Social Darwinism at Ohio State

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chronicles of Higher Ed, 6/1/2001

Ohio State 'Taxes' Departments to Make a Select Few Top-Notch

Is this how public universities can improve in a frugal era?

By ROBIN WILSON
Columbus, Ohio

On a quiet day last July, about a dozen English professors at Ohio State
University were sitting around a conference table in their jeans, talking
about a forthcoming retreat. A few minutes into the discussion, O.S.U.'s
very own Prize Patrol burst in and the university's provost, Edward J. Ray,
announced to the surprised professors that the department had just won
$1-million. A university cameraman was on hand to record the scene, as the
professors cheered and slapped one another on the back.

The department is one of 13 divisions, including history, chemistry, and
psychology, that have won the game-show-size awards as part of an ambitious
program here to recruit top faculty members and, more important for Ohio
State administrators, move the entire institution up in national rankings.
Like many public universities, though, the campus is far from flush, so it
financed the $13-million awards in a unique way: by "taxing" all of its
colleges and giving the money back to a select few through a high-profile
competition.

Before Ohio State started the program, which it calls "selective
investment," any new money that came along was spread across programs
evenly "like jam," says Mr. Ray. But, he continues, "Too often for us the
first good idea that came in the door got funded."

Higher education, fearful of ruffling faculty feathers, is infamous for
avoiding tough decisions about which departments deserve more money and
which deserve less. Reallocation is typically done quietly by deans after
hearing pleas from department chairmen.

What's different about Ohio State's approach is that it was a
well-publicized competition, a concept that is alien to most universities.
>From the start, the university tried to make the winning departments feel
like stars -- hence Mr. Ray's Ed McMahon role in delivering the good news.
The extra money has made for splashier laboratories and cushier packages
for top graduate students.

The winning divisions have hired 35 new professors so far and have plans to
hire 51 more. Chemistry lured a member of the National Academy of Sciences
away from the University of California at Berkeley, and political science
beat out the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania in its bid for an
up-and-coming scholar of American politics. The English department, which
was selected because almost every undergraduate takes at least one English
course, has just hired four senior professors and expects to bring on up to
four more, increasing the number of those in its top rank by at least a
third.

Opposition to the program here has been minimal, in part because the
university has a weak faculty union but also because administrators put
professors in charge of choosing the winners. (A similar program at the
University of Nebraska at Lincoln failed, partially because of the
resentment professors felt when administrators made the decisions without
setting down clear guidelines about how departments could qualify.)

Some professors here whose departments lost out do believe the university
has been blinded by its quest to move up in the national rankings. In the
process, they say, it has ignored programs like media-arts technology and
food science that don't fit neatly into the ratings. But for the most part,
the competition has been well received on the campus, and the awards have
already made a difference. William F. Massy, a professor emeritus of higher
education at Stanford University, says Ohio State is on the cutting edge of
what he calls performance-based budgeting. What's yet to be determined,
says Mr. Massy, is whether Ohio State can pull it off.

Full: http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i38/38a00801.htm


Louis Proyect
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