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Michael Drake (Former OSU President)

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ORD_Buckeye said:
The point of the piece isn't necessarily what's in it. It's who's writing it: a former trustee and current foundation board member. Maybe it's the old Kremlinologist in me, but I see that--and where it was chosen to be published--as getting out the word publicly that Drake enjoys the support of the people in power at Ohio State. As or quantifying Drake's achievements, I think that's pretty easy to do in everything from the average SAT score of entering freshmen to the dollar amount of the endowment, annual fundraising (topped half a billion for the first time) and research budgets to the billion dollar operating surplus that the university ran last year.
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Moving this discussion to the Drake thread.

Of course, to evaluate those factors (average SAT of incoming freshmen, dollar amount of endowment, annual fundraising, research budgets) you'd have to look at the trend lines over 20+ years, to see whether those improvements were maintained under Drake's administration, or accelerated. I don't have that information at my fingertips, and if you do, I'd be interested in seeing it. And just to reiterate, I am not criticizing Drake.

On an unrelated side note, were you being serious when referring to yourself as an "old Kremlinologist", or using that as a figure of speech? If the former, I'd imagine you have some interesting stories to tell.
 
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zincfinger said:
Moving this discussion to the Drake thread.

Of course, to evaluate those factors (average SAT of incoming freshmen, dollar amount of endowment, annual fundraising, research budgets) you'd have to look at the trend lines over 20+ years, to see whether those improvements were maintained under Drake's administration, or accelerated. I don't have that information at my fingertips, and if you do, I'd be interested in seeing it. And just to reiterate, I am not criticizing Drake.

On an unrelated side note, were you being serious when referring to yourself as an "old Kremlinologist", or using that as a figure of speech? If the former, I'd imagine you have some interesting stories to tell.
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Studied for it and my senior honors thesis was based on it. The job, however, became largely irrelevant while I was in grad school though I did do political and economic analysis on post-Soviet Russia.

Your above points are good. I do know that fundraising has averaged a 14% increase per year under his tenure. Increases in SAT scores have slowed, but there's several external factors at play there such as the declining population of Ohio high school graduates and the (mistaken) desire to increase the freshmen class beyond 7K per year. If we shrunk it back to the low 6K range it was a decade ago, the ACT average would shoot up to around 31. His initiatives at affordability though have clearly come through as evidenced by the fact that the school's now tuition free for any Ohio resident whose family makes under 60K per year. Nobody says he's doing this alone, but the buck stops with him, and he'd certainly be held responsible if we were stagnating in any of these areas. Overall, I think that article is a clear affirmation of support from the powers that be.
 
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