Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

UF 's desperate days

In Michigan or North Carolina or many other states, quality is not viewed as an elective in higher education. But University of Florida president Bernie Machen lives in an uninspired political environment where higher education is smothered by lack of ambition. His latest response, a $1,000 "academic enhancement" charge for incoming freshmen at the state's flagship university, is as desperate as it is necessary.

"The bottom line is, we will use the program to enrich the educational experience of the students who are paying it," Machen says. "This state deserves a top-tier university."

In a system that has suffered from repeated budget cutbacks in recent years, the University of Florida has suffered from a lack of resources. Its student-faculty ratio is half-again larger than the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It ranks 123rd among universities through measures of various "faculty resource." It charges the lowest tuition of 75 flagship universities, a fourth as much as the University of Pennsylvania.

Machen has tried to get lawmakers to invest more in universities and, like his peers at the 10 other public Florida institutions, has failed. Lawmakers not only refuse to give more state dollars, but they won't let universities raise their tuitions any sizeable amount. That's because tuition and fee increases drive up the cost of Bright Futures scholarships, an expense that has quadrupled in the past decade.

So Machen is now trying the back door. The method he proposes, a $500-per-semester undergraduate charge, is almost comical in design. It avoids the word "tuition" or "fee," so as not to implicate Bright Futures. It is to be considered extra revenue, like money found under a mattress, so the state won't be required to match. It is a "pilot," so as not to anger other universities that are similarly impoverished.

This elaborate ruse could backfire, inviting lawmakers to begin dumping more on the backs of students and to abandon the state's compact to pay 75 percent of the cost of undergraduate education. In a Capitol that includes so many prominent Florida State University alumni, it also could set off a late-session scramble for more "pilots." Then, again, history demonstrates that few if any viable political alternatives exist. Machen has the scars to prove it.

On Thursday, Machen will bring his plan to the Board of Governors, and some board members may feel the impulse to wince. But they live in the same bleak political world, and they have watched lawmakers preach the same fiction about a free lunch for higher education. Machen's method is novel, to say the least, but it is unavoidable. If UF or any other Florida university is to compete for excellence, it has no choice but to try Plan B.

[Last modified November 11, 2006, 18:56:24]