Kentucky’s Grand Agenda
Can the state’s ambitious postsecondary education reforms continue to move forward?
By William Trombley
Senior Editor
FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY
AFTER THREE YEARS of intensive
effort and heavy spending,
Kentucky’s ambitious post-secondary
education reforms are starting
to take hold but their ultimate fate remains
in doubt.
Determined to lead the state away from
an outdated economy, based on agriculture
and coal mining, to a new role in the “information
age,” Governor Paul E. Patton,
with bipartisan legislative support, has
accomplished the following:
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Kentucky Governor Paul Patton has made higher education reform his highest
priority since taking office in December of 1995. |
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- Spending on higher education has been
increased by 48 percent in the last four
years.
- A “Bucks for Brains” incentive fund has
been established which has enabled the
University of Kentucky and the University
of Louisville to attract top scholars,
endow dozens of new faculty chairs
and provide more
lucrative fellowships
for graduate students.
- All but one of the
state’s 14 community
colleges have
been removed from
the University of
Kentucky’s control
and have been
placed with 15 technical
schools in a new and apparently
more effective Kentucky Community
and Technical Colleges System.
- The state coordinating agency—the
Council on Postsecondary Education—
has been strengthened and has made
progress toward providing coherent
statewide planning.
But many of the problems that prompted
the Kentucky reforms persist. The percentage
of the population with high school
diplomas, and the percentage who earn
bachelor’s degrees are among the lowest in
the nation. Many of those who enter a
college, a university or a technical school
drop out. One of the consequences is that
Kentucky per capita income is only 81
percent of the national average.
“We’ve had some successes but we
haven’t touched the ‘quality of life’ issues
yet,” said Gordon K. Davies, president of
the Council on Postsecondary Education
and the person charged with implementing
the reform program. “The question to ask
is not, ‘Is the crop good?’ but ‘Are there
signs of spring?’ and I think the answer to
that one is ‘yes.’”
Governor Patton, a Democrat now serving
his second term, is convinced that
raising the educational level of Kentucky’s
citizens is the only way to move the state
away from a stagnant economy, based on
tobacco, coal mining, bourbon and horse
racing, to a more prosperous future created
by medical and pharmaceutical research
and other high tech industries.
To do that, he is attempting to reduce
the state’s staggeringly high illiteracy rate—
perhaps one in every four adults—as well
as continuing the reforms in elementary
and secondary education that were started
ten years ago and, now, pushing for change
in postsecondary education.
“There has been a turn-around in aspirations,”
said Aims C. McGuinness of the
National Center for Higher Education Management
Systems, who was Patton’s principal
advisor on the reform program.
Some of the goals might be unrealistic.
For example, undergraduate enrollments
are supposed to grow by 80,000—to a total
of 240,000—by the year 2020, in order to
reach the national average. This will be
difficult to achieve in a state of four million
people, with population expected to increase
only about ten percent in the next
decade.
The University of Kentucky, now
ranked 42nd among the nation’s public
universities in National Science Foundation
research funding, is supposed to climb
into the top 20 by the same year, 2020.
Many doubt this can be achieved.
“I consider that to be a metaphor,” said
Daniel Reedy, professor of Spanish at the
University of Kentucky and one of two
faculty representatives on the university’s
Board of Trustees. “Anybody who understands
higher education knows we’re not
going to be in the top 20 in everything, but
it sets a goal and I think we can get there in
a number of areas.”
Including funds appropriated for the
2000–2002 biennium, about $600 million in
new money has been pumped into post-secondary
education since Patton took
office in December 1995. Spending on
education beyond high school will reach
15.8 percent of General Fund revenue by
2002, a higher percentage than in most
states.
Some of the new funding has come in
the form of “incentive trust funds” money
available to local campuses only if they
raise matching amounts.
The largest of these is called “Bucks for
Brains,” a program that allocated $66.7
million to the University of Kentucky and
$33.3 million to the University of Louisville
for the 1998–2000 biennium, to improve
their academic stature. Both schools
matched the state appropriations, so another
$100 million (again, two-thirds for
Kentucky, one-third for Louisville) has
been included in the 2000–2002 budget.
Another $20 million in “Bucks for
Brains” money will go to the state’s six
regional universities—Eastern Kentucky,
Kentucky State, Morehead State, Murray
State, Northern Kentucky and Western
Kentucky—in the next two years.
Other incentive trust funds seek to increase
enrollment, improve graduation and
retention rates, and provide additional
student financial aid, among other goals.
