View From a Height

Colorado's Colleges

Turns out that CU's athletic department has been taking advantage of some scholarship funds for what would most generously be described as "recruiting." While the prior scandals and non-scandals happened before Gary Barnett showed up, this stuff is on his watch. He might want to put that Big 12 Coach of the Year Trophy in a safe deposit box before the writers have second thoughts.

But Mike Littwin has his eyes on a bigger problem - the fact that Colorado, despite a high personal income and good jobs, can't seem to fund top-tier public universities. Mike and I both went to U.Va., and so both benefitted from the Commonwealth's strong public university system. He also went out to California, so saw another strong system up close. The TABOR-Amendment 23 box is squeezing out discretionary spending like that for public colleges.

The universities really only have themselves to blame for this.

Why? Why isn't this blaming the victim? One reason. Arrogance. Arrogance that says they don't have to account to us. And arrogance that says we ought to be happy about it.

I wrote Littwin to ask about his column. He replied with a complaint about high tuitions. Those high tuitions are a result of the same problem, the question Littwin fails to ask in his column: what are these universities doing with our money, and what do we get out of it? We want college for ourselves and for our kids, so we're willing to take out second mortgages to pay for it. But we rarely ask if those psychology majors really do us any good. Or if the research the professors produce does our psyche any good.

Universities believe that their value is self-evident. So they don't discuss how they spend their money, they don't look for efficiencies, and they dismiss questions about the value of "feminist economics" as coming from those under-educated rural white guys who elected Bush again.

But by doing so, they reduce the justification for massive public spending to its practical effects, almost all of which relate to science, technology, or business. And these are precisely the areas where multi-culturalism is irrelevant, or less relevant. (After all, any society where one plus one doesn't equal two is a society unlikely to have put a man on the moon.) Which is why operations like the University of Phoenix have gained a foothold.

Every other business in the country has to, at some point, examine its operations and ask about its mission. Universities have both suffered mission creep - in terms of research and facilities - and have lost sight of their core competency - education for citizenship and life. They've been insulated from the realities of economics by a public willing to pump money into what's become seen as a necessity for middle-class life.

That may be coming to an end.