As someone who has attended, researched, and worked at Maryland, I keep wondering: how did we get here? I think it starts before Loh, when the university drastically elevated its aspirations. A brief timeline.
For me, the Maryland of today really started to take shape in 1998 when Dan Mote became president. At that time, Maryland was much more accessible, engaged in less research, and often didn't compare itself to major flagship universities. Mote changed all of that.
Using "excellence" as his guiding principle, Mote immediately set out the raise the bar Maryland used to judge itself. He wanted the university to see itself differently, as major research university. And he thought it was a problem that Maryland wasn't particularly selective.
So he changed the institution's list of peers and aspirational peers to include major flagship universities. He pushed to increase selectivity. And he emphasized research and supported aggressive pursuit of external funding. The result? Better rankings.
Under Mote, Maryland became a top-20 national public university for the first time. And anyone will tell you that competition to remain in that elite group is fierce and EXPENSIVE. Mote launched the first big pillar of Maryland's new-era strategy: innovation and entrepreneurship.
Maryland became crazed with entrepreneurship, starting new centers, academic programs, business pitch competitions, marketing strategies, etc. Did these efforts results in the creation of successful companies? Not really. But it was really good for fundraising. Donors loved it.
There's one donor, in particular, we ought to highlight. Kevin Plank, the former Terp football player and Under Armour founder. No one could have predicted the meteoric rise of UA, but Maryland quickly realized the potential and cultivated the relationship.
Plank loved the entrepreneurship craze and even funded the university's largest business pitch competition, Cupid's Cup. And, for understandable reasons, he also loved Maryland sports. It became clear early on that Maryland athletics, UA, and Plank would be tightly linked.
By the time Loh became president in 2010, Maryland's future had already clearly been pegged to prestige-seeking funded by entrepreneurship and UA-branded athletics. Loh doubled-down on the athletics and entrepreneurship strategies.
A cornerstone of Loh's new strategic plan for the university was innovation and entrepreneurship. He hired admins, created a new center, launched a "Fearless Ideas" fundraising campaign, and moved Maryland to the Big 10 in pursuit of lucrative television money.
The physical embodiment of Maryland's new-era strategy came with the announcement in 2015 that Plank donated $25 million to turn an old basketball arena into an athletic training facility & classroom space for entrepreneurship. Because only at Maryland would that make sense.
I wrote about that building and the values it reveals here: chronicle.com/blogs/conversa…
Returning to my question: how did we get here? I think it stems from Maryland's zealous pursuit of prestige, which required that it make a set of choices and create a particular type of culture, within which it was possible for competition on multiple levels to take priority.
Loh should be held accountable for his contributions to this environment. However, we ought to recognize that this has been part of a multi-decade change process at Maryland involving A LOT of people, including boosters, donors, and policymakers.
There have been pockets of resistance to Maryland's Entrepreneurship-Athletics strategy. But it hasn't been nearly loud enough, and it hasn't been effective. Many people seemed okay Maryland's aspirations. New buildings, better students, more $, fancy UA-designed apparel.
So, I wasn't shocked by what happened at Maryland. I kind of saw this happening--no, not exactly this, but some sort of athletics-based crisis. And, truthfully, we've arrived at a moment in higher ed where Maryland's path to this crisis is entirely UNREMARKABLE.
If there's one thing you can count on, it's this: there will be another Maryland. Many other universities are traversing the same path to prestige and confronting a similar set of choices and trade-offs. But I don't think it has to be this way.
I hope that we all (professors, students, leaders, parents, fans) wake up to the consequences that trail the combination of declining state support & a radical rise in a public institution's aspirations. What values are we willing to risk to pay for the rise? END