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| "We've had some successes" but much remains to be done, says Gordon Davies, president of the
Council on Postsecondary Education, of Kentucky's higher education reform efforts. |
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Gordon Davies considers the incentive
funds vital to the Kentucky reform effort.
“They don’t amount to an enormous
amount but they provide money on the
margin for change,” he said. “They give us
(the council) some leverage.”
J. Kenneth Walker, the council’s former
vice president for finance, described the
incentive funds as “the rudder by which
the ship can be turned.”
But some regional university presidents
object to the prescriptive nature of the
incentive funds.
“They sound great on paper, or in some
journal article, but in practice they reduce
the flexibility of the campus president,”
said Robert E. Kustra, president of Eastern
Kentucky University.
“Categorical funds are fine but you
have to jump through hoops to get them,”
said Ron Eaglin, president of Morehead
State. “Our biggest need is for operating
dollars, and these funds don’t help us
there.”
However, no objections to “Bucks for
Brains” have been heard from administrators
at the University of Kentucky and
the University of Louisville.
The program has enabled the University
of Kentucky to increase endowed
chairs from 21 to 66 and to attract prominent
scholars such as Enrico Santi, in
Spanish; Joseph Peek in finance; Gail
Robinson in vocal music; Ted Hosselbring
in special education; and Henry Dietz in
engineering.
The additional money also has made it
possible to offer “outstanding fellowships
for graduate students,” said Professor
Reedy of the Spanish department. “This
year, for the first time, we got five of our
top six choices.”
Kentucky has adopted the slogan,
“America’s Next Great University,” plastering
it all over university publications
and, in the process, offending many graduates
who attended Kentucky before it
became “great.”
Lloyd Axelrod, director of public relations,
says the slogan is part of a new marketing
campaign.
“I came here from a ‘Fortune 500’ company
two years ago and I couldn’t believe
the university had never done anything to
market itself,” Alexander said. “Everybody
knew we had a great basketball team
but that’s all they knew about the university.”
But slogans and high hopes might not
be enough to boost the University of Kentucky,
whose reputation in most research
fields is modest, into the ranks of the nation’s
top 20 research universities by the
announced target year of 2020.
| Conflict of Interests?
Some questionable connections for Kentucky legislators |
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THE TERM “conflict of interest”
does not seem to have currency in
the Kentucky Legislature. Several
legislators, including some who have
considerable influence over education
spending, are on the payrolls of state
universities. They include:
- Representative Robert “Bucky” Buckingham
(Democrat), who is director of
regional development in the Center
for Continuing Education at Murray
State University.
- Representative Jesse Crenshaw (Democrat),
associate professor of social
work and criminal justice at Kentucky
State University.
- Representative Jon Draud (Republican),
director of the Office of University/School Partnerships at Northern
Kentucky University.
- Representative Harry Moberly, Jr.,
(Democrat), who is director of student
judicial affairs at Eastern
Kentucky University and also chairman
of the House of Representatives
Appropriations and Revenue Committee.
- Senator Joey Pendleton (Democrat),
Farm Operations Manager for Murray
State University.
- Representative John Will Stacy (Democrat),
who is assistant dean for
development at Morehead State University
and also chairs the Budget
Review Subcommittee on education.
—William Trombley
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However, UK President Charles K. Wethington
is optimistic. “If policymakers will
keep their commitment, the University of
Kentucky will do its part,” he said in an interview.
“We’ve moved up rather rapidly in
recent years.”
Said Fitzgerald Bramwell, vice president
for research and graduate studies,
“If this level of support continues, we can
reach the bottom rung of the top 20 by
2020, perhaps even by 2010.”
But Davies said the university’s recent
record looks better only because officials
have been including some non-federal
funds—state money and student tuition
and fee income—in their federal research
totals. He criticized the university’s “scattered
approach” to research funding and
said, “They need to do a much better job
of targeting their resources.”
Such targeting has enabled the University
of Louisville to make rapid strides
toward its state-mandated goal of becoming
a “premier, nationally recognized
metropolitan research university.”
Louisville has added 34 new endowed
chairs with its “Bucks for Brains” money,
concentrating on a few areas, including
early childhood education, entrepreneurship
and medical research.
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Kentucky's "Buck for Brains" spending enabled the University of Louisville to
hire prominent bone marrow transplant researcher Suzanne Ildstad. |
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The university lured Suzanne Ildstad, a
surgeon noted for bone marrow transplant
research, and her 40-member team, from
Allegheny University of the Health Sciences,
two years ago.
