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Copyright © 1998 The Seattle Times Company
Editorials & Opinion : Friday, March 6, 1998

Richard White's departure a sober warning for UW

by Richard L. McCormick
Special to The Times

DAVID Brewster's thoughtful column of Feb. 20 makes clear the loss we will suffer when Professor Richard White leaves the University of Washington history department next fall for a new position at Stanford. As a fellow historian, I deeply admire Professor White's ground-breaking studies of the American West. As the UW's president, I regret the departure from our faculty of a nationally renowned scholar and teacher. But those who will lose the most are Professor White's students - and those who might have been his students. In his UW classrooms, as his students report over and over again, Richard White has made American history vivid, troubling, exciting, revelatory.

Why is he leaving? Is there a message here? These are the questions behind Brewster's column. While I might take issue with some of his answers, the column's larger point is right on target and ought to be of concern to everyone who cares about higher education in this state. White's "decision to leave," wrote Brewster, "flows from serious anxiety about the future of UW."

Let me give this anxiety some financial context.

In 1972-73, Washington ranked 13th in the nation in its per-student funding of public higher education. As recently as l991-92, our state ranked 19th. But by 1995-96 - the most recent year for which full data are available - we had plummeted to 43rd. Mississippi, Oregon, the District of Columbia, and 39 other states are ahead of us. Delaware, at the top of the list, spends $11,279 (state appropriation plus tuition) on each fuIl-time equivalent student in its system; Florida, at the bottom, spends $5,386. The figure for Washington is $6,206.

By contrast, Washington is far above the national average in the percentage of its high-school graduates who go on to public higher education (we rank 12th). So perhaps our citizens are simply doing the best they can, paying all they can afford to provide opportunity for the many? But in fact, states much less prosperous than ours are investing a larger share of their resources in higher education. Here again we rank near the bottom: If we look at expenditures for public higher education as a proportion of personal income, Washington comes in 41st. In 1972-73, we were 9th.

Comparisons of individual universities tell much the same story. There are 25 public research universities in the UW's officially designated "peer group." Only a few of these had 10 or more doctoral programs ranked among the nation's top 10 by the National Research Council in 1995. The UW, UCLA, and the University of Michigan were among this select group. How does their state support compare? For 1995-96, such funding was 31 percent higher at UCLA and 61 percent higher at Michigan than at the UW (state appropriations plus tuition, adjusted for size of student bodies). So if this university had been in Michigan - doing the same job we do here, with the same expectations of quality - we would have had $704 million to spend that year instead of $438 million.

Dollars alone don't guarantee greatness. But below a certain threshold, the absence of dollars will guarantee mediocrity. For me, the meaning of Richard White's anxiety and departure is that we are perilously near that threshold.

But hasn't the University of Washington built its quality and its reputation on federal research dollars? Does state support really matter?

There is no question that federal funding has helped the UW achieve its current level of excellence. Almost all the UW's top-ranked programs - in medicine, bioengineering, oceanography and computer science, for example - are in fields for which the federal government funds research. UW faculty have been outstanding research entrepreneurs. Their ideas and the quality of their work, evaluated competitively by agencies like the National Science Foundation, have made the UW second in the nation in its total receipt of federal research funds. Washington citizens have reaped the rewards of this success - in the quality of our health care, in the stimulus to our economy, and in research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students.

But it is crucial to understand that federal research funds do not and cannot pay our basic faculty salaries, build our classrooms, stock our libraries, or cover fundamental academic support services. For these, we must rely on state appropriations and tuition. Those local funds provide the essential human and physical infrastructure with which the UW has leveraged its impressive research funding.

And what about fields for which federal research funds are not available? What about literature, political science, music, or Professor White's (and my) field of history?

Here, the UW, relying entirely on state support, has done less well. There is no lack of demand: Last year, 43 percent of our graduating seniors majored in the arts, humanities and social sciences. But we have not had the resources to build the kind of excellence across the board that other public universities, such as Michigan and UCLA, have achieved. Federal funds will not buy us another Richard White.

Even with offers from Harvard and Stanford, it took Professor White nine months to make up his mind to leave. The difficulty of his decision says as much to me about the UW as the decision itself. This remains a place with strong attractions. Many people in this state, on campus and off, care deeply about the UW - what it represents, what it has accomplished, and the future possibilities it embodies.

If these people speak up and prevail, the University will win the kind of support - financial and moral - that will carry it to the next level of achievement, and the state will have the caliber of higher education it needs and deserves. If not, we face a slow slide into mediocrity - not just for higher education but for the quality of life in this state.

Richard White is a superb historian. Let us hope he proves to be not quite so good a prophet.

Richard L. McCormick is president of the University of Washington.



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