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Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 12 2015
COMMENTARY
In Missouri, the Downfall of a Business-Minded President
By Bruce Joshua Miller and Ned Stuckey-French
Timothy Wolfe should never have been president of the University of
Missouri. He was a computer-company executive with no advanced degrees
or experience in academic administration. Like so many other
unrepresentative, politically appointed boards, Missouri’s Board of
Curators chose a private-sector manager to run a public university.
Wolfe had virtually no experience with students or scholars.
If he had, one of his first major decisions as president in the spring
of 2012 would not have been to shut down the University of Missouri
Press. The internationally respected press had been in existence for 54
years and had published over 2,000 titles. These titles included the
definitive edition of the collected works of Langston Hughes and the
premier series of Mark Twain scholarship. No American writers have
written more insightfully about race than these two sons of Missouri,
but Wolfe was going to sell off the rights to these titles at
garage-sale prices.
A few weeks later, the Board of Curators approved Wolfe’s decision to
close the press, ostensibly to save its annual subsidy of about $400,000
(later estimated to be much less). At the same meeting, it announced
Phase 1 of a $200-million plan to upgrade Mizzou’s sports facilities.
By committing the university to an athletic arms race and running it
like a corporation, Wolfe and the board were heading down a disastrous
path. By committing the university to an athletic arms race and running
it like a corporation, Wolfe and the board were heading down a
disastrous path. More than 5,000 people signed an online petition
opposing the closure of the press, scores of authors claimed breach of
contract and demanded that the rights to their books be returned,
Missouri’s principal newspapers supported the protest movement, and
Wolfe and the university found themselves in the national news. By fall,
Wolfe was forced to reverse his position and reinstate the press.
We can see now that these events presaged what has happened in Columbia
this fall. Public universities are public trusts, not private
corporations. They are a public good in which we must all invest. We
used to view them this way. Forty years ago, about two-thirds of their
revenue came from state appropriations; that figure is now down to about
a fifth. Administrators have tried to wring these lost revenues out of
already strapped middle-class parents and their children through higher
tuition and enormous student-loan burdens. In the meantime, the number
of administrators has skyrocketed, and their compensation packages have
swelled to private-sector levels.
On campus, tenure is attacked, teaching is shifted to poorly paid
adjuncts and teaching assistants, and students are treated shabbily.
Their demands for safe campuses, challenging classes, and basic respect
are too often ignored. The privatization of public higher education led
Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, who has since agreed to step down, to yank
medical insurance away from graduate assistants, and it led President
Wolfe to rush to meetings with big donors while ignoring the concerns of
African-American students.
Fortunately, such bottom-line thinking has also led students, faculty,
and staff to fight back. This fall Missouri provided us all with the
brave example of student leaders (including athletes) who were willing
to risk everything in order to make their university the place of
learning it should be. Our hope is that the Board of Curators will pick
new administrators who see the University of Missouri as a public
institution to which we have entrusted our children and our society’s
future rather than as a corporation that puts money and skyboxes first.
Making this happen will be difficult. State governors appoint the
boards, and the boards appoint the presidents and chancellors. Such a
system, as we have seen recently at Purdue, Iowa, the University of
North Carolina, and Florida State as well as at Missouri, has led to the
appointments of businesspeople, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and politicians
as university presidents. Such appointments do not bode well — but
students, faculty, and staff at the University of Missouri have demanded
something different.
We cannot thank them enough.
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