Other top scholars hired with “Bucks
for Brains” money include cancer researcher
Donald M. Miller; David Gozal, a
professor of pediatrics; and early childhood
experts Victoria and Dennis Molfese.
“We’re not trying to be all things to all
people,” said Nancy Martin, vice president
for research. “The sky is not the limit for
the University of Louisville, but I think we
can move into the 80s or 90s on the NSF
(National Science Foundation) funding
list.”
As large sums are poured into business,
engineering and the sciences, complaints
are being heard that both Kentucky and
Louisville have abandoned the liberal arts.
In a letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal
last spring, a critic took University
of Louisville President John Shumaker to
task for allowing the campus to become “a
giant trade school, turning out carefully
crafted, corporately approved human widgets,
with no appreciation of music, art,
history or literature. A sad day indeed.”
“It’s been wonderful to have a governor
who shows a real interest in higher education,
and it’s been great to have that kind of
support,” said Professor George Herring,
who has taught history at the University of
Kentucky for 31 years. “But you have to
combine something like ‘Bucks for Brains’
with an equivalent effort to retain the good
people you already have.”
| Kentucky by the Numbers |
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Fall 1999 undergraduate enrollment (headcount)
- Doctoral institutions (University of Kentucky, University of Louisville): 31,500
- Regional universities (Eastern Kentucky, Kentucky State, Morehead State, Murray State, Northern Kentucky and Western Kentucky): 53,100
- Community and technical colleges: 52,800
- Independent institutions: 24,100
- Total: 161,500
Full-time state-supported faculty and staff (fall, 1999)
- Faculty: 7348
- Staff: 18,106
In-state undergraduate tuition (per semester)
- University of Louisville: $1575
- University of Kentucky: $1555
- regional universities: $1040 to $1075
- Lexington Community College: $810
- other community colleges: $575
- technical schools: $380
State spending on postsecondary education
- $1.6 billion 2001–2002 academic year
Percentage of population with high school diplomas
- 77.9 percent (44th in the nation)
Percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college
- 30.8 percent (national average 33.7 percent)
Percentage of first-time freshmen who receive bachelor’s
degrees within five years
- 36.7 percent (national average: 52 percent)
Per-capita income (1998)
- $21,551 (national average: $26,482)
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Herring said the Kentucky history department
“has lost three good people in
the last two years and may lose more”
because faculty salaries are substantially
higher at nearby public “flagship” institutions
like the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, and the University of
Virginia. Average annual pay for a full
professor at the University of Kentucky is
$74,000, while it is $93,000 at Chapel Hill
and $101,000 at the University of Virginia.
The postsecondary reform legislation
called on each of the six regional universities
to develop “at least one nationally
recognized program of distinction” and
one “nationally recognized applied research
program.”
For example, Western Kentucky University,
which received $2.4 million in
“Bucks for Brains” money in 1998–2000
and is earmarked for up to $4.6 million in
2000–2002, will concentrate on beefing up
an already-strong journalism and communications
program and on building strength
in areas of applied science such as coal
chemistry.
If Kentucky is to realize its ambitious
enrollment plans—an increase of 10,000
undergraduates in the next two years,
80,000 by the year 2020—much of the
growth will have to be in the state’s 29 two-year
community and technical colleges.
After a bitter fight during a special legislative
session in 1997, all but one of the 14
community colleges were wrenched from
the control of the University of Kentucky
and were joined with 15 technical colleges
in a new Kentucky Community and Technical
College System (KCTCS). Only Lexington
Community College, in the university’s
home town, remains under UK administrative
supervision.
President Wethington was determined
to hold on to the community colleges,
which gave the university political clout
throughout the state. Governor Patton was
just as determined to
break the university’s hold
over the two-year schools.
The two sides lobbied
legislators intensively and
used newspaper, radio and
TV ads to press their cases
with the public. When the
University of Kentucky
basketball team played in
the national championships
in Indianapolis in
March 1997, students handed
out lapel buttons that
read, “Keep us No. 1. UK
and our community colleges.”
“It was a major, major
battle,” said Ron Geoghegan,
a lobbyist for Bell
South of Kentucky and
former chairman of Kentucky
Advocates for Higher
Education, a group that
lobbies for more money
for the state’s colleges and
universities. “If the governor
had lost that fight,
he probably would have
lost the whole reform
package.”
But the Legislature approved
the reforms, including
consolidation of
all the two-year schools
into the KCTCS, with 28
member institutions, credit
enrollment of 46,000,
non-credit enrollment of
more than 150,000 and an
annual budget of more
than $380 million.
