Big Dreams  in the Bluegrass State

The U. of Kentucky's president seeks to make  his state's flagship university a top-20 public research institution

Related materials

Biography: Lee T. Todd Jr.

Chart: How Kentucky compares with the 20th-ranked institution

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines Colleges See Slowest Growth in State Aid in 5 Years Annual state appropriations for higher education inched up by less than 1 percent for the 2009 fiscal year, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University. Data: Changes in State Appropriations and How the States Rank Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses Panel Urges Obama to Ease Limits on Scientific Exports and Visas Weak Economy Could Curtail Flow of Indian Students Into the U.S. A Young University in India Focuses on Real-World Industry and Sustainability Updates on Billion-Dollar Campaigns at 33 Universities Academics Seek the DNA Behind Medieval Poems

By PAUL FAIN

Lexington, Ky.

It's game day in hoops country, and Lee T. Todd Jr., the University of Kentucky's president, is shaking one hand after another. After mingling with trustees, donors, and state lawmakers at a party before the noon tipoff between Kentucky's basketball team and the University of Florida's, Mr. Todd weaves quickly around Rupp Arena to chat with basketball players, police officers, ushers, and the fans who are settling into courtside seats.

People greet Mr. Todd informally, often with a clap on the shoulder of his Kentucky-blue corduroy jacket and variations of the phrase, "How you doing, buddy?"

Standing on the edge of the court, Mr. Todd, 59, a western-Kentucky native, notes that "growing up in Earlington, a town of 2,000 people, you'd never think you'd be on the floor of the Rupp Arena. It's a special place to be."

The game begins, but Mr. Todd cannot yet take his seat, located next to David L. Williams, president of the Kentucky Senate. Instead, he waits courtside for the first timeout, when he and his wife, Patricia, a fellow University of Kentucky graduate whom he met when they were both in first grade, walk to center court with Tarvez Tucker, an associate professor of neurology.

The crowd quiets while the announcer lauds Ms. Tucker for her research in treating acute headaches and for her work directing the university's headache clinic. After the announcement, about three-quarters of the fans stand and politely cheer.

The reception to such stunts, which Mr. Todd performs at all home basketball and football games, has not always been so kind. In fact, frustrated football fans, unhappy with the team's shabby record in recent seasons, have booed Mr. Todd and his wife, as well as the students and professors who have accompanied them onto the field.

But lately Mr. Todd has been winning over fans both inside and outside the arena, as they have come to appreciate his full-court press to transform the state's flagship institution into a premier research university. This December Mr. Todd introduced a lengthy and ambitious road map for this goal, the Top 20 Business Plan, which seeks to make Kentucky a top-20 public research university by 2020. The plan calls for the university's budget to grow by more than $1-billion over the next 14 years, with the money to be used to hire 625 new faculty members, increase research expenditures by about $300-million, and raise enrollment by about 7,000 students, or 26 percent, to 34,000.

Of course, Mr. Todd's lofty aspirations have also been greeted with skepticism. And in March, a backlash to the plan began building among the university's 10,000 staff members, some of whom are unhappy that their projected average annual salary increase, about 3.0 percent as charted under the university's long-term plan, lags behind the 5.5-percent average raise for faculty members.

The day after the basketball game, Mr. Todd fields tough questions from students, faculty members, and local news reporters over a 12-percent increase in tuition and fees the university announced that morning. Standing on a stage in the university's student center, he explains that the increase is one of the tough choices that the university must make to break into higher education's top echelon.

"Do we want to dream the dream, or do we want to lay down and flat-line like everybody else?" Mr. Todd asks the crowd. "That's not an option, for me at least."

Mr. Todd's aggressive pitch for the top-20 plan has included a 20-city statewide bus tour, pressure on the state's lawmakers, and an advertising campaign.

In his stump speech he regularly contrasts Kentucky's passion for sports with its inconsistent support for higher education, and argues that winning hardwood or gridiron glory is far less important than using the university as an instrument to confront the state's economic, academic, and health struggles, which he calls the "Kentucky Uglies."

