by David Safier
Q: For the moment, legislators seem intent to cut the three universities' budgets by something in excess of $100 million, perhaps in excess of $130 million. What's your next move?
A: My real point in all of this is: What do you want the university to be? If you want the university to be a comprehensive, research-grade, broadly scoped public university, we can weather the storm. We'll figure out how to do that. If what your true objective is, is to turn it into a state college — and you could read these cuts to that as the true objective — then say that. Say that. They haven't said that, except to us individually.
Q: Have legislators really told you they want to dump the university system in favor of a college system?
A: They tell us that when they say to me, "Why do you have any graduate programs? Eliminate your graduate programs." They say that when they say to us, "Why are you doing research? Why are your faculty not teaching six classes per semester, which is what they should be doing? They only spend a limited amount of time working." Which is a question or a statement based on someone who has no idea what they're doing. So that's how we get that feeling.
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I love how people are mystified that ASU is so big, as if the population of Arizona has remained steady all these years.
Fact is, there are no more Harvards and Yales and Stanfords being built. That leaves public universities and places like the University of Phoenix. It’s more cost-effective to expand existing public universities than build new ones, with all the overlap and inefficiencies that would entail.
Yes, ASU is big. No, it’s not because the president of ASU is a megalomaniac. It’s because Arizona is big.
But his point is valid. All the years I worked in Florida higher education, for both private and public colleges and universities, I used to write about the fact that Florida had only universities that offered doctoral degrees and community colleges rather than a three-tier system that other states employ — for example, California has community colleges, California State University, and the top-tier University of California colleges. Or New York, which has research-based SUNY and CUNY universities, four-year SUNY and CUNY colleges with or without master’s programs, community colleges, technical colleges, and specialized colleges, as well as the innovative Empire State College for adults.
At least Florida had state universities in every major metropolitan area: Miami, Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, Orlando, Tallahassee, Tampa-St. Petersburg-Sarasota, Gainesville, Pensacola, Fort Myers and Jacksonville.
In recent years Florida has granted some community colleges the right to award bachelors degrees and created de facto state colleges; for example, Miami-Dade Community College became Miami-Dade College and St. Petersburg Junior College became St. Petersburg College.
Arizona, for reasons beyond my understanding, has chosen to have only two flagship, doctorate-granting universities in the Tucson and Phoenix areas and NAU in Flagstaff with its small affiliate programs throughout the state — and our community colleges, which cannot award bachelors degrees.
(The state does not even have a decent doctorate-granting private university like most states have.)
That, I believe, is the ASU president’s point – though he seems much to blame, since he apparently wants to make ASU the largest university in the U.S. If he’d like to turn over some bachelors programs to state (formerly community) colleges or to release the West and Polytech schools from the bloated ASU portfolio, he should say so directly.