Editor,
Despite its status as a Carnegie Tier-One research institution, UNM occupies the third tier of this year's U.S. News rankings.
The Princeton Review has dubbed its faculty the most inaccessible. Beyond the rankings, more evidence suggests that UNM is not competing with the nation's select schools as it continues to over-admit unqualified students and over-employ marginal faculty.
Fewer than half of the students graduate in six years. A full quarter of freshmen do not make it to the second semester. Exacerbating the retention problem is an acceptance rate above 90 percent. Rather than deferring them to community colleges, UNM accepts students who will certainly fail, in order to boost per-capita funding from the Legislature.
The principal objection to a marginal increase in admissions is a corresponding but hypothetical drop in minority enrollment. In fact, UNM's key comparative advantage is its diverse student body. Standardized test scores and high school grades are often insufficient indicators of a prospective student's ability to excel in college. With the current abysmal retention rate, it is hard to argue that lax admission policies help minority students or anyone else.
In three years, UNM has had three presidents. One resigned shortly after suggesting the radical proposal that UNM ought to raise its admission standards. The proposal did not fare well with the Board of Regents.
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The regents fired the wrong person. Their target should have been under-performing faculty.
Unlike university presidents elsewhere who are cleaning their houses, UNM's former provost Reed Dasenbrock favored promotion in cases of academic dishonesty. Bruce Perlman, former director of the School of Public Administration and top city executive, published a book through a vanity press in Mexico that advertises: "We specialize in never saying no." Perlman's promotion committee did not seem to notice the shoddy scholarship. It took the complaint of another public administration professor before anyone took notice. The Perlman case demonstrates that political connections and political correctness are the currency of New Mexico's
pueblo-revival ivory tower.
Remember Richard Berthold? He was the UNM professor who told a class of freshmen on September 11, 2001: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote." In his defense, he has sincerely apologized. Regardless of his politics, a database author query yielded no original articles he authored in a peer-reviewed journal since 1978. Yet, he finished 29 years as a faculty member at UNM when he was finally pressured to retire.
It is true that the majority of tenured professors at UNM are exceptionally talented and qualified. Instead of offering market salaries, UNM offers small course loads and quick job security in comparison to more select and competitive universities.
It is time for the Faculty Senate to acknowledge that there is a problem, rather than abdicate responsibility by attacking the rankings. It is time to liberalize the marketplace of ideas by eschewing tenure and increasing admissions
standards.
Austin R. Duus
Economic Research Assistant
Bureau of Business and
Economic Research