Mr. Todd's ploy is both smart and risky, many Kentuckians and higher-education observers note. In a political climate where many public universities are struggling to maintain state support and their presidents are focusing on cutting costs or soliciting private donations and research funds, Mr. Todd is asking cash-strapped Kentucky lawmakers to contribute an additional $421-million to the university by 2020 and to issue $1.2-billion in state bonds for campus construction.

And his pushing of the ambitious top-20 goal (the university ranks 35th out of 88 peer institutions under the plan's own ranking model) has made some Kentuckians fret that Mr. Todd is setting the university up for failure.

Yet Mr. Todd, who became Kentucky's president in July 2001 after a successful and lucrative stint founding and running two high-tech companies in Kentucky, has converted many to his mission. And on April 11, the state legislature signed off on the first step of his Top 20 Business Plan by approving a $20.9-million increase in the state's contribution to the university.

James F. Hardymon, chairman of the university's Board of Trustees, admits that he did not initially share Mr. Todd's zeal for pursuing the top-20 goal. However, Mr. Hardymon, who, like Mr. Todd, is an engineer and a former chief executive of Kentucky-based high-tech companies, says the hard data in Mr. Todd's plan helped win him over.

"I think we need to stick our necks out," says Mr. Hardymon. "But if we miss a little bit, we'll have to explain ourselves."

A Crowded Field

Kentucky is not alone in having a plan to strengthen its national rankings. For example, Virginia Tech is seeking to become a top-30 research university by 2010, while Clemson University wants to become a top-20 public university.

John C. Vaughn, interim president of the Association of American Universities, says there are so many such plans by universities to improve their rankings "that it becomes a joke."

However, Mr. Vaughn says systematic plans that focus on attracting quality faculty members can, in some cases, help a university to substantially raise its stature in the many ranking systems, including U.S. News & World Report's and the research-focused annual rankings by the University of Florida's Lombardi Program on Measuring University Performance. Mr. Vaughn, whose organization is an elite group of 62 research universities, cites the rankings leaps made by the University of Arizona and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in the last two decades as chief examples of good strategic planning.

But even if the University of Kentucky's plan, which focuses first on hiring top-flight faculty members, aims for the right areas to lift its ranking, Mr. Todd still faces an uphill road in cracking the top 20, higher-education experts say.

Gordon K. Davies, director of the National Collaborative for Postsecondary Education Policy, says it is "extraordinarily difficult" to achieve top-20 status.

Kentucky's benchmark institutions, such as the Georgia Institute of Technology (number 20 in Mr. Todd's model) or Texas A&M University (ranked 18th), have a substantial lead in many categories. Mr. Davies says it is not as if the universities Kentucky wants to catch are suddenly going to stop doing well. And there are many other universities that would like to squeeze into the top 20.

For example, the AAU admitted its most recent new members — Texas A&M and the State University of New York at Stony Brook — five years ago. Kentucky's plan lists seven indicators of success, such as the number of postdoctoral appointees and amount of competitively awarded federal research support, in which it lags substantially behind both Texas A&M and Stony Brook, even though Stony Brook is only five spots ahead of Kentucky in the plan's composite rankings.

"I think that it's a long shot," Mr. Davies says of Kentucky's top-20 aspirations. "On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to try, if you're doing it for the right reasons."

State of Change

Mr. Todd was an important player in the 1997 overhaul of Kentucky's higher-education system. That year state lawmakers adopted sweeping legislation that sought to increase college enrollment, improve academics, and better align public colleges with the state's needs. The restructuring, in addition to establishing the top-20-by-2020 goal for the University of Kentucky, created a powerful board to oversee all public institutions and dedicated $230-million over the next four years to an endowment, the "Bucks for Brains" program, that sought to attract scholars to the state.

