It’s probably just as well that our university’s new president isn’t an historian.
If he were, Mun Choi might take a discouraging lesson from the past of the institution he now heads.
That lesson would be that it is a great deal easier to talk about making serious changes and major cutbacks, especially at the flagship campus, than it is to actually make those changes.
The Missourian reported on the “Systemwide Budget Guidance” memo that emerged Monday from the president’s office. The guidance included a warning of “an overall budget cut between 8 percent and 12 percent throughout the University of Missouri system.”
The “guiding principles” for making those cuts seemed, at least to me, commendable. They were:
- “Challenge the status quo and long-held traditions that are impediments to change.”
- “Make strategic decisions based on performance measures of excellence.”
- “Protect programs of excellence….”
- “Be transparent, collaborative and accountable….”
I suspect President Tim Wolfe had much the same principles in mind, if not online, in 2012 when he called for each of the system’s four campuses to become “best in class” and noted that redefining campus responsibilities would require unspecified tradeoffs. Three years later, when he resigned, the campuses had not changed appreciably.
Twenty years before that, Chancellor Barbara Uehling got out ahead of then-President James Olson when she and Provost Ron Bunn responded to that year’s 10 percent budget cut by the legislature...
Read the complete column at the Missourian.