Patton still savors the victory. “We think
we’re getting the University of Kentucky
away from being the biggest empire in the
state, to being the biggest contributor to
the state,” the governor said in an interview.
IWethington, the loser, will leave the
University of Kentucky presidency next
year.
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| Michael B. McCall is president of the newly formed Kentucky Community and Technical College System. |
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It is one thing to create a new structure
for the community and technical schools,
and quite another to make it work. That
job fell to Michael B. McCall, who was
executive director of the South Carolina
technical college system before becoming
KCTCS president in January 1999.
One of McCall’s goals is to improve
cooperation between the community and
technical colleges—in some cases, one
school will not accept the other’s credits,
even if they are in the same town.
Gordon Davies thinks McCall is succeeding.
“Nobody is going to be able to
take that system apart now,” he said.
“We’re driving toward a system in which
the distinction between community colleges
and technical colleges will disappear.”
McCall also hopes to provide “faster
and better service to business and industry”
by training young people for the
Kentucky workforce and also by
upgrading the skills of those who already
have jobs.
He pointed to a joint effort by KCTCS
and the University of Louisville to train
workers for United Parcel Service, which
McCall said was a factor in a UPS decision
to keep its regional headquarters in Louisville.
Perhaps the most difficult of the Kentucky
reforms has been to establish the
Council on Postsecondary Education as a
credible state planning agency.
In the past, higher education policy
often emerged from a series of turf battles
between powerful campus presidents, with
little thought given to what was best for the
state as a whole. There was a coordinating
agency but its recommendations were
routinely ignored by campus officials, who
went directly to favorite legislators with
their requests.
“There was no system, just a collection
of feudal baronies,” said Walter Baker, a
former state senator who is now a member
of the Council on Postsecondary Education.
Governor Patton made several strong
appointments to the council, and the council
then selected Davies as its first president.
Davies had been director of the State
Council of Higher Education of Virginia
for 20 years before he was fired in 1997 by
council appointees of George Allen, a conservative
Republican who was then Virginia’s
governor.
“I considered his dismissal in Virginia to
be a positive,” said Leonard Hardin, former
chairman of the board of the First National
Bank of Louisville. Hardin was
chairman of the Kentucky Council on
Postsecondary Education when Davies
was selected. “We needed a hardnosed,
tough guy who would not be buffaloed by
anyone, and we got one,” he said.
To enhance the prestige of the council
presidency, the reform legislation says the
job should pay more than any of the state’s
university presidents earn. Davies’ current
annual salary of $274,000 is higher than
that of University of Kentucky President
Charles Wethington, although a presidential
house and other perquisites probably
provide Wethington with a larger
total compensation package.
Before agreeing to take the job, Davies
insisted on meeting the governor and came
away convinced that Patton was committed to spending the money needed to
make sharp improvements in the state’s
colleges and universities. “For this governor,
higher education was the starting point
for the budget, not something you fill in
later,” he said.
Davies has used the incentive trust
funds to bring about change and also has
introduced “benchmark budgeting,” an
approach that bases each university’s budget
on comparisons with similar schools
across the country and with a few better financed
campuses outside the state.
For instance, Kentucky State, the only
historically black institution in Kentucky, is
compared not only with similar universities
like Morgan State, in Maryland, and South
Carolina State but also with racially diverse
schools such as Northern Michigan University
and California State University,
Bakersfield.
“Benchmarking” has been controversial.
In its budget recommendations to the
governor for the 2000–2002 biennium, the
council proposed that campuses which had
been funded inadequately in the past in
particular, Northern Kentucky and Western
Kentucky universities—should get
larger increases than the other six regional
campuses.
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Eastern Kentucky University President Robert E. Kustra, shown with the campus
behind him, thinks Eastern Kentucky has been short-changed in the state budget process. |
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This brought howls of protest from
other campus presidents, especially President
Kustra of Eastern Kentucky University.
At a state Senate hearing last February,
and in subsequent public remarks,
Kustra accused Davies and the council of
playing favorites.
“I have some skeptics on my staff who
think the council was using the budget to
restore the balance of power because they
think Eastern Kentucky has too much political
clout,” Kustra said in an interview.
One of these skeptics (and the major
source of political clout) is Harry Moberly,
who is director of student judicial
affairs at Eastern Kentucky
and, more importantly,
chairman of the House of
Representatives budget committee.
“That flawed formula cost
Eastern a lot of money,” Moberly
told the campus newspaper
last spring. “That’s just
the result of incompetence and
favoritism in the Council on
Postsecondary Education.”
