WHY UNIVERSITY RESEARCH?

The University of Minnesota Alumni news featured research in one of its articles. This is not new; in fact, it is expected. I resigned from the University of Minnesota as a full University over 31 years ago; I did not even have a job to go to, I just quite in disgust of what was happening then and has continued to happen ever since. Obviously, from that history it should be clear that I am now an old man, much too old to cry, but I do as I watch my university continue to deteriorate with a clamor of accolades for its research prowess. The uproar of success has drowned out the truth as the “band played on” as the Titanic glides under the waves. I have never been able to make the simple point; the major purpose of a university, no matter wherever you find it, is to educate students. Our government, shepherded by corporate greed, has drastically cut taxes on corporations, consequently forcing cuts in government university support. We see universities getting bigger and more expensive, hiring more research scientists and technicians, building buildings, expanding campuses while we see expanding research efforts. The Centennial Campus in North Carolina is a prime example.

Read the Alumni news letter and watch the video clips; an unabashed cry for more research support. Desperate university administrators close their eyes to huge endowments (60 colleges with over one billion in endowments) and raise tuition to meet the rising costs and lowering of state support, concentrating the burden of support of higher education to student families, which quashes the American dream, equal opportunity for all. What father of four or six children can afford $50,000 tuition a year for four years of medical school? Check out activity of your current president at the U of M, a chemical engineer, and your will find great efforts to push entrepreneurial ship but not one word about education. He does not understand what tenure means because he demands candidates for tenure entrepreneurial ability at faculty tenure hearings. At the time, I wrote letters in opposition to his appointment, which didn’t even arise eyebrows; I couldn’t even get a letter to the editors published.

Few seem to remember the University of Minnesota president, at the helm with the ship first hit the iceberg; switched from putting teaching first to putting research first—ironically; it was Malcolm Moos, he was the man who wrote the most famous of all Eisenhower speeches warning of the military-industrial complex. Patentable research, the kind that can lead to the formation of new companies and make money for old companies, has come to dominate universities across the nation—it was made into federal law by the Bayh-Dole amendment. It is also the kind of research that causes professors to forget about teaching after all the dreams of a huge fortune beats the hell out of a professor’s salary.

     

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