The time seems long overdue for someone with vision, courage and ambition at the University of Toledo to take charge and shape our institutional future and thereby shape the future identity of our metropolitan region. The Governor of the State of Ohio, his Chancellor of Higher Education, the State Board of Regents, The UT Board of Trustees, President Jacobs, Provost Haggett and Dean Lee are all at present demonstrably inccapable of achieving what is appropriate and best for our local community here in Northwest Ohio. They are all outsiders, or at least act as outsiders, by shunning the richness of our local traditions, achievements and potentials in their strategic educational planning.
Mismanagement of local higher education at UT is becoming painfully obvious as we watch strangers attempt to rapidly reshape our future as a local community to serve outsider interests. Our UT administration is thinking globally without acting first on behalf of local inspirations and interests. Toledo higher education and the liberal arts in particular don’t have to be reshaped – manhandled and abused as they are – by the implementation of a unimaginative secular outsider vision of how our local public university should function as part of its future customized state-wide system. Outsider decisions are based on a global focus full of fear-mongering and fault-prone futuristic economic forecasting. Who can know the future? We in Toledo do know of our own proud traditions and our local strengths and potentials, all of which outsider educational planners seem to ignore.
The outsider story of our present higher-education condition and its future is based on patronizing perceptions of what strangers think is good for UT, a story that is full of untenable assumptions, internal contradictions, prevarications, errors and mistakes. We were recently told by our chief administrator that American higher education (implying UT as an example) is outmoded and uncompetitive in a global economy -- broken. Critical thinking reveals that our educational leadership in its strategic planning can do better for us locally, but will not. Educational planners in Columbus and their implementers on our own campus either 1) lack for a contextualized local vision of an alternative future for UT and its surrounding metropolitan community, or 2) have no interest in promoting the local good if it does not serve their secular vision of the common (statewide or global) good.
As I understand it, Governor Strickland wants Ohio higher education to be organized in a functionally-integrated way like the California system, with each institution nurturing its special strengths. One internal contradiction in all this outsider rhetoric that justifies higher-education restructuring is the governor’s claim that “competition is bad” between Ohio’s higher education institutions, while arguing at the same time that “competition is good.”
If we can choose our future based on our strengths, why can’t the University of Toledo become the Santa Cruz of the Ohio System? We can in this alternative scenario choose to nurture rather than neglect our fine liberal arts and social science departments and thus opt out of embracing STEMM so comprehensively and campus-wide at the sacrifice of our other demonstrated strengths. The point is we A&S faculty and in the liberal arts and social sciences have had little or no choice in shaping the future identity of UT. The Strategic Plan is being imposed on UT as a top-down dictated document.
The outsider story neglects to mention that Toledo already has myriad strengths and assets, only some of which are directly STEMM-related: a local multicultural community rich in linguistic, literary, musical, artistic and culinary traditions from around the world; a unique historic glass-crafting industry; a world class museum; a vibrant sports-centered, popular culture; a rich transportation history; beautiful Metroparks; varied developed and undeveloped waterfronts and wetlands; remarkable architectural variety; agrarian wisdoms including communal and family values resistant to secularism, avarice and corruption. All these and other forms of social, cultural and economic capital combine in Toledo to continue to constitute a landscape of opportunity for local higher education research, teaching and outreach. The venerable liberal arts and the social sciences at the University of Toledo can successfully achieve world class status by continuing to entrench their efforts at the local scale, meanwhile maintaining global awareness.
“Toledo” already has an international place identity related to excellence in advanced manufacturing and education that transcends local, regional, state and national borders. We might model our alternative vision of UT excellence in higher education in light of what we know of the magnificence of Old Toledo, in Spain. Old Toledo was best known worldwide a as sword manufacturing city and as a multicultural educational center of excellence. The city and its excellence in education were inseparable in their singular identity, comprising a Toledo famed around the world for its highest-quality “swords and savants.”
Toledo, Ohio, at present, also has an alternative future comprised in part of “sword” and “savant” should we choose to take that path in higher education at UT. Our specialist glass manufacturing history embodied at present in thin-film photovoltaic research can be our UT Sword. Our past and present local multicultural hybrid vigor that continues to vitalize liberal arts and social science higher education potential at UT can be our Savant. These two are exceptionally complementary at the local level and have community-wide appeal to foster our future higher education emphases -- should we choose to incorporate them in our local strategic planning initiatives. It is time to act. Let’s promote our own interests, our Sword and our Savant, against destructive outsider interests that jeopardize what we at the University of Toledo already know and can do best, assisted by infusions of more visionary, courageous and community-spirited local leadership.
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