“Whatever we decide to do, we want to do very well. We want to do it at a level that will make us competitive with the best” ~ Bill Destler
Buried within the sweeping 10-year strategic plan the University Senate approved last week, administrators are sending the university’s 102 academic programs a very clear message: Be great or be cut.
Like any of the goals in the plan to catapult the university into the ranks of elite public colleges, the message is laced in bureaucratic speak and padded with wiggle room. But where the plan’s wording isn’t clear, its intentions are, and we applaud them.
In general, the plan places an emphasis on making its strongest programs stronger. Previous drafts of the plan included provisions that required 80 percent of the university’s academic departments to reach top-25 rankings or produce plans to get them there. The wording was cut, but professors and deans who helped create the plan said the intentions remain.
The strategic plan also calls for officials to regularly review all academic departments, and it makes special provisions for them to focus their attention on low-enrollment programs as well as those with low-graduation rates. “When appropriate, we will use this process to consolidate programs and/or administrations to increase efficiencies,” the plan says.
And when these programs are “consolidated,” there is little question where the provost’s office will direct it. There are clauses within the plan to assure officials aim money at chronic weaknesses such as the university’s graduate program and library system, but on the whole, it’s the university’s world class departments (engineering, computer science, physics and business, to name only a few) that make its reputation.
A university’s reputation attracts its best students and increases the value of its graduates’ degrees. If the university can prove it can efficiently spend its money now, it can make a better case to press the state for more funding later. With a $2 billion pricetag, the strategic plan calls on officials to make this university something its graduates can truly be proud of, and to accomplish this administrators realize they’ll have do more with less.
So why offer a middle-rated academic program, when another state school can offer the same classes, but better? Cutting any department will spark a temporary outcry, and we realize the importance of every academic discipline, from the largest to the most profitable to the most obscure. College is a time for intellectual exploration, and students should have the opportunity to focus on whichever field they wish. But if a student needs to go elsewhere to study a specific discipline, at least the programs this university does offer will be among the finest.
In the first five years of President Dan Mote’s tenure, the university rose from a top-30 public institution to number 18 in 2002. We’ve since stalled there. To ascend the remaining steps, we will have to make sacrifices, and we commend administrators for realizing this.
