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Article Excerpt
THE University of Virginia is surely the most architecturally renowned campus in the country. Among Virginians, it is reverentially referred to as "Mr. Jefferson's university," and indeed that polymath president had a major hand in designing what he called the "academical village." A miniature version of the Roman Pantheon, the Rotunda, sits at the heart of the early nineteenth-century grounds (the school has a grounds, rather than a campus), flanked by two rows of Federalist-style buildings. The buildings serve as classrooms, faculty residences, and dormitories for seniors, who vie for these coveted places.
Even as droves of tourists annually make the pilgrimage to Charlottesville to admire the grounds, signs of neglect are visible in the shadow of the Jeffersonian grandeur. Rouss Hall, which houses the department of economics, is the sorriest case. It needs new pipes and a new heating system, structural repairs, an elevator for the handicapped, and much more. So far, however, the university administration, chronically strapped for funds, has only been able to afford cosmetic touches.
A mile away, on the north grounds, the recently completed campus of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration pays homage to Jefferson's architectural vision. Federal-style buildings frame a wide lawn. The main building is modeled on the Rotunda. The pristine interiors, painted in soothing colonial hues, the echoing foyers, and the sumptuous decorative touches recall his vision.
Rouss Hall and Darden embody in brick and mortar a fundamental divide within the university. The schools that are situated on the historic grounds, among them the liberal arts college, the education school, and the school of commerce (which trains undergraduate business students), operate according to the conventions of public universities: The state doles out operating funds and specifies, often in numbing detail, how those funds can be spent.
In sharp contrast, the business school and to some extent the law school, its campus neighbor, have been moving toward what is referred to as "self-sufficiency." In exchange for eschewing most of the state funds to which it would otherwise be entitled, Darden has essentially been set free to build its own campus. The result is a nine-building, 340,000 square-foot complex, paid for with $77 million in private contributions. Darden can decide how many professors it wants and how much to pay them. It keeps 90 percent of the money it raises. It offers expensive executive-training courses for senior managers and basically determines its own tuition. A university steeped in tradition has responded to the contemporary pressures of market competition by creating what is likely the most autonomous--the most "private"--school in an American public university.
Darden is the canary in the mine, a sign of things to come, for across the country the privatization of public higher education proceeds apace. Since 1980, the share of the operating expenses of public universities that is paid for by state tax dollars has fallen by 30 percent. At the University of Virginia, the state's contribution has been reduced by a third in just the past decade, and now the legislature underwrites only 20 percent of the university's budget. The federal government also contributes proportionately less than it did a generation ago, and federal dollars increasingly go to students, as grants and loans, rather than to institutions.
Meanwhile, public universities face mounting competition from private schools, whose endowments were fattened during the 1990s stock-market boom. For-profit institutions like DeVry University and the University of Phoenix compete vigorously with the second-tier state universities that historically have educated most undergraduates. Public universities have responded by raising tuition--by as much as 50 percent in the past decade--but pressure from parents and politicians effectively sets a ceiling on this revenue source. Universities have also been more aggressive in courting private and corporate donors, with the inevitable consequence that the donors' preferences, not the desires of the public, become synonymous with the mission of the institution.
Fundraising has always been critical to the survival of higher education in America, of course, but that pursuit has been transformed from an activity conducted at the margins of the institution to its very center. In this new Gilded Age, it's easy to see how academic entrepreneurship of the sort that the Darden School engages in could come to prominence, if not dominance.
Because Darden may represent the way of the future, it is worth taking a close look at its recent history. Is the Darden School the kind of institution that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote of "a University [established] on a plan so broad and liberal...
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