. But again, that's where I see his lack of concrete leadership. He went for the hollow, splashy route most likely to get his name in the newspapers.
Look, whatever one's hate level to Ohio State, people need to understand that any major decisions regarding Ohio higher ed are going to go through them. They may not get their way on everything, but they have more than enough power to kill something they see as a threat. They got burned really badly in the 60s and 70s by Miami and OU and Jim Rhodes, and they've spent a generation building up the political capital to ensure that it never happens again. UC is not going to be a co-flagship with Ohio State for reasons both historical and contemporary that I've laid out--and quite frankly, if you really break down the rankings (not just US News but the global rankings, National Research Council's once-a-decade doctoral rankings etc) and other factors (such as National Academy members, AAU membership, lack of a Comprehensive Cancer Center), UC has a hell of a long way to go before they could start making any such argument.
What Ono should have done is try to make common cause with Ohio State to eliminate poorly ranked, redundant Ph.D programs, get rid of one or two of the public law schools (Ohio has more state law schools than California does) and so on. Position UC to be the Va Tech to OSU's UVA. The resources freed up would strengthen the programs that deserve to remain. Yes, Ohio State would have the lion's share of them, but UC would have, and by a large margin, the second most. So people need to decide what it's really about. Is it primarily to hurt Ohio State or to build up UC? Then you add in Miami as an undergraduate focused school like William & Mary, and you'd be well on your way to undoing the mess created in the 60s and 70s. That would be your University of California equivalent. The rest would be the Cal State system. That's how you change the system in a way that it both improves UC (probably ensures that it gets AAU membership down the road) and probably provides a more efficient, cheaper system for Ohio taxpayers.
But that would have been hard. That would have required actual difficult, behind-the-scenes lobbying over the course of several years. It would have made most of the public university Presidents mad at him, and they wouldn't have posed for selfies with him anymore. No, Ono took the cheap, easy publicity route of attempting to poke a stick at the bear in Columbus (always a sure fire way to get applause in Cincinnati) and accomplished nothing. I can guarantee that the OSU President was on the phone to Kasich, the legislative leadership in both parties and editorial boards around the state the following week. And what happened, Kasich came out and publicly shot Ono down and the state went on record saying the idea was dead in the water.
I'd like to see the numbers on funding. I couldn't find the post in a search. I know certain majors get more funding based on expense of instruction (i.e. more to engineering than history) but that the number was the same for all schools. Do they include the biennial capital appropriations? Ohio State gets the largest of that, but one would really need to dig into the numbers and see if their share is disproportionately high relative to either their budget or their share of state enrollment. Then again, I'm someone who thinks that OSU, UC and Miami should be funded differently than the rest. Rather than focus on OSU getting more than UC; the focus should be on UC getting more than UT, OU, BG, YSU, WSU, CSU, UA and KSU.
(This post was last modified: 12-01-2016 11:56 AM by Bearcat 1985.)
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