The 1997 legislation was a hit with lawmakers, business leaders, and public-university presidents. But the University of Kentucky fought the plan because it stripped the university of 13 community colleges, taking away a key link to lawmakers' home districts during budget season.

The spat over the plan got heated, with university officials bashing the proposal in television and radio ads.

Mr. Todd, however, a former engineering professor at Kentucky who was then chief executive of a local technology company, supported the proposal.

In 1997 he "was without a doubt the strongest business leader" behind the overhaul, says Aims C. McGuinness Jr., a senior associate with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, who advised Paul E. Patton, the governor at the time, on the plan.

Mr. McGuinness says Mr. Todd, who testified early in hearings for the legislation and served on the Council on Postsecondary Education, created under the plan, always understood "the University of Kentucky in the broader context of the commonwealth."

In his current role, Mr. Todd has become the most visible proponent of the broad, but often vague, legislative mandates passed in 1997.

"What Lee has done is important for others in the sense of helping to define the goals," says Thomas D. Layzell, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education.

Not everyone appreciates Mr. Todd's vision, particularly when it appears that his university is getting more than its share of resources. The university did well in the second year of the state's budget for the 2006-8 biennium, and most public institutions in Kentucky fared better in the final budget than they had in earlier versions. James C. Votruba, Northern Kentucky University's president, says Mr. Todd's "strong voice" has helped higher education across the state.

"UK has a statutory mandate" to become a top-20 university, Mr. Votruba says. "I think Lee Todd did exactly what he was asked to do."

But several other state institutions, including the University of Louisville and Western Kentucky University, fell short of their requests.

"There's only so much money," says Gary A. Ransdell, Western Kentucky's president, noting that financing for the University of Kentucky's business plan "came at the expense of others."

Nothing Ventured

Mr. Todd's imprint is evident in the Top 20 Business Plan. He pushed to insert the word "business" into the name. By ditching the language of the academy for the frank economic terms of business, Mr. Todd thought he would have more credibility with lawmakers and business leaders. Other Kentucky institutions have taken notice, with college presidents, legislators, and reporters now referring to the strategic plans of several public universities as "business plans."

Mr. Todd, a short, energetic man who smiles often and speaks softly, eschews delicacy when selling the plan, preferring instead to hammer on how a strong flagship university can help curb the state's economic and social ills, such as low per-capita income and high obesity rates. And the plan itself has a frank tone.

For example, it prominently features controversial numbers, such as the $1.097-billion operating-budget increase and its $2.1-billion in state and revenue bonds. Mr. Todd has stressed that the university can pay for 40 percent of the new investments in the plan through tuition, fees, and private fund raising.

Mr. Todd has told state lawmakers in "very concrete terms" what the university needs to achieve the state-mandated top-20 goal, says Mr. Layzell, of the Council on Postsecondary Education. With this approach, he has passed much of the responsibility for meeting the top-20 challenge back to the state capital. And he has altered the conversation with the legislature, replacing the typical question lawmakers ask universities — What do you want from us? — with: How can we give you what you need to help the state achieve its goals?

Although Mr. Layzell praises the specificity of Mr. Todd's proposed give-and-take with the state, it is also "risky," he says, "because people will remember the numbers."

Risk, particularly of the financial variety, is nothing new for Mr. Todd. An electrical engineer with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he left an engineering professorship at the University of Kentucky to found Projectron Inc., a manufacturer of cathode-ray projection tubes, and DataBeam Corporation, a designer of communications software. His first office for DataBeam was located in two former bathrooms above a McDonald's on Main Street in Lexington.

Mr. Todd says it was a challenge to raise the initial capital for his two companies, which built high-tech products that had never been manufactured in Kentucky. He equates the task of convincing people that the university can achieve the goals in his top-20 plan with his sleepless nights while selling his plans for his companies to investors. Chief among the hurdles Mr. Todd faces is ingrained skepticism that Kentucky, a state mostly known for horse racing and bourbon, can sport a nationally prominent university. Mr. McGuinness characterizes this attitude as: "You've got to be kidding — Kentucky?"

