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People | George Davis
"Perspective" Published by the Tucson Citizen, August 14, 2000
Thirty years ago today, I first arrived at the University of Arizona as a young assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences, fresh from graduate school at the University of Michigan. Professor Laurence McKinley Gould became one of my principal mentors. He was a heroic geoscientist and academic leader who had served as second-in-command of the Byrd Expedition in Antarctica in 1928 and as president of Carleton College in Minnesota for 15 years. Larry had much to do with forging the University of Arizona's determination to aspire to yet higher levels of academic achievement. His influence on geosciences was direct and personal in selecting new faculty, recruiting new students, evaluating candidates for promotion and tenure or deciding on new programmatic initiatives, Larry would admonish us: Good is the enemy of excellence. Were he with us today, Larry would address all of us: faculty, students, staff and administrators; regents, public officials and political leaders; corporate and business leaders in the private sector; alumni and parents of students or former students; and the citizens of Arizona who influence and are benefited by the University of Arizona. Larry would caution us: we cannot afford to be satisfied with good, for there is too much at stake. As we look around the nation, we see other states investing more seriously in their universities. This is producing a more marked differentiation of states and state universities that are good or even very good, and those that are excellent. The motivation in this race is not a popularity contest. The motivation is to harness more fully the enormous leveraging power of universities in the New Economy. The ultimate goal is to use universities to achieve a better-educated citizenry, a more knowledgeable work force, a stronger economy and a better quality of life in all quarters of society. At the University of Arizona, where can the investment in excellence do the most good? In my view, it is in recruiting and retaining outstanding faculty. Our capacity to achieve excellence in our primary missions of serving students, creating new knowledge, and extending outreach to society springs directly from our faculty. Teacher-scholars are the fountains from which everything flows within an institution of higher learning. As I look around the University of Arizona, I see that we are losing our capacity to compete effectively with peer institutions in the recruitment and retention of faculty. Our mean faculty salaries are well below the 50th percentile of our peers. This makes our excellence vulnerable. We see this across the landscape of the university: in the arts and sciences colleges of fine arts, social and behavior sciences, humanities and science; in the professional colleges of agriculture and life sciences, business and public administration, architecture, planning and landscape architecture, education, law, engineering and mines; and in the health sciences colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health. We are losing ground because salaries are not competitive with other state universities. What is at stake as we lose outstanding faculty or fail to attract our top choices for new positions? We will diminish our capacity to generate new information. We will lessen our opportunities to shape student-centered learning environments within the university. We will reduce the impact of our outreach in agriculture, K-12 education, health sciences, technology transfer and the performing arts. It is the quality of the faculty that determines the degree to which we achieve excellence in our mission goals, or the degree to which we slip to merely good. With outstanding faculty, we are in the strongest position possible to discover new knowledge to prepare students to be contributing members of modern global society, and to achieve the overall goal of greater society, and to achieve the overall goal of greater self-realization for individuals, and for society as a whole. I report this now, and I call upon Larry Gould's admonition, because there is opportunity to reverse the trend and move the University of Arizona and our state toward their proper position of leadership and excellence in higher education. The opportunity lies in Gov. Jane Hull's sales tax initiative, Proposition 301. Passage of Proposition 301, which will require a strong, collective endorsement, would have a significant, positive impact on education in general and the University of Arizona in particular. The increased revenue generated from just 6 cents for $10 of sales will generate an additional $394 million a year for our K-12 schools and approximately $56 million for higher education. This infusion would put us in a much stronger position to compete and would fuel our university's ability to carry Arizona forward. Larry Gould came to the University of Arizona through a recruitment effort -- one that was successful beyond imagination. Larry's positive impact on students and faculty, and on everyone in the Tucson community who got to know him was life changing. We need to remind ourselves that every recruitment and retention challenge, when met properly and competitively, enhances the University of Arizona. Outstanding faculty who can contribute to student learning and the creation of knowledge, benefit Tucson and all of Arizona in an extraordinary way. Let us not lose the opportunity to strengthen our position. Instead, let us invest a little more to achieve excellence. George H. 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