UVa Ex-president:UVa is overrated

Parents Forum
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<p>Medicine is one kind of research. A lot of other research is driven by military goals no matter how it is gussied up. That is why so much money is available for it.</p>

<p>And not much research is done on solar energy, for example. A lot of research does drive what Eisenhower presciently called “The military-industrial complex.”</p>

<p>I live near Brookhaven National Labs, one of the top physics research institutions in the world. I am actually quite friendly with the guy who oversees the particle accelerator, and the Lab is known polluter in the area.</p>

<p>Of course I am not arguing for research, but I think we blithely endorse a value system that doesn’t necessary sustain a humane approach to life. Thus, science research equals good and Classics department equals arcane and worthless.</p>

<p>Things that make money are often the top desecrators of the environment. </p>

<p>The Iliad really talks about things like that, and if we don’t train a new generation who can read the original Greek and Latin the meaning will eventually be lost to us because each generation interprets the Classics through its own lens, and it is retranslated accordingly.</p>

<p>There have been five new major translations of the Aeneid in the past ten years. As far as I know, they have all sold enough copies to justify their existences.</p>

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<p>Hm. Those USNWR statistics are silly. My Alma Mater was envited to join a “prestigious” group of the 100 top research institutions in the world and it doesn’t register on the radar screen of USNWR and I’m pretty sure is it somewhere like 100 on USNWR.</p>

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<p>Isn’t trying to make distinctions among the group of top public universities as asking “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”</p>

<p>Why is it important to define who is a first, second, or third? The fact that the schools are grouped (or ranked) in a narrow range should be all we need to know. That group of schools are hard to distinguish from one another, but easier to distinguish from the highly selective schools with single digit admissions and from the group that completes the first page of the USNews. HYPS they are not and will never be; and neither are they Tulane or Wisconsin.</p>

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<p>Not me. :)</p>

<p>But the fact is that the feds pump billions into scientific research and the big guns (particularly Hopkins) pull much of it in. The point is not to debate science research vs. lit/hume research, but that the vast majority of available money is in science research. And a LOT of that money covers Uni overhead, unrelated to the actual scientific projects. So, going after it is a natural and logical conclusion for Uni leadership. (Not to mention that, IMO, unlike lit/hume research, scientific research is highly correlated to rankings.)</p>

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<p>Could it be because “research” is not part of the methology of the Best College rankings, except to permeate and muddy the Peer Assessment. </p>

<p>Measuring research and related outputs are the bread and butter of the GRADUATE schools rankings produced in England or China. Rankings that should be irrelevant to most students making undergraduate selections.</p>

<p>PS There is always baseball and the CWS!</p>

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<p>And visibly not as easily convinced to respond to surveys with integrity, attention, and … knowledge. That Peer Assessment is total garbage. Do we really need to dig out the forms filled by officials at Clemson and Wisconsin to ascertain how it works?</p>

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<p>^^uh-oh, picking on the Badgers will get barrons all riled up. :D</p>

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<p>" A lot of other research is driven by military goals no matter how it is gussied up. That is why so much money is available for it."</p>

<p>I think this assertion is unsupported by any facts. While there is always some overlap between science and some potential military use, the idea that it constitutes a significant amount of NSF funded research or thinking is pure make believe.</p>

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<p>“Do we really need to dig out the forms filled by officials at Clemson and Wisconsin to ascertain how it works?”</p>

<p>Not necessary. With over 2000 respondents, the outliers don’t have make much of an impact. :-)</p>

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<p>It’s an old story and they immediately moved the responsibility to another office. That said I’d be happy if the based the ranking on actual measurables like professors that win major academic awards, leadership in their fields, etc so that Xiggi would have one less thing to carp about. And UW would probably do better using those criteria.</p>

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<p>In the meantime, the ex-president of UVA had pointed out glaring weaknesses in her own school’s academic credentials. If she weren’t aware of where the problems existed at Virginia, then who would be? It seems the BOV didn’t want to hear the truth. Now they will search for a “yes man” and one can only imagine where UVA will be headed then when that happens.</p>

