Sam Harmon

Perhaps I'm missing something. How is new apartment development within exisiting university boundries and within easy walking/biking distance of where these people will work/study contributing to sprawl? Now if they were housing their MBA students at Polaris, forcing them to make an I71 commute everyday, your point might have some validity.

:drunk: That's absurd. I think Case is doing a great job and is a wonderful asset to Cleveland and Ohio, but Case has never, ever been considered a peer of Cal Tech or MIT. Hell, they weren't even elected into the AAU until 1969. Case has a lot of great things to trumpet. It doesn't need to resort to comically absurd boosterism.

As someone who grew up in Reno, and has no objections to gambling on moral or religious grounds, I can say with near certainty that gambling is in NO WAY a serious long term solution for Columbus' downtown. No matter how shiny and "upscale" the casinos developers promise it to be, mark my words that, within three years, it will be a depressing, low-class dive. I've been to "the boats" outside of Chicago, and was shocked at how depressing and low-rent they were. They made downtown Reno look like fracking Monte Carlo. Vegas is the only city in the country that's been able to do upscale casino gambling with any measure of success. Just look at the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to Atlantic City's casinos a quarter century later. My honest feelings are that gambling should have never been allowed to move beyond Nevada. If you can't afford to go to Vegas for a weekend, you have absolutely no right (particularly if you have kids) to be gambling in the first place. Columbus' downtown has its problems, but there are several significant positives, including the Arena District, North Market, the gentrified neighborhoods south, east and north of the CBD and--of most recent importance--the 10 year tax abatement on downtown condos. Put a casino in downtown, and it will destroy all of that in a decade.

Just what the upscale residents of German Village and the downtown condos want (or need) something that will attract every drunken redneck from a 100 mile radius to hang out in downtown Columbus wasting their paychecks every weekend. Build a casino in downtown Columbus and you can kiss German Village property values goodbye and start taking over/under bets on how high the CBD crime rate will spike and how far down the office occupancy rate will plummet. What I would like to see is a nice mix of office, residential and retail--in the framework of some interesting architecture. As far as retail goes you're never going to lure the suburbanites back downtown to shop. It's just not going to happen. What downtown does need is a good mix of retail that has a catalyst effect on downtown living (i.e. makes it more attractive and easier). Things like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Best Buy, Home Depot a Crate & Barrel. In other words, a retail mix that serves downtown residents in the manner that the Clybourn shopping corridor in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood serves the Lincoln Park, Gold Coast, Bucktown neighborhoods.

I might add that, if we're comparing the ability of various state universities to stem Ohio's brain-drain, attracting Ph.D students from around the world is certainly doing a greater service to the taxpayers of Ohio than attracting upper middle-class, white undergrads from the Chicago suburbs who come only because they were rejected by U of I or Wisconsin and who most likely move right back to Chicago after graduation.

I wouldn't go that far. In fact, I've discussed the shortcomings and damaged reputation that Ohio State faced in the 60s-70s many times. It's just that some, out of blind loyalty to their chosen institution, would choose to ignore certain facts about Ohio State including the historical reasons behind its founding, its legally designated flagship status prior to the Rhodes administration, the considerable quality gap between it and the other Ohio public universities today, and the flagship role it's logically and historically positioned to play in the current restructuring of Ohio higher education. To answer an earlier question, I have degrees from Ohio State and Chicago.

no, definitely not. osu is HUGE in attracting foreign students. I will add that Miami has a huge percentage (over a third) of out-of-state undergraduates. How much of this was planned and how much was a simply a reaction and reallocation of recruiting resources as they fell behind Ohio State for top Ohioans, I don't know. BTW, I don't consider it "hating" to discuss any Ohio university objectively (strengths, weaknesses and challenges) in a way that strays from the sunny, admissions brochure talking points.

Great news, and they chose downtown instead of an office park on the outerbelt. Outstanding news for Columbus.

I agree but do see W&M's reputation as quite a bit higher than Miami's. UC-Santa Cruz is another similar institution. Miami has always had this Svengali-like ability to convince Ohioans that it is really much better and of a higher national stature than it actually is viewed outside the state. Having the state's flagship forcibly dumbed down on the undergraduate level in the sixties and seventies certainly helped in this perception. Personally, I'm not sure what role Miami of Ohio will play in the future of Ohio higher education. They're not a serious research/graduate university, but on the other hand, they're nowhere close to being the "selective public liberal arts college" that they profess to be. They won't accept a role as a lesser selective undergrad college a'la Bowling Green or Kent State but can no longer compete with Ohio State for the top Ohio high school graduates. Quite frankly, they really seem to have boxed themselves into a very diminished role. With nearby UC's apparent emergence as the state's secondary comprehensive, research university, and now tightening up its undergraduate admissions profile, I don't foresee happy days ahead for the popped collar crowd in Oxford.

