CU NOBEL WINNER BLASTS UNIVERSITY
Wieman, who plans to leave in Jan., says school stresses sports

By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
March 21, 2006

BOULDER - Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carl Wieman announced Monday that he is leaving the University of Colorado and blasted the school, saying it stresses athletics over academics. [Oh well. Nobel Prize-winning physicists are a dime a dozen; whereas first-rate football coaches..]

Wieman will leave CU in January for the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he will head a $10.6 million science education project.

He will retain a 20 percent appointment at CU to lead the Science Education Project there, funded with $5 million during the next five years.

Wieman, 54, said at a news conference that the Canadian funding offer was the main reason for his departure from CU after 22 years.

But afterward, he said CU regents' and administrators' preoccupation with athletics contributed to his decision.



"If you want to have any sort of large-scale education initiative, where you're really focusing on education, you need people at the highest levels to put thought and attention into it," he said.

"If our Board of Regents spent half the time on discussions of how to improve the education for students that they do on athletics, it would be a very different university," Wieman said. [You're not supposed to say this so baldly. How rude.]

The recent CU football recruiting controversy was a major distraction that diverted attention from the classroom, Wieman said.

"My personal view is that there's a considerable overemphasis (on athletics) that takes time and attention away from what we could be doing to improve education."


It's not the first time Wieman has criticized CU athletics.

In a February 2004 opinion piece in the Daily Camera in Boulder, he described the university as "an academic appendage to the football program." [The "appendage" thing is not a new formulation -- lots of people use it. But you can see why. It's rather wonderful.]

CU President Hank Brown was unavailable for comment Monday. [Darning Coach's socks.]

But Board of Regents Chairman Paul Schauer said the university's football program has received a lot of the board's attention recently "because it's an area that was creating some issues for the university that needed to be dealt with in a very thorough and complete manner." [Note use of passive voice -- athletics was creating some issues. No. We, the Board of Regents, created a mess we're trying to clean up. Takes mucho time and money.]

But that doesn't mean academic excellence is a low priority, he said.

"If we were overemphasizing athletics, we would have had a basketball team in the Final Four, and we might have had a higher-ranked football team," Schauer said Monday. [Trustees not chosen for logic skills.]

CU Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano [famous for his remarkably obtuse comments on Ward Churchill] also rejected Wieman's assertions.

"Our role and mission is to provide a top-notch education for both our undergraduate and graduate students," he said. "Athletics is an auxiliary." [If only saying it made it so.]


Wieman shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics for creating a new form of matter, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, predicted by Albert Einstein.

Eric Cornell, Wieman's partner in the 1995 discovery, continues to work at JILA, a research collaboration between CU and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder.

Wieman said that about 15 years ago, he realized that university educators were doing "a pretty miserable job" at teaching basic science to undergraduates. When he won the Nobel Prize, he decided to use his celebrity and influence to help change that.

He contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to a CU physics education initiative. [Good guy.] While on sabbatical last year, he sought state and federal support, along with private funding and grants, to pursue his vision for improved teaching techniques.

All 34 of his funding requests were rejected, he said Monday. At that point, he contacted several universities, directly and through intermediaries, to see if there was interest in his project. The University of British Columbia was one of the schools.

The Vancouver school offered Wieman's program $10.6 million over five years. Schauer said CU "couldn't be competitive" with that offer. [Too busy competing for dribblers.]

The Colorado and British Columbia schools will collaborate in the cross-border science-education effort.

Computers will play an expanded role in the science classroom, and instructors will use teaching practices based on solid research into how students learn science. Explicit learning goals will be established for each course, along with reliable ways to measure how well students attain those goals.

Wieman said he will close his atomic physics laboratory to concentrate full-time on education. He said he couldn't find a way to pursue his educational mission while maintaining a top-flight lab.

"Forefront science is a tough game," Wieman said. "Rather than be a third-rate physics researcher, I just figured it made more sense to put my full effort into (science education)."


Before accepting the Canadian offer, Wieman said he reviewed Vancouver-area newspaper coverage of the University of British Columbia during the past two years.

"It's just a different climate in terms of seeing the university as an important resource, an important element of a healthy economy - seeing it as something where the university is first and foremost an institution for providing the best education possible for children in the state."

He noted that while the Vancouver university has a football team, the head coach gets paid "about the same as a starting assistant professor." [My mouth dropped open at this one. Can it really be true?]

The remark was an apparent reference to former CU football coach Gary Barnett, who was awarded a $3 million settlement after being fired in December.

Barnett was dismissed in the wake of three embarrassing losses that came after two years of damaging headlines brought on by federal lawsuits.

The lawsuits were filed by three women who alleged they were sexually assaulted either at or after a December 2001 party attended by football players and recruits.