By Michael P. Wright
Guest columnist
October 16, 2007 10:08 pm
—
A recent editorial in the Phoenix offered the opinion that "higher education, like any business or government agency, must deal with controlling its spending." To this I add the suggestion that institutions of higher education must place top value on the search for truth. David Boren, presidentof the University of Oklahoma, has been leading the school in the opposite direction.
Boren is troubled because, while he has been there, OU has dropped off of the top 100 list of universities ranked by federal funding for research and development. His solution to this problem is to make inflated claims as he goes about constructing the legend that OU has achieved "excellence" as a result of his leadership.
On Sept.15, The Norman Transcript published an article quoting Boren, who said that for fiscal year 2007, OU received $252 million in external funding for research. The article also reported that, since Boren arrived at OU, "research expenditures have more than doubled ... [and] have risen from $94 million in 1994 to $252 million this year, according to the university." The headline was "External, research funding posts record year at OU" (online edition).
Boren also stated that this sum was $12.7 million more than what was received the year before (fiscal 2006). For this to be true, the external research funding for that year would have to have been $239.3 million.
Defenders of Boren might argue that his boast included "sponsored" programs which were not research. This term was used in the first two paragraphs of the Transcript article and then dropped. If this were the case, then Boren should have disclosed how much of the funding was for research alone.
He didn't do that. A table from the National Science Foundation lists total research funding for American universities. For FY 2006, OU was ranked number 95, and total research funding from all sources (state, federal, corporate, and internal) was only $178.7 million.
In his public relations effort to create the legend that "excellence" has been achieved at OU because of his leadership, Boren has made some false claims.
Two years ago, Boren claimed that the OU business school was on the Forbes magazine top 50 list (Oklahoma Daily, Sept. 30, 2005). I investigated this by simply looking at the Forbes magazine website. OU was not in the top 50 then, and it isn't now. Will prospective employers believe OU business school graduates who trust Boren and put this false claim on their resumes?
Boren's bad example is being followed by other OU departments and offices. The 2005 OU Visitors' Guide has a list of graduates said to have achieved high distinction. The list includes Shannon Lucid, a NASA astronaut who flew on a space shuttle mission in 1985. OU described her as "the first woman in space."
In fact, the first woman in space was the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who orbited the earth in 1963. The first American woman in space was Sally Ride, who participated in a 1983 shuttle mission. Can we trust a school whose publications make such blunders about simple matters to teach history to its students?
Boren is a man of shifting priorities who searches for glory in strange places. In the 1990s, after Barry Switzer's resignation, the OU football team sank into mediocrity and had three losing seasons during the latter half of that decade. During that period, Boren told the Chronicle of Higher Education that "I don't think we need to have any national championships."
He added this strange statement: "From my perspective, the time we've gone through, of difficulty and struggle in football, has been good over all. It's been good for our national image in academic circles." Boren apparently believed that having a losing footballteam is sufficient to raise the academic prestige of a school, in the eyes of the nation. Will Utah State soon be invited to join the Ivy League?
Boren promptly dropped this peculiar idea after OU restored itself to football glory by winning the national championship for 2000. Following this he drove up the athletic department's bonded indebtedness to $152.7 million in order to expand the stadium.
Using the power of eminent domain, he destroyed a historic neighborhood east of the campus along the way. Then he renamed the stadium for his friends in the Gaylord family. In 1925, it had originally been named to honor men who had died in World War I.
That huge sum of money wasted to expand the stadium should have been used for bridge and highway repair.
Is it not time for David Boren to retire?
LINKS
Transcript Article
http://www.normantranscript.com/archivesearch/local_story_258012326
Oklahoma Daily article with false "top 50" claim
http://hub.ou.edu/articles/article.php?article_id=1067675831&search_id=1915499684
Forbes magazine website with its top 50 list
http://www.forbes.com/2003/09/24/bschooland.html
Top 100 for federal R&D
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i36/36a03401.htm
Boren's 1999 statement about football
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i08/08a00101.htm
Annual debt service for 2002 stadium bonds -- from prospectus prepared by
A.G. Edwards (click to enlarge):
http://bellaciao.org/en/IMG/jpg/bonds3-2.jpg
Wright lives in Norman.
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