Focus on successes of the University System

Talk about it

As sure as a hot prairie wind in a North Dakota summer, legislators are generating a lot of hot air over the building cost overruns and procedural glitches at North Dakota State University, the University of North Dakota and other campuses. Lawmakers, some of whom have never been friends of higher education, are taking advantage of short-term administrative failures to beat up campuses that have become national higher education and research leaders.

It’s the wrong approach to a fixable problem. To resurrect the cliché: A few lawmakers are flirting with throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The University System, particularly the big research universities in the Red River Valley, has never been stronger. Enrollments are up nearly everywhere. As engines of economic growth, campuses big and small are vital to their communities and to the state as a whole. The Red River Valley Research Corridor and Centers of Excellence across the state are doing world-class work that attracts students from all over the world and generates good-paying jobs.

Yet, there are a handful of lawmakers who would undermine that unprecedented success by rolling back the doctrine of campus flexibility that made progress possible. They would settle for the mediocrity of the past, rather than the obvious excellence that has characterized the campuses in the past decade.

Proposals to hire consultants or shift some responsibilities from campuses and the state Board of Higher Education should be scrapped. The safeguards in place will work if the personnel charged with oversight pay attention. The lapses in projects at UND and NDSU, in part, happened because the oversight function was not fully applied. Additional bureaucracy is not the answer. Effective application of existing accountability mechanisms is the best option.

But let’s be clear: Some lawmakers would gut the higher ed board if they could. They would return to the days of micromanaging campuses, which over time damaged higher education. They would play politics with a system that is too valuable to be left to the machinations of politicians with parochial agendas. Some of that parochialism was on display last week when lawmakers reviewed a university audit.

The Higher Education Roundtable developed a doctrine of flexibility and accountability that the Legislature endorsed. The schools flourished in ways they never had before. It would be a mistake to ignore that success – to in effect go backward. Tighten up the accountability element of the equation by better use of systems in place, but don’t restrict the flexibility that is key for innovation, research and focused use of resources.

Tags: opinion, editorials, university