To compete with the nation's top universities, UF president Bernie Machen is calling for more money and less meddling from state officials.
Published March 1, 2004
Bernie Machen, the University of Florida's new president, is the only person in the state university system who knows from experience what it takes to operate a top public university. Machen spent the previous six years as president of the University of Utah. But before that, he was provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan, generally recognized as one of the best two or three public universities in the country. In Florida, no other public university president or system official has remotely comparable experience.
So Machen deserves to be taken seriously when he talks about what the Gainesville campus needs from state government if it is to be considered among the nation's top public universities. According to Machen, the needs are simple: more money and less meddling.
State officials routinely pay lip service to the idea of giving our public universities the support they need to compete with any in the country. In reality, though, they have increasingly focused on moving students through the higher education system as quickly and cheaply as possible. UF, which historically has been considered the flagship of the state system, lags behind the nation's top public universities in endowment, state funding, tuition and other measures of support. In addition, the recent political intrusion in the governance of the system has damaged the reputation of UF and other state universities.
Machen is about to experience his first Florida legislative session. He seems to be realistic about the political and financial environment in which he is now operating, and his short-term goals are reasonable. One is to get a handle on undergraduate enrollment, which has become too large at UF (and some other state campuses). UF already has won approval for capping freshman enrollment. Machen hopes eventually to reduce overall enrollment, which, at almost 50,000, is the nation's fourth highest. He also hopes to win new flexibility in setting tuition; UF's now is the lowest among the 62 research institutions in the Association of American Universities.
Winning significantly more generous state funding will have to wait on different political and economic realities. Building the endowment is a long-term project, too. But Machen says the effort needs to start now. As he put it, top schools such as the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley "are not going to park on the side of the road and wait for you."
Ann Arbor and Berkeley may be out of reach for now, but there is no excuse for a state with Florida's resources to fail to produce universities that are competitive with the flagship universities in states such as Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina. The state officials who don't have Machen's firsthand experience in running a top-tier university should learn from him and give him the support he needs to fulfill UF's potential.
