NO-DEPT

It's a situation no institution wants to find itself in: getting singled out, not for earth-friendly efforts, but for an Environmental Protection Agency investigation. Yet messing with hazardous waste laws can result in just that.

Key Accomplishment:

Making a systemwide commitment

A study by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation indicates that African Americans and Hispanics are still significantly underrepresented among recipients of Ph.D.s. The two groups comprise 32 percent of all U.S. citizens in the age range of Ph.D. candidates but only 7 percent of those earning doctorates.

Manufacturing workforce reductions and outsourcing of manufacturing operations overseas have reportedly cost 2.7 million American workers their jobs in the last four years. Yet, many manufacturing jobs lie unfilled for months as companies seek workers with the skills they need for these jobs. So, how can we have too few jobs for our workers and too few workers for our jobs--at the same time?

Harvard president Lawrence Summers created a firestorm of controversy when he rashly speculated that the underrepresentation of women faculty in science and engineering may result from innate biological differences between the genders. He later said his remarks were misconstrued, but he should have known better.

With the recent and very public resignation of two TIAA-CREF trustees for tripping over federal auditor independence statutes, the corporate accounting scandals have officially crossed into higher education. Clearly, academe has the same vulnerabilities to fraud that corporate America has, and any thought to the contrary is naive.

What's an administrator to do? State funding is down, student enrollment is up, economic diversification groups demand courses with limited enrollment that may lose money, and the Board wants the fund balance in the black at year-end.

Hear that sound? It's a clarion call, courtesy of David Kirp. In his must-read book, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, published earlier this year, Kirp eloquently summarized our challenge as university businesspeople and marketers: to find a way to reconcile the "values of the marketplace" with the "values of the commons."

Why do so few American colleges and universities offer three-year bachelor's degrees?