Dick The Butcher Had It Right

Well, a while back Clay Jenkinson asked in his newspaper column what we could do that would be really, really good for North Dakota if we basically had unlimited amounts of money, because that’s what our oil is going to provide. One expert said our state government budget surplus could go from One Billion Dollars to Six Billion Dollars, and that we should plan to do big things with that kind of money. I’ve read a couple of responses by people I admire, Ken Rogers, editorial page editor for the Bismarck Tribune and Tom Dennis, editorial page editor for the Grand Forks Herald, and both have included Higher Education in their discussions.

They’re on the right track. I’ve discussed this Clay before and I’ll share it with you now.

Here’s the basic premise:

We Make North Dakota the Public Higher Education Center of the Universe.

Here’s how.

First, we serve notice on every North Dakota University/College/Junior College Professor, Assistant Professor, Instructor, Dean, Vice President, President, Middle and Top Level Managers and Professional Staff that their jobs will be ending at some arbitrary date, say 18 or 24 months hence. All of them.

That’s the bad news – for them. Here’s the good news.

We announce that we are going to double, triple, or even quadruple (I haven’t figured out yet how high we should go) every one of the salaries we pay those people, and they are going to be welcome to reapply for their jobs. But they will have to compete for them with everyone else who applies, and if it turns out that North Dakota is paying the highest salaries in Higher Education in America, as word spreads (I don’t think we’d have to worry about that—this will be the biggest news in higher education in many years—maybe ever) we should attract the very best applicants in Higher Education in America – academic, professional, and administrative. Some of the current staff will make the cut. Some won’t.

The ultimate goal here is to have the single best public university system in America—maybe the World. This will work mostly because those we hire will get the chance to live and work in an intellectual community that challenges them to greater heights. And get paid what they are worth.

Meanwhile, during that time between when we announce this, and when we rehire – I’d like to think we could do it in 18-24 months – we set about reinventing our system.

I’m not going to pretend I know how to do this. It might involve closing, reinventing missions, merging, God knows what all. But I bet we could put together a team of the very brightest North Dakotans and expatriates – businessmen, educators, farmers, carpenters, philosophers, coal miners, economists (well, the jury is still, out on economists), doctors, lawyers, journalists and even a politician or two – and they could figure it out. If you throw out all the rules and just start over, you could get past sacred cows like duplication of programs and degrees and other problems identified by Elwyn G. Robinson in his “too-much mistake” theory.

We can specialize, or we can generalize. Our goal can be to turn out the best engineers in the world (but only at one of our universities), or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers, or welders, or whatever we want each element of our university system to specialize in. We could have one great university that only teaches philosophy and the humanities.

So we create this system, and what happens?

Well, I’ll bet the best students in America will come here to learn, because it will be the best place in America to come to learn.

And I’ll bet, in the end, this really won’t cost the state of North Dakota a lot of money. Great Universities and University Systems end up generating lots of money, not costing lots of money. We just need that initial investment—that first billion or two—to begin the process.

After that, I don’t know what happens. I can guess, though, that if we have the best Higher Education system in America, and get the best students in America graduating from it, in the end, as a state, we win. Big time. In the end, many of them will live here, work here, raise families here, start businesses here, invent and manufacture things here, encourage (or demand) development of the arts and humanities here, grow things here, and generally, just help us create the very best place in America to live.

Dick the butcher, in Henry VI, Part II, uttered the famous line “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” I like to use that line, not as anything to do with lawyers, but as a euphemism for making radical change. You’ve got to do something radical, something shocking, to get going down the road to quantum change. “Killing” all the professors seems like a good place to start.

I ran this by one of our University Presidents (who's gone now) one night a couple of years ago, after supper and a couple classes of wine. Didn't get much response. Pretty short conversation. I think he blamed it on the wine. What do you think?