This coming Monday. the mostly unqualified NDSU
will announce which of the under qualified candidates it prefers to be NDSU’s next president. They will make their recommendation to an equally unqualified State Board of Higher Education. Whomever their choice is, and none have administrative experience at a research institution that includes managing budgets or faculty, will inherit a university that is millions in debt, has a dispirited, dramatically underpaid mostly junior faculty. What senior faculty that remain will be gone soon, there are few mid level faculty, leaving hordes of junior faculty, most of whom will not be here long enough for their tenure question to come up, if history means anything. And we have 14,000 student, much more than a few years ago, but according to many faculty and lecturers,, are inordinately apathetic and unqualified to be pursing an education at one of the state’s flagship institutions. I used to be unsure of this last since I hadn’t observed it myself. But now I have, and the situation is worse than I had ever imagined,
So how did we get here? Most residents of North Dakota are not going to like my answer to that. I think it boils down to a fundamental lack of understanding throughout the state of what higher education is, what the benefits of a high profile research university are, and what it takes to fund higher education. One only needs to look south to the Twin Cities with it’s top of the line research university and the many corporations that partner with that university to create a wealthy society not even imaginable here.
Our higher education system is managed by the State Board of HIgher Education, political appointees of the Governor, and the Chancellor, Dr. Goetz. The last presidential search committee was chaired by that well known scholar Bruce Fureness. A junior faculty member, from Maryland and no longer here, remarked to me a out the remarkable coincidence of Fargo’s mayor and the chair of the search committee had the same name. That’s how bizarre it appeared to someone from a respected university..
This committee and the state board apparently thought it important to have a president that would bring division 1 athletics to NDSU. Never mind that their choice had a history of bankrupting universities.
Reported in the media recently was the position of the state board about the violations by NDSU of state board policies and their desire to oversee expenditures.
First, lets look at the NDSU part of this idea. The governing body of NDSU is tjhe University Senate. It can by overridden by the President, but he does so at his peril, as he might find himself facing a vote of no confidence. Former President Chapman was able to bring division one athletics to NDSU be end running the University Senate, claiming that it was none of their business as no appropriated funds would be involved: everything would be funded by private donations. Unfortunately there is no oversight of how the President manages the NDSU budget, and this has been upsetting the faculty for as long as I can remember. Of course, there is the vice president for business and finance, but he is not subject to faculty review either before or after he is appointed. So any mistakes made by “NDSU” were in fact made by two men that were appointed by people that really have nothing much to do with NDSU, and not approved of by the real NDSU. When the former vice president for business and finance, er, resigned, he claimed that he couldn’t do his job due to pressure from the president and that he learned how to get around state board policies from his counterpart at UND. Chancelolor Goetz said at the time that he had assumed that state board policies were being followed. In other words, the man is a fool.
Parenthetically, Goetz and the state board have taken this oversight a bit further by taking it upon themselves to decide what constitutes proper pre-requisites for some elementary courses, infuriating some administrators at both NDSU and UND.
Is their a solution to all this? Without a grassroots change of attitude,, probably not. But it would help to replace the state board and chancellor with more qualified people.