"I like challenges, I guess," Mr. Todd says, acknowledging that some Kentuckians view the top-20 plan as a "pipe dream."

"Every leader sets themselves up for failure," he says. "You're not taken seriously until you do something like this."

And he insists that his confidence is backed by the voluminous research on Kentucky's standings in higher education that went into producing his business plan.

Bluegrass Perspective

Mr. Todd's forays in private industry paid off. In 1990, when Hughes Aircraft Corporation bought Projectron, which he still largely owned, 95 percent of commercial flight simulators were using his picture tubes. DataBeam also did well. The company had evolved into a Web-based software developer specializing in real-time business communication by 1998, when Lotus Development Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM, purchased it. The terms of both sales were kept private, but Mr. Todd says Projectron went for millions and the larger DataBeam acquisition was worth between $20-million and $100-million.

After Hughes bought Projectron, Mr. Todd persuaded the company to consolidate its similar operations and move them from New Mexico and Long Island to Lexington. As for DataBeam, its 110 employees and Mr. Todd, who became a senior vice president for Lotus, also stayed in the area.

"One of my goals in life was to show that we can do high tech in Kentucky," says Mr. Todd.

In addition to the goodwill Mr. Todd earned by helping Kentucky's economy, his entrepreneurial success has contributed to his clout as he sells the university around the state. And his pitch for the plan, which manages to invoke both populist and capitalist themes, resonates with both business leaders and middle-class Kentuckians. It includes the idealistic view that the university can increase incomes, create better jobs, and improve the quality of life in the state. But it also stresses pragmatism, stating that if the state's lawmakers follow the plan, state contributions, or "investments," will taper off by 2012 as the university begins achieving its enrollment, research, and other goals.

"There is no virtue in cynicism, and there can be no progress from timidity," Mr. Todd writes in a letter introducing the plan. "The time has come for Kentucky to risk and reach, unencumbered by the hollow safety of the predictable, the accepted, and the secure."

Mr. Todd's fast-paced efforts to publicize the top-20 plan have given him a high profile around the state. A recent university survey found that among alumni, his name was more closely identified with the university than anyone else's, including that of Tubby Smith, the university's popular basketball coach. In fact, some people whisper that Mr. Todd is positioning himself for a gubernatorial run. (He says he's not interested in the job.)

He acknowledges that his local roots have allowed him to criticize Kentuckians for their past failures to support higher education.

"If I wasn't a native Kentuckian, I probably wouldn't get away with it," says Mr. Todd, who is still known around his hometown by his childhood nickname, "Tro."

Success Stories

Other public universities have emerged from recent years' dark budget days, when an economic downswing walloped both state contributions and university endowments across much of the country.

But many public universities have only been able to get increases in their state support by making substantial accommodations to state governments. For example, in 2003 the University System of Maryland undertook an efficiency plan that trimmed $40-million from the budget of the 13-campus system. William E. Kirwan, the system's chancellor, says the effort bought "good will" with the governor and state legislature, which in March approved what Mr. Kirwan calls a "dramatic" $101-million increase in the state financing.

Mr. Todd, by contrast, is seeking to bolster his university's status the old-fashioned way: by seeking increased state contributions without placating lawmakers with big internal budget cuts.

Kenneth W. Winters, a state senator and former president of Campbellsville University, says Mr. Todd did a "superb job with the business plan" and that his efforts to raise awareness for higher education helped other Kentucky universities.

"I can't even tell you how many times Dr. Todd was in my office himself," says Mr. Winters, a Republican and chairman of the senate's education committee.

State lawmakers also say Mr. Todd's entrepreneurial background has been an asset.

"Most of us are businesspeople," said Robert R. Damron, a Democratic state representative and chairman of the House majority caucus. "Dr. Todd gives legislators a comfort level that when we make an investment in higher education, it's not going to be lost in academic bureaucracy."

