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- Thread starter Thump
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No offense intended, but we need to stop this nonsense. I am not opposed to Carter being Ohio State President. Best wishes to him. However, command responsibility for an aircraft carrier does not necessarily develop the skills necessary for a senior executive at Ohio State.
My concern, and it may be misplaced, is that four years at Nebraska would not be expected to prepare Carter for this challenge. In fact, Nebraska's rankings declined substantively during his time there, last year to below #800. According to the QS rankings, 5 South African universities amd 3 Egyptian universities rank above Nebraska in the World University rankings this year, and this is after Nebraska recovered some of the losses under Carter to a rank in the top 600.
Ohio State is a top 100 ranked university, with only the University of Cape Town at #165 comparable.
Universities at the level of Ohio State (and those at much lower levels) exist to develop new knowledge, often in collaboration with business, civil society, and government, so that it can be incorporated into educational programs and societal advancements. How does that look in practice?
An example of this would be the development of Columbus as a financial innovation hub during the last 60 years, in collaboration with new research that became the discipline of consumer behavior (now behavioral economics) at Fisher College of Business. The ATM, Visa card, electronic funds transfer at the point of sale, bank by phone, etc, the esteemed Journal of Finance attributed 27 of the top 30 banking innovations in the 20th century to banks headquartered in Columbus.
Bank One was the most profitable bank in America for many years and went from its beginning as City National Bank, the 4th place bank in Columbus, to become the #2 bank by market capitalization. Other beneficiaries were the Limited Stores, who became the fastest-growing and most profitable retailer in America. They convinced consumer behavior and marketing strategy prof David Kollat to join them as VP Marketing in the early 70s and developed that winning string of companies (Abercrombie and Fitch, Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, etc). Retail is detail and Fisher profs were intimately involved in the creation of those business models and retail environmental designs, based on the most recent consumer behavior findings. The Fisher CoB and its students also benefited from the interplay of those relations.
It takes about two decades to develop a professor who understands how to develop and publish such knowledge in the highest level journals. I have watched how many university presidents in Africa and Europe, who did not understand the difference between publishing in the highest level journals, saw the quality of their faculty decline, research dollars dry up, and student numbers drop--with incredibly bad outcomes for their universities that can take more than a generation to repair.
Carter is retirement age and this is likely to be his last job. His experience is largely with people who do not have the capacity to dissent or leave.
Right now, Carter is saying the things that any new leader says. Nod the head at a few programs for excellence, sing the school song with students, get around the campus. If President Carter fails to understand the core requirements of an internationally-respected research university, and small missteps can prove fatal in this regard, then things can go South very quickly. I am wondering how many leading scholars at Ohio State feel to learn that Trustees in the Talent, Compensation and Governance committee approved an amendment to the university's bylaws, making the provost "'the chief academic officer of the university' rather than chief operating officer". That seems like a plus to me, but does it have implications for funding, freedom to control one's research funding, changes to the academic structure, the attractiveness of the University to faculty and prospective leading PhD students, whatever, that might create recruiting challenges? I don't know. It's all in the details and that is why someone has to have an understanding of the requirements of a complex adaptive system, such as a public research university.
Time may tell that this is a home run hire. The point is that running a university is like herding cats, except some of those cats are sharks that simply can stand up and take a huge chunk of your reputational and research resources and staff with them. That's a dynamic one simply doesn't learn running an aircraft carrier.
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It's a very different environment at the top, and I think you're boiling it down way too simple.
People dissent a lot. People leave a lot.
Other commanders onboard have their own agendas and the chain of command is neither as linear nor as "yes man" as you're painting it.
I'm not commenting on the rest, because i think you have valid arguments there.
I see Carter as somebody who is excellent at administration, organization, and won't panic during crisis management.
The academic departments will need to execute on their end, and it should be his job to enable that by removing a lot of the day-to-day bs from their desks; the kind of stuff necessary to run a large University campus or Carrier -- but which is a waste of time for a PhD researcher to be doing.
I started here when he was leaving, and I can say it got worse when he left. Carter took a lot of things off the Faculty's plate and let them cook, and Buck put most of it back on their plates.
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What the "here" you're referencing? (Just curious as its not clear to me)
Anyway I'm not getting into it too deeply other than to say I was a little surprised he was the choice. That said I hope he does a good job.
If it helps, I can tell you he sends a pretty solid form letter for recruiting. (If a little lengthy)
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This is a heaping pile of hyperbolic nonsense. A PhD is a fairly meaningless piece of paper and can never ever be a substitute for intelligence, wisdom, and experience. We are talking about a school that hired a biology teacher as President. Yeah, how did that work out? Anyway, Carter checks all the appropriate boxes of productive accomplishments, and without a hint of the bullshit ideologies and total embarrassment that the fancy pants Ivy League Presidents with their PhD’s and plagiarism put their respective Universities through.
Education and work experience
Billionaires come from a very wide number of backgrounds. A review of the education and work histories of the top 400 billionaires shows little correlation between education and success. Nearly 30% of billionaires do not have a college degree, greatly exceeding any other educational background. The most common field of university education was finance and economics, which only contributed to a combined 15.5% of billionaire educations. There is little correlation between any university and becoming a billionaire. The top 10 universities produced just 99 of the top 400 billionaires combined, significantly less than the total number of billionaires who were not college educated. Military service produced 21 billionaires, more than any single university.
Billionaire - Wikipedia
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This is the kind of person that I would kill to have run for President of the United States but people like Ted are too smart for that.
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calibuck
Too soon old, too late smart
Read a bit ago that tOSU landed $1.6 Billion in grants. That was really great stuff about the growth of Money and Banking literacy in the Franklin County banking system. Does anyone know (I'm looking at you Steve 19) how much of the Buck six is attributable to the banking sector? Just asking because I don't know, nor have the patience to ferret it out on google....thanks in advance. PS, Command and Control is a learned skill. And I humbly disagree that a big boat command is not a transferrable skill to a big university. The systems and the players are different, but he's made his errors at Nebraska. Professors leave, and navy personnel can request transfers both. Finally, how deep was the interview pool for tOSU top job? Gotta believe that they were lining up to head up Buckeyeland. AND, Carter came up on top. Don't believe a trustee (you know the one), will be able to bully this dude around. Anyway, tOSU has had some croppers as their President....PS, wish we'd had that banking expertise around when I was in MBA school.
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