Smart plan for universities
A Times EditorialPublished December 6, 2007
Florida university system chancellor Mark Rosenberg has struck the right balance with his plan to govern individual universities through compacts. The compacts would allow campuses their operational freedom while providing the necessary state oversight to set goals and limit costly duplication.
The Board of Governors is scheduled to consider Rosenberg's plan today, and it represents another sure-footed step in a broader journey he calls "Forward By Design." Rosenberg, in just his first year on the job, is helping to chart a new course for a university system that has suffered from conflict and entirely too much neglect.
The history is a painful one. The former university Board of Regents was abolished the last time it stood up to a meddling Legislature and refused to recommend a medical school at the then-House speaker's alma mater. Only through a 2002 constitutional amendment was the Board of Governors established. The Legislature, not surprisingly, is asking a judge to limit the board's authority.
The compacts are a smart tool for redirecting the historic tug of war between university ambitions and higher education resources. They would be used, much like the Texas university system, to establish parameters for undergraduate and postgraduate programs and to set performance goals. The strategies would be left up to the 11 individual universities.
"We don't want to go back to the way it was with the Board of Regents," says Board of Governors spokesman Bill Edmonds. "So we think this a happy median."
The leash would certainly be looser than in the days of the Regents, which reflects an appropriate deference to the board trustees and presidents at each campus. Where the Board of Governors will need to apply some forceful yanks will be in the costly arena of research and doctoral and professional programs. Not every university can or should be a major research institution.
Those issues can become part of each compact, which are not expected to be completed until March. The compacts themselves can form the basis of a similar pact with the Legislature, used successfully in California to provide stable financial support. As Rosenberg has noted, Florida higher education suffers from funding that is too little and too unpredictable.
The numbers are scary. Florida ranks 46th in the number of bachelor's degrees it awards per capita and 50th in student/faculty ratios. Only one of its institutions, the University of Florida, is ranked among the nation's top 50. The amount of money it receives per student, adjusted for inflation, has dropped a staggering 20 percent in the past two decades.
"Every year," Rosenberg writes, "citizens of the state and public university administrators play a guessing game to determine annual tuition charges, faculty hiring and course availability. The end result is an inability to meet growing state needs for quality and baccalaureate degree production."
Rosenberg is on the right track, and university presidents should welcome his willingness to fight.