C'mon, when a university that has such an oversized, puffed-up view of itself can only manage a fundraising campaign less than half that of the school that it looks down upon (UC) and then falls far short of that goal, I think that's perfectly good fodder for criticism. To listen to the Miami of Ohio community (alumni and administration) talk, one would think that they'd be raising funds on a par with Michigan or Northwestern...or dare I say it, Ohio State. I've always found the gaping chasm between how Miamians view their university and how the rest of the world views it to be rather unique in higher education.

Sorry, ink. Miami of Ohio was allowed to have its brief moment of glory in the 1960s and 1970s only because your former president Millett as the first chair of the board of regents protected Miami and allowed it to backdoor into selective admissions through not building enough dorm space for the baby boomers while he and Governor Rhodes were at the same time forcing an open admissions policy on the state's only Association of American Universities member school. This brief moment in the sun culminated in the Public Ivy book that only Miami still talks about a quarter century later, but the writing for Miami's subsequent demise was already on the wall. Rhodes and Millett were gone, and Ohio State quickly went to work reestablishing the university hierarchy that had existed prior to 1962. The rest is history as they say.

Don't get too full of yourselves too quick, UC. Just to put things in perspective, my alma mater is about to kick off a 2.5 billion dollar university wide campaign that is in addition to a current half billion dollar medical center campaign. :wave: But good luck and congrats on all the progress so far! :clap:

Actually the 30+ ACT number for my school is 27%. ;)

I will add that the 400 million dollar donation to UC is not considered an endowed donation in the common use of the word. It was a gift of software and equipment, and I'm not sure over how many years it will be given. It most definitely was not a cash donation that funds something in perpetuity--like scholarships, research funds or professorships. That being said, it was still a very nice snag on UC's part.

The official kickoff may have been in April 2005, but these campaigns always have a "soft period" leading up to that kickoff. Note how UC has already raised 275 million towards their goal prior to the kickoff. It has taken Miami all seven years to raise that 290 million. 2006 was their best fundraising year ever and raised 51 million. 2005 was their second best year ever and raised 28 million. By Miami of Ohio's own account, they've only raised 79 million in all of 05 and 06. http://www.forloveandhonor.org/cgi-any/newspages.dll/pages?bid=&nfid=&record=86&htmlfile=newspages3_Campaign.htm I consider any fundraising campaign that falls almost 20% short of its goal to have fallen flat on its face.

Admissions selectivity is trending upwards at UC and, by varying accounts, is either stagnant or declining at Miami.

I was just sent some comparative data on the freshman classes at Ohio's public universities. I'm sure the regulars on this thread will be pleased to know that UC has passed Ohio U. by for the percentage of incoming freshman who scored a 30+ on the ACT (8.95% to 7%) and the number is closing in on Miami of Ohio (15%). :clap: Good luck on the fundraising campaign. I think 800 million is a very attainable goal for UC. As far as the UC-Miami of Ohio rivalry goes, their campaign has fallen flat on its face. It was supposed to wrap up this year with a 350 million dollar goal (after starting in 2000!) but has yet to pass 300 million. They've extended the campaign for two more years and tried to disguise the failure by raising the goal to 500 million, but I can hardly see how, given past performance, they'll manage to pull in a 100MM a year for two consecutive years--particularly since most of the low hanging fruit should already be picked seven years into a campaign. :drunk:

That's a pretty good idea, and one that's probably a easier path politically than merely closing down 6 of the programs.

Why should they support four or five? Two or three makes much more sense to me. Funding 5 would still mean continuing to fund 2 programs bottom-third nationally solely to fuel the institutional egos of the regional state colleges but still completely unneeded in any rational university system. All so Louis Proenza can fly off to some academic conference and pretend, all evidence to the contrary, that there's no difference between his institution and the one in Columbus--taxpayers and tuition payers be damned! In the end, the majority of alumni from Akron, Bowling Green, OU and all the rest will end up supporting Strickland for the simple reason that they don't give a rat's ass whether their alma mater is allowed to pretend that it's Ohio State's equal. What they care about is affordable tuition, and unregulated redundancy in higher education = high tuition.