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<p>We can’t help it. Because humans are social mammals, and as such have a strong natural tendency to think in terms of hierarchies. There are few creatures more unhappy and anxiety-ridden than a lion, wolf, baboon, chimp, or human that doesn’t know who is ranked first, second, third, etc. in its own group and where its own place is in the ranking. Social animals are also much preoccupied with knowing and doing what it will take to advance their own ranking within the group.</p>

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<p>Hi, xiggi. Welcome to college confidential - pull up a chair and get comfy!</p>

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<p>In theory that is true. However, the theory Morse has tried to sell to all of us is that their system has internal mechanisms to catch the outliers and verify the information. Since none of the egregious behavior by some were uncovered by USNews but by the “public,” we (and that includes you) have no idea how prevalent the gamemanship still is. </p>

<p>And that only addressess the issue of outright misrepresentations, and not the biggest issue, namely that the responders MIGHT know their own school performance, but surely are unable to evaluate their peers with any real knowledge, except for the prior rankings’ edition or pure and unadulterated hearsay. In our neck of the wood, we give that a different name, along the line of equine output!</p>

<p>The only thing that is worse than the Academic PA is the the one produced by … guidance counselors. For all I know, if they keep digging deeper in their lack of relevance, the USNews might decide to poll politicians in DC.</p>

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IMHO Dr. Sullivan being asked to leave has nothing to do with the areas of concern she pointed out in her memo in May. It has been noted that the previous president John Casteen also found shortcomings in the university. I think the problem came in a disagreement between Sullivan and the BOV on what was of greatest concern and how to address those areas.</p>

<p>I’d also like to mention while many are taking apart Sullivan’s May memo to the BOV and using this as platform to knock it down a peg or ten, I think it’s very likely that there are many, many memos like this written by university presidents all over this country to the boards they report to. Written in a frank and open manner, never intended for public eyes, to address areas of concern at their university and suggest ways to move forward. We would probably be taken back to see these memos, intended to be private, and know what actually goes on behind closed doors of certain universities. Don’t think UVa is the only school simply because we are all getting an inside look at one memo.</p>

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<p>Returning to the question of faculty eminence, here is some data on membership in the leading academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The fifth table aggregate the data from the four. Overall, UVa is in a cluster with Minnesota, Rutgers, UC-Davis, and Arizona. <a href=“http://oirap.rutgers.edu/reports/MSA2008/Self-Study-Reports/aau06pp126-131.pdf[/url]”>http://oirap.rutgers.edu/reports/MSA2008/Self-Study-Reports/aau06pp126-131.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Larger universities do better simply because of their greater size. Still, these data buttress some of President Sullivan’s points.</p>

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<p>That’s an interesting set of tables, but it appears to exclude private schools. I don’t see MIT or CalTech or any of the Ivy schools. </p>

<p>And I know California is really a lot larger than everywhere else, but it looks like the UC system has more members in these organizations than, for instance, all of the Big Ten schools combined. (I haven’t done the totaling. Just eyeballed it.)</p>

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<p>Look at the title of the table.</p>

<p>RANK PUBLIC AAU INSTITUTIONS NUMBER OF
MEMBERS
1 University of California - Berkeley 129
2 University of California - San Diego 65</p>

<p>The consensus (depending on cutoffs for new hires and retirement) is that Harvard is at 161, Stanford 142, Berkeley 131, MIT 119, Princeton 81, Caltech 60, UCSD 68, and Yale 63. </p>

<p>Other sources peg Stanford at 156 and Berkeley at 140. </p>

<p>PS Not sure if those numbers mean a whole lot, but to some it appears to do.</p>

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<p>I don’t think it’s a big secret that UVA is not a powerhouse in STEM fields, nor is that news–it’s just UVA’s historical profile. That’s reflected both in its research budget (#73 nationally, behind schools like the University of Hawaii-Manoa and the University of South Florida) and in STEM grad program rankings which are based almost entirely on perceived faculty strength (#39 engineering, #46 math, #40 physics, #45 chemistry, #46 biological sciences, #63 earth sciences, #28 computer science). On the other hand, its medical school is quite good (#25 for medical research). </p>

