World Class Greatness - Coming to a Land Grant University Near You

I've got a post up at the Chronicle of Higher Education, below are some edited excerpts:

As I write, the leaves are turning color, and the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers are actually ahead in the early stages of the first half against Southern Cal in Twin City Federal Stadium, also known as the House That Bob Built (for Bob Bruininks, the U of M's president). There's been a lot of talk in Minneapolis this week that our recent lousy performance in Bob's House has been because we aren't spending enough money on football—even though our new stadium, just a year old, has close to the largest locker room in the universe. Complaints started after we lost last week to those high-spending South Dakota Coyotes. I wonder how we'd do if we swapped athletics budgets with them.

Academic competition this fall—the annual greatness rankings of American and world universities—is also upon us. As if that weren't enough excitement, the National Research Council rankings, which are supposed to be released every 10 years but have been delayed for some time now, will soon be made public. The NRC's data are so old as to make its ratings virtually useless (the council began collecting this information in 2006), but maybe that's the idea.

The phrase "land-grant institution" is often used but still bears some explanation. Institutions of higher education designated by states as beneficiaries of the federal Morrill Acts have been granted federal land for the purpose of development or sale to finance their activities. The land-grant mandate was to legitimize research and teaching of agriculture, science, and engineering. Land grant institutions also provide citizens with other areas for study such as business, social sciences and the liberal arts.

There are approximately 70 such institutions in the United States. Among them are some of our finest universities: the Universities of California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Arizona, along with Purdue, Ohio State, Penn State, and Michigan State Universities.

The exact mission of land-grant institutions is open to discussion, but there seems to be a consensus that they have a special obligation to provide high-quality education for citizens of their home state, as well as to focus attention on the economic development and social welfare of that state. An inscription on Northrop Auditorium, a central building on the Twin Cities campus, summarizes one such land-grant mission:

So how does the maintenance of high academic ranking as a research institution fit into the land-grant mission? Simply put, it doesn't.

The value of rankings is in the raw data they provide rather than the final score they reach. Students and their parents can make sensible choices based on such things as graduation rate, average debt at graduation, and other factors important to them. But what can we say about diverse methods that variously rank Minnesota as 28th, 96th, and 52nd in the world, but 64th in the United States (as the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, QS TopUniversities, Times Higher Education, and U.S. News, respectively, have rated us)?

Attempting to game the rankings is a losing proposition for land-grant institutions because some of the factors that affect rankings are in direct opposition to the land-grant mission. Because high SAT scores and high-school rank often influence university rankings, many institutions try to recruit students from out of state to raise those numbers. What of the citizens of the state who are squeezed by such tactics?

It's wrong that many land-grant institutions have been sucked into the competitive university-ranking business and have strayed from their mission. In 2004 the University of Minnesota's president boasted in an embarrassingly titled document ("Serving Minnesota Through World-Class Greatness") that under the provost's leadership, "the University community articulated an ambitious aspiration for the University to be one of the top three public research universities in the world within a decade."

That would be 2014. As Hook said to Smee, "Do I hear a clock ticking?"

There's something both hubristic and clueless about statements like those from my university. Does the administration believe that the public cannot see through the unreality of its intention to be one of the top three public universities in the world in four more years?