Spot on! In Ohio's case, it has a lot more to do with the populist, leveling policies of Jim Rhodes than it did with any reaction to Sputnik. Until the mid-1950s, Ohio State was the only public university allowed by law (Eagleson Bill of 1906) to offer doctoral education or conduct basic research. While population growth and the post-war boom in higher education certainly dictated that those restrictions be eased, what followed in the 1960s under Rhodes and the first higher education chancellor (Millett) was a completely unregulated system where every regional state college was allowed to indulge their institutional egos and chase the dream of becoming a "research university." To name just one ridiculous example, Ohio's public universities offer 9 Ph.D programs in history. Six are ranked in the bottom third nationally, and only Ohio State's is has a national ranking. Not only is the system utterly redundant and ridiculous, siphoning off funds that could be better spent on the stronger programs but the mass of unnecessary doctoral programs draws money away from the undergraduate subsidy resulting in Ohio ranking 47th in the affordability of its public universities. Undoing this mess of a system the was created under Rhodes is one of the primary goals of the higher education restructuring that Strickland is attempting. The Plain Dealer put it best in their editorial on the subject when they stated,

Sadly, that's a much more rational law than the 3-tier system. I understand the former because of the chance that underage checkout workers might knowingly sell beer to his/her underage friends. I've yet to hear such a logical reason as to why that six pack should be legally forced to pass through a local wholesaler's warehouse before reaching the store shelves, with an additional 30-40% of cost added along the way.

The article is fundamentally mistaken about one thing. Ohio law does not allow wholesalers to mark up to 33%. It requires that they mark up no lower than 33%. Most wine wholesalers work on gross margins of 30-40 percent which means that they are marking up at or above 50% on their "laid in costs" which are the cost of the product, the cost to ship it to Ohio and any Ohio excise taxes. I worked on the supplier side for several years, and trust me. The wineries and importers have nothing but scorn for wine wholesalers. They are lazy parasites fixated solely on "passing through" wine that has already been sold for them--either through high scores from the wine critics or national and regional contracts created by the winery/importer themselves. They add nowhere near the value to the distribution chain that they add in cost to the consumer. Unfortunately, they are still legally protected by the repeal amendment which mandates a legal wholesale tier. In other words, they don't have to justify their business or economic existence nor are subject to market efficiencies because the law says that a winery can't sell directly to Kroger or the neighborhood wine shop (regardless of any demand or logistical viability) but rather is forced to pass the wine through a wholesaler. My guess is that the Ohio wineries were simply bought off by a couple of the big wholesalers. They were promised increased attention and sales in exchange for their support of this bill. Don't worry though. This is all about to change. COSTCO has taken the entire notion of a legally mandated wholesale tier to federal court. In federal district court in Washington, they won a sweeping decision in which the presiding judge went further than COSTCO was asked and found the wholesale system to be patently unconstitutional. The case now goes to the 9th circuit and eventually the Supreme Court. Within 5 years, there will not be a legally required wholesale tier in selling wine, over half the wine sold in America will go straight from the winery/importer to the store or restaurant, cutting out the wholesalers' bloated profit margins and resulting in great benefits to wineries, retailers and consumers. The Plain Dealer's wine writer was always harping on the state minimum markups as adding cost to the consumer. What they add is minimal if anything. If one really wants to look out for the consumer and lower prices end the three tier system. It's high time that the wholesalers little racket come to end. Deep down inside they know that there's no economic justification for passing a majority of wine through their warehouses, and with the legal requirement to do so removed expect 2/3 of these parasites to take a dirt nap in the next 5 years. :clap:

I think you're wrong in thinking that they're all going to be research universities. Ending the situation that Rhodes created where every university thinks it's a chief and nobody wants to be an Indian is at the heart of these changes. Certainly the regional universities will keep any graduate programs that have proven themselves to have a regional or national impact, but I truly believe a key to this is closing down large numbers of graduate programs and diverting those savings to both a better funding of the remaining programs and better funding for the undergraduate subsidy (or to put into words the voter will understand--lower tuition). Right off the bat, an Akron-CSU merger makes sense from the fact that you can lose a law school right there. NE Ohio does not need two public law schools. Ohio does not need 5 public law schools. Every year, Ohio creates far more law school graduates than new legal jobs to absorb them. Take such savings and strengthen the remaining law schools. I don't necessarily see how it will be harder to get into these universities as a result of the merger. Merging them shouldn't automatically lead to less space or opportunity at the undergraduate level. What leads a university like Cleveland State to say that they want to become more selective is institutional ego and a lack of control from the board of regents. Maybe Rhodes policies seemed more rational given Ohio's economic base in the 1960s. In hindsight, they seem grossly mistaken Strickland and Fingerhut want 250K more Ohioans enrolled in college in the next decade. With Ohio State limiting their freshman classes to around 6,000 and accepting only 50% of their applicants, pretty much all of these students will need to go to the regional state colleges. The president of Akron today said the NE Ohio deserves an "elite public research university," and guess who he thinks should occupy that role. The president of Kent State has recently said something similar, and you can bet that he wasn't talking about Akron. I'm certain that UT, Bowling Green, OU and Cincinnati all foresee similar roles for themselves. Why? Why--in an environment of finite resources and underfunded undergraduate subsidies--do we need an "elite public research university" in every corner of the state. We can't afford it. Not everybody can be a chief. Some institutions have to fulfill the Indian role. When deciding whether to support Stickland and Fingerhut's reform of the higher education system, Joe Taxpayer needs to decide which scenario is more important to him and to Ohio's future. A) Ohio offering a rational system of higher education of gradiated institutions (from a flagship research university to more limited regional research universities to undergraduate focused colleges) all with tuition that's both affordable and competitive with other states. If this sound like a wise use of taxpayer money, support Strickland. B) An unregulated system where every university is allowed to chase its institutional dream of becoming an "elite research university" and guys like Akron president Louis Proenza can fly off to academic conferences and pretend that there's no difference between Akron and Ohio State. Meanwhile back at home, Ohio ranks 47th among US states for the affordability of its public universities. If this sounds like a rational higher education system and wise use of taxpayer money, they should by all means oppose Strickland's efforts at reform.

The problem is that while individual institutions might find this freedom to their liking and benefit, it's become an absolutely untenable situation for the state's higher education system at large. Jim Rhodes wanted a public university within 30 miles of every Ohioan (apparently still believing that mobility was hampered by a reliance on horses and buggies). So, the state university system took in the struggling municipal universities in Toledo and Akron--despite having public four year universities close by in Kent and Bowling Green. On top of that, new universities were founded--Wright State and Cleveland State. The real problem came in that Rhodes refused to see any differentiation in the system. Each university was left to its own devices to add graduate and research programs at will. Since the 1960s, Ohio has become bloated and marked by countless redundancies as each university has felt free to chase the vain but unrealistic goal of turning itself into a national research university. Just to name a few examples, Ohio funds 9 Ph.D programs in history--six of which are ranked in the bottom third nationally. Despite being a large net exporter of law school graduates each year, Ohio funds 5 public law schools--one of which was barely able to keep it accreditation at its last review. Ohio funds more public medical schools than California, which has three times the population and five times the economy! At the same time... --Ohio can't adequately find the money to fund its undergraduate subsidy resulting in us ranking 47th for affordable tuition --Resources are siphoned off from the graduate programs at our one AAU member public university and the one university that conceivably could give Ohio an institution on the level of Berkeley or Michigan and the resulting research dollars and "brain gain" that accompanies it. So after more than 40 years of this nonsense, what have the Ohio taxpayers gained? None of the regional universities are any closer to being elected to the Association of American Universities than they were when Rhodes took office in 1962. None of the regional universities (including OU) are any closer to pulling themselves out of the USN&WR rankings' 3rd and 4th tiers than they were when the rankings began in 1983. It's time to put an end to the charade. A couple of quotes from recent Plain Dealer and Dayton Daily News editorials perfectly encapsulates the view needed to reform Ohio's system of higher education. From the Plain Dealer, From the DDN,

Yet several Ohio newspapers have gotten their panties in a bunch over Karen Holbrook's 250K bonus at Ohio State. Under her leadership, Ohio State took in 650 million dollars in external research funding which, by the federal government's standard multipliers, translated into 24,000 well paying jobs and 9 billion dollars in total economic impact for the state. It was more than Case and UC combined. It was more than every other public university in the state combined. It was almost as much as every other public and private university in the state combined. Under her tenure, Ohio State now has 23 members of the National Academies of Science and Engineering. For comparison's sake, the other 12 public universities combined have 1! Now, they're whining about Gordon Gee's new salary. Get some perspective. Quality costs money, and lowest common denominator standards are not the way to halt a brain-drain.