Counterpoint | U of M Morris will ‘wither’ away? On the contrary.

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Carrying the heading “U of M Morris enrollment drops in half. How will MN campus survive?” the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Aug. 16 article on the University of Minnesota’s Morris campus uses legitimate concerns about enrollment as grounds for giving longtime critics of the university a platform from which to relaunch old policy attacks on UMM’s mission and to question its place in the University of Minnesota system moving forward.

Were the article more than tangentially concerned with enrollment, it would have highlighted the fact that this year’s incoming freshman class is 20-25% bigger than last year’s.

Were the article concerned with a genuine discussion of UMM’s place in the university system as a whole, and less with giving existential critics of UMM a place to air their grievances, it would not have reduced Board of Regents Chair Doug Huebsch’s recent statement on the subject to just two words (“vital part”) before returning the floor to UMM’s critics.

The chair’s statement is worth reading in its entirety:

“As a freshman from rural Minnesota, I chose to start college at the University of Minnesota Morris. It was a great decision for me, just as it is today for new generations of students. Morris is a vital part of the University of Minnesota as well as the state’s rural economy. I’m deeply supportive of the University’s ongoing efforts to serve the state’s workforce needs and community engagement in Morris and throughout Greater Minnesota.”

A few months after that first visit, I moved into my dormitory room, ready to begin classes. My next-door neighbors, living on either side of me, were quite different from each other. One was from Minneapolis, the other from a farm just 20 miles south of Morris. As a Minnesota farm country “town kid,” I was somewhere in between.

The three of us became, and remain, close friends.

I went on to become a lawyer. One of my friends became a food science researcher. The other took what he’d learned at UMM back home, where it continues to impact his daily practices as a farmer to this day.

The point is that our story is not unusual. For decades, students have been coming to UMM from small-town Minnesota, from farms, from the Twin Cities, and from farther afield. UMM is where most of us began to discover who we were, who we were becoming and what we wanted to do with our lives. UMM prepared us — and continues to prepare its students — for success after UMM.

For more than six decades, the University of Minnesota Morris, located in a town of just over 5,000 people, has been able to serve as a liberal arts curriculum flagship; a launching pad for countless students who have gone on to careers in the sciences; and a training ground for students who want to go back to their hometowns and farms all across Minnesota, bringing what they’ve learned at UMM back home with them, to the great benefit of their communities.

The suggestion that UMM is “wither[ing]”, as one of the article’s sources put it, is simply not true. Whether potential student, parent or just someone who is curious, I encourage you to visit Morris to find out for yourself. You won’t find a more beautiful campus in the system, and I suspect you’ll soon come to realize why U.S. News & World Report’s most recent rankings list UMM as the seventh-best public liberal arts college nationally!