This column is addressed to all the new students at UNM, who surely received a rosy picture of the University during orientation.
But do you really know about the institution you have chosen to attend?
Do you know, for example, that this summer US News & World Report in its annual ranking of American universities placed UNM in its lowest tier?
Or that among the 50 state flagship universities UNM is near or at the bottom in graduation rates?
Even within the state, UNM has a serious image problem: NMSU, with only two-thirds our enrollment, annually receives far more applications for admission, an indicator of greater academic reputation.
Outside the state, UNM is virtually unknown, though the 1999-2001 catalogue strangely claims that in the last decade we have become “one of the country’s premier public universities.” Naturally, public affairs offices cannot be expected to say damaging things, but this is a complete and total lie.
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Of course there is much that is good about UNM. It has an excellent faculty and at least one high administrator, Peter White, who actually care about undergraduate students. In certain fields, such as photography, western history and high energy physics, UNM does indeed offer some of the best programs in the county, and a motivated and prepared student can receive an excellent undergraduate education.
But there’s the rub: “motivated and prepared.” Most of you, most of each entering freshman class are dramatically disinterested in being educated and completely unprepared for university work. From the vantage point of 29 years of teaching freshman in Western Civilization, I have seen it get worse and worse. The public school system fails utterly in even the basic mission of teaching people to read and write, let alone think, though I expect most of you know how to put a condom on a banana.
Of course, because your bodies represent money and we have possibly the worst retention rate on the planet, the University administration will do anything to keep you here, such as remedial education and dumbing down courses. Anything, that is, except emphasizing undergraduate education and raising standards.
By the late ’60s, UNM was actually developing a national reputation as a rising star among “provincial” universities, but then-Regent Calvin Horn began implementing policies that started UNM down the slope.
The university was even more seriously damaged from 1990-98 by the “leadership” of President Richard Peck, who enthusiastically supported the mission of the regents to turn UNM into a nationally recognized “research university,” regardless of the damage done to undergraduate education.
The current president, Bill Gordon, is a hell of a nice guy and a long-time faculty member, unlike his predecessor, but is seemingly powerless to do anything but defend, sometimes to his embarrassment, the policies of the regents.
What does this mean to you?
Well, you, or whoever is writing the checks for you, are paying for the research university, for all those faculty and programs that focus on research and graduate students.
Have you noticed how many of your introductory courses are taught by graduate students or part-time faculty? Partly that is because in any given semester roughly half the full-time faculty at UNM have absolutely nothing to do with undergraduates — they were hired to serve the research university.
A recent critic of the US News & World Report ranking system in fact claims that it is an excessive emphasis on research that is generally hurting American university education.
Many, if not most of you, have already been defrauded by a public school system that handed you a diploma and said you had high school education, when in actuality your academic skills were somewhere in the middle school range, if that.
UNM is perfectly happy to continue that fraud, admitting you as a university student, even though many of you are unprepared even for high school work. The result is completely predictable: huge numbers of you will drop out after a couple of years, having wasted your time and university resources.
In a recent opinion piece President Gordon actually stated that this was a measure of UNM’s greatness — we give everyone the opportunity to attend the university, regardless of their suitability!
The solution, the path back to a national reputation for UNM is fairly obvious: raise admission standards and expect more from our students.
Forget it. Such a policy is politically and economically impossible, and the slightest move toward limiting enrollments to students who are actually qualified would raise a storm of protest from state politicians, liberal “educators” and other ignoramuses, who would promptly label UNM an elitist and racist institution.
So we shall remain an equal opportunity university, providing everyone with the opportunity to fail and help further turn UNM into a community college.
