IU education is far from mediocre

Several senior faculty members have recently expressed concerns about IU's low ranking among Big Ten universities by U.S. News & World Report. They claim IU's status as a research university has been falling over the past decade and that there is a "culture of mediocrity" on campus. This claim is insulting to the many high-performing, superb faculty members on the Bloomington campus and results from a superficial understanding of the U.S. News rankings. There is, and has been, a culture of achievement at IU.\nAny set of rankings must be taken with a grain of salt. But for the sake of argument, let's look closely at the criteria used to create these rankings.\nThe single most important measure of academic quality used by U.S. News is comparative academic reputation, based on peer review by faculty and administrators nationwide. In higher education, peer review is the standard means for evaluating academic quality in promotion and tenure, salary increments, hiring and program evaluation.\nBy this measure, U.S. News has IU tied for fourth among Big Ten public universities and tied for 11th among public universities nationally. Hardly mediocre!\nThe "underrating" of IU is not a new phenomenon. Nor do the U.S. News ratings, when viewed over time, support the idea that IU's stature is eroding. In the 1990s, IU was rated highly in academic reputation. IU's overall ranking has increased slightly in the last seven years, but we have been placed in the "second tier" of universities.\nTo understand why, we have to look carefully at other criteria.\nThe magazine keeps its exact formula secret, but it does make known several measures it uses. One is expenditures per student, a combination of tuition and state support. Both IU and Purdue are near the bottom of the Big Ten in state support. To increase expenditures per student, IU would have to increase tuition dramatically. We could raise our ranking by doubling our tuition. But our students are too important to do that.\nAnother important criteria to U.S. News is grants and contracts. While IU as a whole, including the School of Medicine, does well in this category, grant revenues for the Bloomington campus are modest. IU does not have a medical, engineering or agricultural school and focuses on liberal arts, which do not attract large grants. Since Herman B Wells helped build this campus, it focuses on the arts and sciences. We are proud of our excellence in these areas, but this focus hurts the campus in the eyes of some rating agencies.\nA recent study by University of Florida researchers has also been cited as evidence of IU's "decline." But that study falls into several of the same traps. Bloomington's overall research effort is considered quite low. If figures from the School of Medicine are added to IU's total, our rankings improve.\nTo boost our status in such surveys, we could close the School of Music, greatly reduce humanities and social sciences programs, move the medical school and open an engineering school. But that's ridiculous! \nThe central point is that we will continue to make every effort to improve what we do, but we will not change our mission just to become more attractive to certain rating agencies.\nIU's critics also point to a supposed exodus of outstanding faculty members. Inevitably, a university with the academic reputation of IU will be the target of "raids" by other universities. Sometimes other public and private institutions make offers that IU, given its budget constraints, cannot match. The good news is we have been able to retain many faculty members who have been strongly recruited by other universities. Just as important, we have had excellent success attracting promising young scholars to IU to continue our proud academic tradition.\nWe have been helped greatly in this regard by our fund-raising successes. Endowed chairs and professorships are a powerful tool in attracting and retaining top-quality faculty. In the past five years, our number of such positions has gone from near the bottom of the Big Ten to among the leaders.\nThe academic quality of IU, as measured by peer review, is outstanding. But because of other criteria, the ranking of the campus does not reflect its academic quality. We should continue to try to improve academic quality, and steps are being taken to accomplish that. But we should resist changing our mission just to meet arbitrary ratings criteria. And we should reject the negative perspective that substitutes those criteria for recognition of our true academic merit.