If they are allowed to increase tuition 8% each year for the next 9 years, tuition will indeed double.

Looks like the governor vetoed the 8% increase. Will be interesting to see if his own party overrides his action.

The kind of compromise you suggest is certainly a possibility. In terms of the groundswell for this I think what you have is the parents of currently enrolled students and those who will enroll in the next few years very focused on this topic, but most other Ohioans in the I-don't-really-care camp. However, the I-don't-really-care camp includes folks who do care about their local college athletics. So, legislators in the scenario we are discussing would be hearing from both camps. As you know, Ohio politics can get very messy.

You are correct that I'm not a fan of the USO concept. When we were lobbying to can the BOR, we came up with some interesting stats (circa 1985) which showed just how much more money each campus could get if the BOR was abolished and its budget evenly split among all state schools. I don't recall the actual amount, but it was not an insignificant sum.

In terms of the number of state medical schools and law schools, I actually tend to agree with you that Ohio has too many. However, if you look at the situation historically, you can understand how it happened. In terms of the medical school situation, of which I'm more knowledgeable, you had some interesting dynamics with the creation of Wright State's medical school as a result of a bill that Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) got through Congress for the sole purpose of supplying federal start-up funding for the Marshall medical school against the wishes of the AMA, the WV BOR and the WV Legislature. It was a very masterful stroke by a master politician. The bill, however, couldn't be transparently a "Marshall bill," so it included a set of criteria which applied to Marshall and about six other colleges around the nation. You had to have a state university without a medical school in a municipality that had a VA Hospital of a particular capacity, and a few other criteria. In addition to Marshall, from memory, Wright State and East Tennessee were two other universities that started medical schools under what I'll call the "Byrd Bill." Since the Feds supplied a lot of funds for the first seven years, the Ohio General Assembly went along with the establishment of this school, just shortly before some members of the legislature were successfully lobbied by the Ohio Osteopathic Association to start the third state-supported osteopathic medical school (second at a state university). The empty dormitories at OHIO due to the precipitous enrollment decline of the early 1970s gave extra impetus to this effort, as it was seen by some in the legislature as a way to "save" the university which some feared might be ready to go bankrupt. That was a little bit of an exaggeration, but those were the kinds of terms being thrown around at the time. The argument for OU-COM, I think, was much stronger than that for NEOCOM (the consortium medical school shared by Kent, Akron and YSU, with headquarters in Rootstown) and Wright State. First, Ohio had no osteopathic medical college; second, SEO was the only region of the state that did not have a medical college; third, D.O.'s had a track record of disproportionately going into family medicine and serving in under-served areas.

Where I think we disagree here is that the onus for too many medical schools falls on the legislature and the solution, if the problem needs to be dealt with, rests on the legislature. I just don't like the concept of unelected bureaucrats making these kinds of decisions. The BOR, BTW, actually testified in the Senate Finance Committee hearings against the establishment of OU-COM, so their later action trying to get rid of us was consistent. There were many reasons for this attitude, but part of it was anti-D.O. bias. Rationally, WSU and the Medical College of Ohio at Toledo (now the UT medical school) had a weaker raison d'être than OU-HCOM.

Sorry to have rattled on so long here. I guess the bottom line is that I prefer the rough and tumble of the legislative process to piling on additional layers of bureaucracy that tend to shield the people from their representatives and add unnecessary expenses to the state budget under the pretense of cutting costs.

You know, this can really be a cool place sometimes. I enjoyed reading this exchange.

Interesting to look at the annual USA Today report that came out yesterday: http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances /

The following state schools in California subsidize athletics with more dollars from student fees annually than OHIO:

-SDSU
-UC Davis (without FBS football)
-Sacramento State (without FBS football)
-Cal Poly SLO (without FBS football)

Also close in the mix is Fresno, SJSU, both who are within $1MM of OHIO's subsidy level. Interesting that UC Davis annual total spend also exceeds OHIO's by $730k without offering FBS football.

