Wendell Berry and Top 20
By Danny Mayer
“We did not expect and we did not invite these challenges. But even in the presence of such obstacles, our commitment to mission and mandate remains the same. Our shared ambitions are still before us, fixed on our collective horizon, unmoved by time or fate or by short-term challenges we cannot control.”
Lee Todd, President’s Budget Message, June 17, 2008
“Rather than trying to be nationally or globally prominent as a great research institution,if the University of Kentucky would meet its local responsibilities and really meet the needs of the land and the people of this state, it would be a city on a hill.”
Wendell Berry
On June 23, the Lexington Herald-Leader informed area readers that Kentucky author Wendell Berry was in the process of removing his papers from the University of Kentucky special collections archives. Berry, a UK alumni and former faculty member in the UK English Department, sent a letter to the university dated December 20, 2009 in which, according to the Herald-Leader, he “excoriated his alma matter” for voting to accept last October a $7 million dollar gift-bribe from Alliance Coal to construct an unneeded dormitory for male basketball players, to be unsubtly named the Wildcat Coal Lodge.
“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry,” Berry wrote in the December letter. “[This is an act that] puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the university.” The papers are currently in the process of being moved to the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort.
Though the story has largely been seen as a repudiation by Berry, a tireless coal activist throughout his public life in Kentucky, of UK’s position on coal, the author’s divestment from UK was in fact rooted in a more fundamental disagreement with his alma mater: the university’s quixotic quest for becoming a “Top 20 Research University” by the year 2020, a process that has meant, Berry has argued, the sacrifice of state needs and resources for national and global interests and pursuits. For Berry, the Coal Lodge is just the most visible symptom; the disease is the neoliberal UK Top 20 Mission.
It is this disease, UK Top 20, that Berry’s letter compels us to address. We must ask, as a state university is UK’s mission, to be ranked nationally in the Top 20 of public research universities, one that will benefit the state, as Lee Todd (and nearly every publication covering Lee Todd) has claimed these past 10 years? What exactly do Top 20 research universities do?
According to Todd, who has used the same misleading statistics for over 5 years now, Top 20 research universities will make the state richer, smarter, healthier, and better-employed. This is true, of course, except when it is not, which is often. The correlations Todd makes tend to be more regional than Top 20-based. Incomes are below the national median in North Carolina, Georgia and many other southern states home to Top 20 universities, a region where incomes are lower than the rest of the nation; conversely, in the northeast, even failed non-Top 20 universities like Rutgers and the University of Rhode Island are situated in states significantly richer than Kentucky and other states housing Top 20 universities. Even more damning, the statistics clearly show that the difference between the national “average” and states that house Top 20 institutions is negligible. Statistically, the greatest jump by far in a healthy, educated, economically secure and employed state is simply getting UK to average. Add it up, and Top 20 doesn’t measurably do the things Todd has been claiming it does.
But Top 20 does do certain things. On page 19 of the 2008/2009 Operating and Capital Budget Plan, housed on the university’s Budget Office website, UK offers an operating budge comparison between the year’s 1998-99 and 2008-09. The comparison, done in the service of a call for an increase in state appropriations, sheds a pretty stark light on what Top 20 does do: spend and cost money, shit loads of it.
In the 1998/99 school year, two years before Todd’s arrival amped up a Top 20 rhetoric that was embraced and openly celebrated throughout the university community, the university’s operating budget was 1.05 billion dollars; a mere ten years later, as Top 20 hysteria began to crest, its operating budget stood at 2.2 billion dollars, a whopping 100% increase. Rather than benefiting the state, there’s considerable evidence to show that the university has actually sucked away needed state resources, over a billion dollars of it, all on the pretense of gaining a national notoriety that, in hard economic terms, has mainly benefited those at the top ends of the university hierarchy—hotshot endowed professors imported to the state for $125,000 to teach one class a semester and perform research, Vice Presidents with large slush accounts, university presidents and basketball coaches making bank. And yet, with all that increased operating revenue, UK still has staff—people who struggle to get by living all around us throughout Lexington—who get paid wages below $20,000 a year. A billion dollar increase in revenue over ten years, and the college can’t give its workers a living wage? We might say that, in terms of resource extraction, UK’s Top 20 gambit is strikingly similar to the Eastern Kentucky mining racket.
The immense new operating budget, required for running a nationally recognized Top 20 university (or one that aspires to be one), has meant a change in what the university must do to feed its needs. Ten years ago, when our university president did not make $500,000 a year and tuition was half as much, the state contributed 27% of the operating budget, and the hospital 27%. Now, despite an over 10% increase in state appropriations over the decade (a yearly allocation that has increased over $30 million dollars in ten years), UK’s roided-out budget needs have meant that that state’s contribution has fallen to 14.6% of the operating budge. The hospital, which as part of the current ongoing healthcare bubble has received nearly $700 million dollars in building bonds over the last several years—university and state debt—to create a nationally-recognized hospital, now generates 34% of the university’s operating budget. Alongside its growing fiscal importance to UK, the hospital complex has taken up a significant amount of campus space, even though few “students” have access to it as an educational resource.
When Lee Todd genuflected to the needs of UK basketball, it might be because “affiliated corporations,” of which the Athletic Department may be the most lucrative, at 280 million dollars in 2008/2009 now contribute a nearly equal amount to the state’s contribution. And if it was King Coal who won out in the bidding war over UK’s branding image for the Coal Lodge, Todd’s meek handling merely reflects the fact that Top 20 universities require energy, shitloads of it. Todd can’t disagree with coal interests because cheap dirty coal—while immensely destructive to its regional neighborhood—is structurally necessary for UK to reach its national goals. How could one, after all, pay for all the energy required to run all those new Top 20 buildings.
Berry sent his letter in late December, at which point the university all but ignored it. Corporate management is the game now, not intellectual engagement with tough ideas. Though Berry is among a handful of living UK graduates known and respected the world over (his visage looming larger the more we continue to destroy our communities), UK President Lee Todd did not even have the decency to respond in person, assigning that responsibility instead to UK archives director Diredre Scaggs in late January—a month after Berry’s hand-typed correspondence. In fact, the Herald-Leader was only able to look at and report on the letter in June, after the university forced them into filing an open-records request.
Todd still hasn’t said anything public about Berry, but then again, that shouldn’t surprise anyone. He also fled a group of students who wanted to question Todd and the Board of Trustees at their board meeting. Why should Berry be any different; like the students, his interests don’t make UK much money. Only big money players like Alliance Coal’s Joe Craft or UK Athletic Association’s Jon Calipari or groveling publicity writers like the Herald Leader and student body presidents can get access to Todd.
It is not easy to suggest that many years, money and effort have been misspent. Nor is it easy to recognize that a goal feverishly horse-whipped into the public for so many years by our paleface university president; city and state politicians; university students, faculty and Board of Trustees members; and respectable publications ranging from the Kentucky Kernel on up to the Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times—all slobbering over the noble goal of the Midwestern-State-U-That-Could—has been, well, wrong. Dead wrong. Damagingly wrong.
We should not fret too much over this feeling of being hoodwinked and taken for a ride; in the United States ca. 2010, we might as well add this to our list of pricked belief bubbles: a peace-loving United States; Barack Obama the liberal savior; Afghanistan the good war; perpetually rising real-estate values; sustainable service economies; the benevolence of extractive industries and the universities that are working to become them.
Leave a Reply