<p>Historically, UVA has been much stronger in the humanities (English #10, history #20) and to some extent in the social sciences (psych #23, econ #28 poli sci #33), and its business school (#13) and law school (#7) are very strong. Still, its faculties on the whole are not nearly as strong as schools like Michigan and UC Berkeley which have comparable strengths in all the areas UVA is strong and top 10, or at least top 25 programs pretty much everywhere you look. Even a school like Wisconsin has more top 10 and top 25 programs.</p>

<p>UVA has a reputation as a good school for undergraduate education despite a student/faculty ratio that’s fairly high (16:1 v. 14:1 at UNC-Chapel Hill, 15:1 at Michigan, and 17:1 at UC Berkeley; most elite private are below 10:1) and relatively many large classes (16% of classes are 50+, same as at Michigan and slightly higher than UC Berkeley’s 15% and UNC-Chapel Hill’s 13%; on the other hand even Stanford and MIT are at 13%, so there’s no great difference there). It’s got a fairly strong endowment, 19th largest overall, but at around $195K per student that’s going to produce less than $10K per student per annum in endowment payout, so there’s not a lot of wiggle room there.</p>

<p>I guess overall I’d say UVA is not in great shape but maybe not in such terrible shape, either, in an immediate sense, but the longer term trends are not favorable. Places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and UC Berkeley with their much larger research budgets–Michigan’s is 4 times the size of UVA’s, and Wisconsin’s is close to that–can fund more faculty and students out of those research funds and have a lot more opportunities to recapture overhead and use it to fund other programs. Because of its inability to ramp up its STEM programs and research grants–and it’s tried–and because state funding has largely dried up (UVA gets only about $8K per student from the state v. $13K at Michigan and $22K at UNC-Chapel Hill), UVA seems to be trapped in a tuition-driven revenue model, and it’s a little hard to see how it’s going to compete over the long term against better-endowed private schools and public universities with more diversified sources of funding. And being strong primarily in the humanities is maybe not the ideal place to be these days if you’re a university administrator; they tend to be “loss leaders,” costly but attractive programs that represent a pretty significant net drain on your budget, in contrast to most STEM fields and law, medicine, and business schools which tend to be largely or entirely self-sufficient and sometimes even produce a small surplus to help fund the rest of your operations.</p>

<p>“Overrated”? Well, as long as it continues to attract good students, UVA will continue to be seen as a good school, but its undergraduate student stats more than anything are propping up the university’s reputation at this point, along with the English department. The weakness on the faculty side (especially with the number of pending retirements, if Sullivan’s estimate is accurate and I have no reason to doubt it), the financials, and the ability to continue to sell a competitive product in the undergraduate market have to be worrisome. </p>

<p>Teresa Sullivan didn’t create those problems, she inherited them; but she named them pretty clearly and seemed to be taking significant steps to address them. Ironically, some people on this thread seem to want to trash her for doing some things like hiring more lecturers (typically though not necessarily adjuncts), cutting and consolidating programs, and moving toward more online course delivery, when the message from the Rector seemed to be that the BOV wasn’t satisfied because she wasn’t doing these things as fast or as aggressively as they would have liked. In short, after instructing her not to produce another strategic plan because the university was weary of endless strategic planning, she identified the weaknesses in the existing strategic plans and began to develop a vision and a plan of action to address those weaknesses; then the board decided she didn’t have the strategic vision or the executive skills they were looking for, using her own arguments for what needed to happen as the basis for criticizing what she had accomplished so far, in less than two years on the job. Kinda dumb if you ask me. But then, no one asked me.</p>

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<p>bclintonk, You have made some interesting observations. One undergrad school you did not address is Mcintire (Commerce). Lots of kids in that program as 3rd and 4th years and it is currently ranked 5th and has been ranked as high as first in the recent past. UVa also ranks high as a best value school and the endowment is fairly large. UVa also does well with graduating African American students and in producing Peace Corps volunteers and Rhodes Scholars. Wikipedia has lots of good info on these kinds of issues as well as history, architecture,Jefferson’s vision,etc. UVa is very dear to many Virginians and has a very loyal alumni base which makes the recent developments difficult and confusing for lots of folks. UVa is a strong,proud school with a storied history and I have no doubt UVa will get through this latest crisis.</p>