Why would a pro-UA Board, 80 percent of them Alabama alumni, be so vengeful toward the other campuses? The easy, and by no means wrong, answers are jealousy of the successful younger siblings, and (in UAB's case) the deep personal resentment of Bryant Jr. But, in the end, the UA board collectively acts in the interests of Tuscaloosa (not always in its best interests, however).
Why would denying undergraduate public education opportunities in Birmingham and Huntsville after a half-century-plus of success redound to UA's benefit? Upon investigation, I found 951,092,958 reasons why.
That's how much UA's "non-current liabilities" were on Sept. 30, 2014 —up 169 percent in the past five years alone. In short, the Tuscaloosa campus is a billion dollars in debt, and the debt is soaring.
This debt is the result of a growth plan run amok at the Capstone, without any UA board restraint. Current UA System Chancellor Robert Witt created this plan as UA president in 2003, with dreams of UA at last becoming a tier-one research university, growing a larger student body, and serving the citizens of the state.
The plan didn't work. The research university dreams at UA have crashed and burned. Witt's big push barely moved the needle on the national ranking of UA among research universities (UA was a miserable 190th in the nation in research expenditures in 2013). I have recently learned through sources at the Capstone that there will soon be zero "hard money" funding for any college-based research centers or institutes on the UA campus, a tacit admission of failure.
Instead of research, the big bucks have been poured into metastatic growth for growth's sake, centered on extracurriculars, not academics. To try to cover the ensuing debt, UA has gone after out-of-state tuition payers with such vigor that the Capstone's dearth of Alabamians has become national news. But without steadily increasing out-of-state tuition revenues, the debt will be unsustainable—the Moody's reports on recent bond issues for UA imply as much.
How bad is the situation? A respected academic colleague at another flagship university with inside knowledge of the situation in Tuscaloosa gave me his assessment: "...a very unsustainable model... they are driving 100 mph toward a brick wall."
Why would denying undergraduate public education opportunities in Birmingham and Huntsville after a half-century-plus of success redound to UA's benefit? Upon investigation, I found 951,092,958 reasons why.
That's how much UA's "non-current liabilities" were on Sept. 30, 2014 —up 169 percent in the past five years alone. In short, the Tuscaloosa campus is a billion dollars in debt, and the debt is soaring.
This debt is the result of a growth plan run amok at the Capstone, without any UA board restraint. Current UA System Chancellor Robert Witt created this plan as UA president in 2003, with dreams of UA at last becoming a tier-one research university, growing a larger student body, and serving the citizens of the state.
The plan didn't work. The research university dreams at UA have crashed and burned. Witt's big push barely moved the needle on the national ranking of UA among research universities (UA was a miserable 190th in the nation in research expenditures in 2013). I have recently learned through sources at the Capstone that there will soon be zero "hard money" funding for any college-based research centers or institutes on the UA campus, a tacit admission of failure.
Instead of research, the big bucks have been poured into metastatic growth for growth's sake, centered on extracurriculars, not academics. To try to cover the ensuing debt, UA has gone after out-of-state tuition payers with such vigor that the Capstone's dearth of Alabamians has become national news. But without steadily increasing out-of-state tuition revenues, the debt will be unsustainable—the Moody's reports on recent bond issues for UA imply as much.
How bad is the situation? A respected academic colleague at another flagship university with inside knowledge of the situation in Tuscaloosa gave me his assessment: "...a very unsustainable model... they are driving 100 mph toward a brick wall."