Also interesting to note is that while OHIO supports ICA with 63.5% of it's budget coming from Student Fees, UC-Santa Barbara supports ICA with $15.2MM at 80.9% of its budget, UC-Irvine supports ICA with $15MM at 77.2%, CS-Fullerton with $13.9MM at 83.9% and CS-Northridge with $13.7MM at 86.4% of its budget.

So while the California state system may have high academic performing institutions in their system, they also clearly, FIRMLY believe that supporting Intercollegiate Athletics with Student Fees is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to the institutions and student life. Otherwise they wouldn't approve of such a high percentage and so many tens of millions of dollars supporting those pursuits

Interesting. Thank you. I agree that it certainly shows those UC campuses seem to believe that subsidizing athletics is important. They don't, however, seem to believe that subsidizing FBS football and joining that arms race is a factor much less a necessity for their academic mission. Also, it doesn't counter my original argument that you don't need FBS football and its perceived "advertising effect" to be a world class AAU university.

I'll bring up the Minnesota-Alabama comparison. Why is Minnesota, despite decades of utter mediocrity in both football and basketball, such a superior university to Alabama by ANY metric: fundraising, research funding, any ranking you care to look at, student selectivity?

As for Ohio's subsidies, Ohio's far from the worst transgressor in Ohio or the MAC. I still think they're too high though and should be capped at no more than half the athletic budget. Ohio is far from a rich university in a state that historically underfunds higher education. There are areas where that money would have a much higher impact on the university's core mission than through a hoped for "advertising effect."

[/QUOTE]
And I'll reiterate that Vern Alden's greatest mistake was in trusting that Millett and Shriver would cut Ohio in on the spoils of holding osu back. Instead, they stabbed him in the back, and Rhodes and Millet ordered Ohio to build the necessary new dorms to stay open admissions just like OSU.

[/QUOTE]Please elaborate on this. I have read A LOT about OU's history and have never heard that we were "ordered" to build new dorms in the 1960s.

My understanding is that Vern Alden made common cause with Millet and Shriver's agenda with the understanding that Ohio would become a selective admissions campus along with Miami. And dorm space was how Millet was able to backdoor Miami into selective admissions in the 60s. Contrary to their propaganda, they were never designated any special "honors campus" or other such self-serving myth. They simply didn't create new dorm space for the exploding baby boom enrollment thus artificially creating a need for them to deny students. OSU and OU were not allowed to do that. They, through the regents and Rhodes' control of their Boards, requested and were granted all the necessary funds to stay open admissions through expanded dorm space.

And that's the entire basis for Miami's precious "public ivy" nonsense. The state's only AAU research university was forced to become open admissions and thus create a ridiculous situation where they were flunking a quarter of their freshmen classes out every year. At the same time, the state's oldest public university was also forced to stay open admissions. Millet engineered it so that Miami's primary in-state competition had to compete with one arm tied behind its back.

SBH, I'm glad you mentioned my former confusion. After our last discussion on this topic, I looked back at some of my old material. It was when Marshall was kicked out of the MAC that Alden was the prime mover, not the denial of their request for re-instatement. What confused me is that in 1970-71, when the Marshall student newspaper did a survey on attitudes toward the MAC there was a question about Alden, and questions about the denial of re-admission. In the fog of memory I had conflated the survey question about Alden in 1970 with Alden's earlier action a few years before. The confusion was all mine.

That being said, I have many other -- non-Marshall related reasons -- for not liking Alden. Some of them are very personal and have to do with his actions toward my father, who as a full professor of mathematics, and at one time during the Alden Administration was the chairman of the Faculty Advisory Council, forerunner of Faculty Senate. In that capacity he had several serious disagreements with Alden, who was not one who tolerated disagreements very well. He wanted only lavish praise from his underlings. In a PM I'll be happy to tell you the meanest thing Alden ever did to my father.

Good answer to a difficult question that I can't answer myself. I thought I'd pawn it off to you for an easy way out. I'll give it some more thought, but I have to wonder that he faced a form of Sophie's choice: side with Millet/Shriver and hope for the best (with a couple of delusional A-holes looking out only for Mother Miami) or side with OSU and face a losing battle against a deck (Governor and Regents Chancellor plus the other schools looking to empire build) stacked against him.