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Sunday, October 10, 2004
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FLORID-FACED
Public universities are forever making the case that they improve their state’s economy, drawing jobs and industry and high-tech and all of that. UD thinks in some restricted sense and in some selected places this may be true. But she is also struck by the fact that some of America’s richest states - Florida, Nevada, Alaska - have some of the weakest university systems. Florida in particular is worth thinking about, and a number of Floridians are doing that. “Why Are Our State Universities So Badly Rated?” Howard B. Rock titles an article that appeared last month in the Miami Herald: "Florida is a wealthy state. One need but examine the Florida real-estate market, with million-dollar houses and condos selling so rapidly. Florida is also one of the four most populous states, one of the fastest growing and with a low unemployment rate." All of this, and yet the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings represent an annual embarrassment for this economic power-house: Stunningly few Florida universities land even in the first three tiers, and most of Florida’s schools languish in the “unranked fourth tier.” Unranked. That means there’s almost nothing of an academic nature you can say about them - they’re not selective, they conduct no meaningful research, etc. Here’s one thing you can say about them: Great football. “Lawmakers seem to see classes and laboratories as tedious academic appendages of useful and interesting football factories,” writes a columnist in the Saint Petersburg Times. “Florida is a large and prosperous state; its universities’ peer institutions should be Michigan, Berkeley, Ohio State, Wisconsin. These schools have Top 25 football programs as well as first-rate libraries, highly ranked programs, upper-end faculty salaries and …excellent stipends for graduate students and teaching assistants. Instead, Florida’s universities belong to the sphere of Ole Miss, Oklahoma, LSU - colleges in states still struggling with the old Southern curse of poverty and low expectations. Cuba has a higher literacy rate than Florida.” As the economist Robert Frank points out, big sports schools tend neither to attract better students nor to make money on all those games. Athletic budgets are now immense, growing at NCAA Division I schools at more than twice the rate of university budgets overall from 1995 to 2001. Insufficient government funding (Florida’s per capita spending on higher ed is among the lowest in the United States) and corrupt meddling in university governance sustain the problem, in Florida and in most other weak state university systems; but the root cause is cultural -- most of the people who run places like Florida and Nevada don’t give a rat’s ass about education. They don’t even know the difference between legitimate and illegitimate subjects of study. Florida politicians are all excited about the soon to be established school of chiropractic science at Florida State University - the first public such school! And sure to be the best in the nation! But, as the FSU newspaper notes, “Due to questions surrounding the legitimacy of the profession, starting a chiropractic school at FSU could potentially affect the University and its academic reputation.” FSU neither asked for nor wants this school; the gift comes from a well-connected politician who is also a chiropractor. As UD has noted in a number of earlier posts [see UD, 5/17/04, 6/21/04, and 6/25/04], among all of the benighted state universities of Florida, the University of South Florida seems to rise most often out of the darkness of daily academic life to the daylight of national scandal. Most recently, its highly paid associate vice president and undergraduate admissions director resigned when it turned out that they’d sent falsely inflated student test scores to U.S. News and World Report. “[It’s] one thing [to try] to improve your credentials through legitimate academic programs,” says the director of data research for U.S. News; “[it’s another thing to engage in] flat-out lying about it.” Anyway. UD asks, for the sake of asking, for the sake of provoking thought, the following question: Is it necessarily wrong for there to be some states in the United States that are rich and happy and not too bright? |