And the plan, despite its business-friendly language, has gone over well with faculty members. This is due in part to Mr. Todd's credibility as a former engineering professor at the university.

As a recruiter, Mr. Todd has helped the university land several prominent faculty members from other institutions. In the spirit of the marketing push for the plan, the university has bragged loudly with advertisements about its new faculty members.

One such ad, titled "Look Who's Wearing Blue," depicts 20 new faculty members, all of whom are displaying logos from their former institutions, which include Harvard University, MIT, the University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina.

In October 2003, Michael Karpf came to the university from the medical center at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he served as vice provost for the institution's highly rated hospital system. He now oversees the University of Kentucky's health-care system as executive vice president of health affairs. Mr. Karpf says Mr. Todd "has an intrinsic understanding of the importance of academics" and was the "critical issue" in his decision to come to Kentucky.

"A lot of my friends never thought I'd leave Southern California and the weather, but the challenges and opportunities were substantial" at Kentucky, he says, adding that the top-20 plan is "eminently doable."

Several other prominent transplants to the university echo Mr. Karpf's optimism, including Wendy Baldwin, former deputy director of extramural research at the National Institutes of Health, who became executive vice president for research at the university in 2002, and Kumble A. Subbaswamy, who will leave his position as dean of arts and sciences at Indiana University at Bloomington to become Kentucky's provost in July.

Mr. Subbaswamy says he delayed his decision to come to Kentucky until he could see the final version of the business plan. He says the chutzpah Mr. Todd displayed with the plan and its $1-billion price tag proved that he was serious about the top-20 goal.

"He convinced me that this was not some tagline," Mr. Subbaswamy says.

Rankings Game

Mr. Todd has had setbacks on his quest to bring the university to dominance. For example, it's hard to leverage academics against success in basketball when the team isn't that good. And not everybody wants to talk about his top-20 plan all the time. While intently watching the March 5 loss to the University of Florida, Mr. Todd said he spoke only briefly about university business with Mr. Williams, the president of the Kentucky Senate who sat next to him during the game.

"He deserves a break as much as I do," Mr. Todd says.

The 79-64 score was Kentucky's worst "senior day" loss since 1919. The team finished the season ranked well out of the top 20, a rarity for a program that has won seven national titles.

And to rub salt in the wound, Florida, which won this year's national title in men's basketball and has dominated Kentucky lately, beating them four straight times, also has a big lead over Mr. Todd's university in other areas: its composite ranking in the top 20 plan is 11th.

BREAKING INTO THE TOP 20: HOW THE U. OF KENTUCKY STACKS UP The ranking model that the University of Kentucky developed for its Top 20 Business Plan uses a comparison group of 88 universities, all of which were classified as "doctoral/research-extensive" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2000. The sample includes all public research universities that take in $20-million or more per year in federal research dollars. The model compares the universities on nine measures in the domains of undergraduate education, graduate education, faculty recognition, and research, with each domain weighted equally. Source data for the comparisons are taken from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, membership indicators used by the Association of American Universities, U.S. News & World Report's college rankings, and the University of Florida's Lombardi Program on Measuring University Performance. Kentucky ranks 35th among the 88 universities in a composite ranking. Here is how it compares with the 20th-ranked institution in each of six key indicators: U. of Kentucky The 20th-ranked institution Number of doctorates granted in 2003 208 (Rank: 47th) 373, U. of California at Davis Number of postdoctoral appointments in 2002 230 (Rank: 30th) 301, North Carolina State U. National faculty awards in 2003 11 (Rank: 32nd) 17, U. of California at Davis Nonfederal research expenditures in 2002 $136-million (Rank: 23rd) $149-million, Rutgers U. at New Brunswick Federal research-and-development expenditures in science and engineering in 2002 $100-million (Rank: 35th) $167-million, U. of Florida Six-year graduation rate of first-time, full-time degree-seeking freshmen in 2004 60 percent (Rank: 51st) 72 percent, Clemson U. SOURCE: U. of Kentucky