In an interview with National
CrossTalk, Moberly said,
“Gordon Davies plays favorites
with the institutions, depending
on his personal relations with
the presidents of the various
universities.”
Moberly claims the council
budget provided Eastern
Kentucky with $1,000 less per
full-time-equivalent student
than Western Kentucky. He
predicted that the “current
benchmarking system won’t
survive—too many legislators
are unhappy with it.”
However, council officials say Eastern
Kentucky has received annual budget increases
averaging 10.9 percent over the last
12 years, more than any other campus.
Davies said he is not “playing favorites”
with campuses but is trying “to move from
a ‘keep everybody happy’ approach to
making the most of our opportunities.” He
added, “My job is not to make them all
equally happy—my job is to invest the
state’s money wisely, and that’s what we are
doing.”
As for benchmark budgeting, “it’s not
gone if I have anything to do with it,” Davies
said.
However, an aide to Governor Patton
said “there are likely to be some
adjustments” in the benchmarking
process.
Kustra and the presidents of
Morehead State and Murray State
tried an end run around the Council
on Postsecondary Education,
appealing to the Legislature to
increase their appropriations.
They did receive small increases
but for the most part Governor
Patton’s budget proposals, based
on the council’s recommendations,
were upheld by a bipartisan
legislative coalition.
This was especially noteworthy
in a year of harsh partisanship.
The House of Representatives
was controlled by Democrats, the
state Senate by Republicans—the
first time in Kentucky history that
the Republican Party has
controlled either house—and the
two sides quarreled over almost
every issue.
Another obstacle the governor’s
higher education budget had to
overcome was the fact that at least
half a dozen legislators work for
public universities (see sidebar)
and are not shy about promoting
their campuses in the state capitol.
Several, like Harry Moberly, are in
key positions.
“We’ve gotten into a very bad situation
here in Kentucky,” said council member
Walter Baker. “The schools go out and hire
their own legislators.”
“I think it is a negative for a legislator to
be voting for the higher education budget
and holding a position at one of the institutions
at the same time,” said Richard Belisles,
state chair of Common Cause of
Kentucky. “But our state seems to be going
that way.”
Moberly defended the practice.
“I take a paid leave when the Legislature
is in session (60 days, every other
year),” he said. “We have a citizen legislature
in Kentucky. Everybody has another
job, so in that sense you could say all
of us have a conflict of interest.”
Moberly and others made several attempts
to alter the budget but largely
failed. The Legislature “recognized the
role of the council and the existence of a
(higher education) system, and I’m very
pleased about that,” said Charles Whitehead,
a northern Kentucky business executive
who is chairman of the Council on
Postsecondary Education.
The budget victory is seen by many as
an important step toward creating a higher
education system in Kentucky, reducing
the power of the individual campuses and
their legislative allies, and putting a stop to
the endless turf battles. But the war is not
over.
“Kentucky is a state of fierce regional
loyalties, and the regional universities are a
major part of that feeling of loyalty,” said
Dick Wilson, former capital bureau chief
for the Louisville Courier-Journal.
As the council moves on to other issues—
increasing enrollment; improving
retention and graduation rates; eliminating
academic programs that graduate few
students; nurturing the state’s new “virtual
university”; and tackling the problem of
adult illiteracy—bad feeling from the budget
fight might hinder progress.
Davies and the council appear to have
the support of four presidents John Shumaker
of the University of Louisville,
James Votruba of Northern Kentucky;
Gary Ransdell of Western Kentucky and
Mike McCall of the Kentucky Community
and Technical College System. But three
others—Kustra of Eastern Kentucky, Ron
Eaglin of Morehead State and Kern Alexander
of Murray State—are openly opposed,
and University of Kentucky President
Wethington reportedly refers privately
to Davies and the council as the “evil empire.”
Can the Kentucky reforms move forward
in the face of such divisions? How
long will Davies, now 62, be willing to
remain as president of the Council on
Postsecondary Education, a position in
which he acknowledges he has become a
“lightning rod for criticism?” How long can
Kentucky afford to spend such a large
share of its revenues on postsecondary
education? And will the Patton reforms
survive the governor’s departure from
office in December 2003?
“The reforms will get sidetracked somewhere
along the way. It’s bound to happen,”
the Courier-Journal’s Dick Wilson
said. “But things will never be the same as
they were before Patton came in. In 20
years this is going to be a better system of
higher education than we ever could have
expected.”
