Graham says that if the regents go, he might not want his grandchildren to attend a state university--even though he long ago bought six of them pre-paid tuition contracts. A few weeks ago, he flew down from Washington to Tampa to testify before a task force on what is indisputably a state matter--something members of Congress normally don't do.
But as Graham sees it, the issue is critical, and very simple: The legislature has had it in for the board all these years because the regents won't sign off on pet projects favored by key legislators, notably a medical school at Florida State and a law school for Florida A & M. In his view, the regents are being punished for carrying out one of the main missions of any statewide higher education system: keeping local politics from driving the crucial decisions.
"Florida cannot afford to grant to each university what the university or its advocates in the legislature desire," Graham told the task force. "There must be statewide planning and control." Graham is now pressing for a state constitutional amendment that will preserve the board of regents and protect it from political interference.
The former governor seems unlikely to prevail. The task force is already putting the final touches on a plan to abolish the statewide board by 2003 and create separate boards for each of the state's 10 public universities. But Graham might take a little comfort in one piece of information: It's not just a matter of Florida politics. States all around the country seem to be fooling around with the bodies that govern their university systems. The past few years have been a time of considerable turmoil at the top of the higher education pyramid.
Kentucky stripped control of all but one of its 14 community colleges from the University of Kentucky, ending the university's role as "the biggest empire in the state," as Governor Paul Patton called it. Illinois did away with half of its statewide governing boards and turned several of its campuses loose to govern themselves. New Jersey went through a decade-long process of making its individual campuses more autonomous.
Last year, West Virginia moved to a decentralized system that's not so different from what the task force in Florida envisions. Its creation of 153 new trustee positions to oversee various individual institutions grew out of a lobbying effort by business interests to strengthen community colleges. West Virginia's move undid a plan that had been adopted just a decade earlier, when the state centralized its higher education system so that the two universities were governed by one board and all the colleges by another.
A few states, such as Minnesota, have been going in the opposite direction, moving to a more centralized system. But overall, the trend is toward reversing a course undertaken 40 years ago, when states began putting control of most of their public campuses under one roof.
Until the 1960s, most states had a flagship university and a collection of land grant and teachers' colleges that were loosely confederated, at best. California set the modern standard with its "master plan" of 1960, which centralized the management of the University of California, other four-year state colleges and community colleges under the control of three statewide boards.
By the late 1980s, governance structures in quite a few states were becoming creaky. The designers of the early coordinating boards had no idea how large their systems would grow as more of the population pursued higher education. In many cases, enrollment increased to the point where management by a single statewide entity no longer seemed practical.
But there is another, perhaps more important reason for all the recent churning in academic governance. Politicians who are unhappy about the performance of public higher education often take their frustration out on the governing boards. Changing a board's structure or responsibilities can be the equivalent of an unhappy sports owner firing the coach because he can't get rid of all the players.
"What legislators see is that education is absolutely at the heart of economic, social and cultural development," says J. Wade Gilley, president of the University of Tennessee. "People want it to do more and do it better so their state can be competitive, but they're at a loss as to how to do that. So they try to change the governance structure."
Gordon K. Davies, president of Kentucky's higher education council, puts it a little more bluntly. "You're dissatisfied with higher education, and you don't want to kick the university because it's too powerful," he says "The governing board has no power at all."
The truth is that experts and consultants don't claim to know what sort of governance works best. States whose public university systems are regarded as the nation's finest, such as California, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia, all use different structures.
"I used to believe I knew what a rational governance system was," laments David Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Now, he says, "I'm not sure governance makes much of a difference. From my perspective, one of the worst structures is in Michigan. There's no central plan whatsoever. But it would be hard to say that Michigan has poor higher education."
For all the confusion and uncertainty, there remain two basic prototypes of higher education governance. In a system such as North Carolina's, a central board has the authority to hire and fire university presidents and run the internal operations of the schools. In a decentralized plan, such as Virginia's, campuses are essentially autonomous, and the board or commission merely tries to coordinate decisions made at the campus level.
Both models have their weaknesses. The State University of New York has 64 different campuses but is run by one central board. It's difficult to imagine any such body being competent to micromanage all those sites, especially when most of the members are part-timers. On the other hand, inadequate oversight and coordination among campuses in a decentralized system are what usually prompt state intervention in the first place.
There are constant conflicts between what governors and legislatures want, on the one hand, and what state colleges think they can deliver. In a well-functioning system, a governing board provides the link between state government and the campuses. But that middleman role is a hard one to sustain. Regents and trustees have a tendency to end up less the honest broker between the state and the campuses than advocates for one master or another.
On occasion, boards can become conduits for the desires of a governor or a legislature to try to promote a larger policy agenda. This was the case, for example, in the mid-1990s, when Governor Pete Wilson successfully pushed the University of California board of regents to abolish affirmative action.
But it's rare that politicians have their way with campuses through governing boards. What happens more often is that regents become spokesmen for the campuses they oversee. In some cases, trustees are alumni who live out of state and whose natural loyalty leans more toward the college than the overall interests of the citizens. New Jersey, for example, allows up to three of the trustees at each of its campus boards to be out-of-state residents.
In addition, states with part-time legislatures often have legislators who earn their bread by working directly for a college system or campus. In Kentucky, for example, a half-dozen legislators work for public colleges and universities. The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Harold Moberly, wears another hat as director of student judicial affairs for Eastern Kentucky University, whose president has been one of the loudest critics of the 1997 governance overhaul.
One danger for states that tinker too much with their governance systems is that they make it unclear exactly who is in charge for the long haul. Outside donors, often the major source of funds for expensive modern areas of research, can grow skeptical about systems without reliable leadership.
Florida may face some of those questions if it goes ahead and abolishes its board of regents this year. In particular, there are fears that baronies will be built at the University of Florida and Florida State at the expense of less established--and less well connected--schools such as the University of West Florida and Gulf Coast University.
In part to forestall such concerns, the legislature is planning to create a new "super board" of education, charged with overseeing the elementary and secondary school systems as well as the colleges. But few experts expect that such an entity, with responsibility for educating everyone from kindergarten to graduate school, will have the in-depth knowledge necessary to govern campuses effectively.
The legislature's task force is still sorting out questions of how much authority will rest with the individual university boards and how much power the state super board will have. It may not be easy to sort out. "From my experience," says William Friday, former president of the University of North Carolina, "the overlapping systems they have mean they'll have to restructure again. It just won't be efficient."
