| | Anne Winkler-Morey, W A M M
| Every year the conservative news magazine U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) ranks colleges and universities. Today Minnesotans are considering a "strategic positioning plan" aimed at raising the ranking of the University of Minnesota in the USNWR contest.
In accordance with this occasion, we hereby inaugurate the first annual Alternative college and university ranking contest. International results will be tallied and announced later. In the meantime Minnesotans should heed this warning: The U of M's strategic positioning plan, if implemented as is, would plunge the U of M to a dangerously low spot (think triple digits) on our scale.
Our Goal: We are looking for premier resource colleges and universities bold enough to tackle the world's most pressing problems, such as inequality, non-sustainability, maldistribution, and militarism. We have implemented the following measurement criteria for colleges and universities:
1. Are they financially sound? Does the community served by the institution demand "money for schools, not for war" and work to eliminate the single most wasteful and destructive drain on our education budgets-the military? Are for-profit motivated corporations funding research or does the community tax corporations and create their own research agenda?
2. Are they cooperatively managed? Do architects work with agronomists, urban planners, and educators to build cities that eliminate homelessness and hunger and provide access to mass transit and education in a manner that is sustainable for seven generations to come? Do medical researchers work hand in hand with places and people most in need of medical care to provide preventions and cures accessible to all who are afflicted? Do dancers, painters, and actors work hand in hand with educators and politicians committed to opening the doors of theaters, museums, and art curricula to reach every urban and rural community with art that genuinely reflects their realities?
3. Do they harness available brain power? Does the education institution have mechanisms in place to fully harness the knowledge of those who are experts in the problems that most acutely affect our society? For example, those who grew up without homes and people whose culture is not dominant and privileged? And people whose skin color makes them 27 times more likely to understand the inequalities of our judicial system, whose work and citizenship status makes them most acutely aware of the need for a global view of the world's problems? What about people who think differently than their teachers? What about communities where the current education system does not reach? Will people be included who best understand the need for education reform that truly leaves no child behind?
4. Do they appear to be equitable priorities? At the U of M, for example, we want to see the Rafael Espinosa School of Labor and not the Carlson School of Management have the most prestigious building on campus. We would also like to see that the building that houses the department of Chicano and American Indian Studies is fully handicappedaccessible and furnished with the best heating and cooling system, the cleanest water and the latest education technology available to students elsewhere on campus.
While our final tallies will take months, today we issue the University of Minnesota this warning: The strategic positioning plan, as it is written, will plunge the U of M down in our ratings. To avoid this devastating fall in status, we suggest the following:
1. Keep General College open and expand its programs and budget. Because this is one of the programs at the U of M that addresses our brain power needs, it needs to be expanded and cloned until the entire university will, like General College, represent and serve the needs of the diverse brain power resources we have in this state.
2. Replace meaningless rhetoric with a budget and a concrete plan to make pre-K-12 education a college prep system for all in Minnesota. Eliminate deceitful rhetoric about alleged diversity and support for pre-K-12 education. Pre-K-12 education in this state has suffered horrendous budget cuts in the last five years, exacerbating education gaps between white and nonwhite, rich and poor, suburban and rural/urban students. Because the university is a land grant institution and the final stage of Minnesota's public education system, the university's strategic positioning plan must include a concrete financial plan to reverse this devastating trend.
Implementing our new alternative ranking system could mean a world of change. The University of Minnesota could be not number three, not number two, but number one!
May 2005: Anne Winkler-Morey is finally leaving the University of Minnesota for parts unknown, after ten years of teaching in the Chicano Studies Department.
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