SHARE:
Lombardi
He once told the story of how, as a young man, he fell in love with a girl who came from a family of academic marvels. He knew to win over this girl, he had to match her family's erudition. So Quigley began to read: a couple of books a month became a book a week and then a book a day. In the end, he said, he found he could read multiple books a day because he already knew most of what was in them. And, by the way, he married the girl.
Brash? Yes. Egotistical? Of course. But he was a man whose audacious views never failed to pack a lecture hall.
Recently I was at a reception in Gainesville and met John Lombardi for the first time. Of course, I knew him by reputation as the outspoken president of University of Florida whose independent - some would say high-handed - ways often put him at odds with the state's higher education bureaucracy. I also read that when he was courted by Johns Hopkins to become its president during one of his confrontations with Chancellor Charles Reed and the regents, the students turned out to urge the popular historian and administrator to remain at UF.
It quickly become apparent during our brief conversation that his reputation for having strong views wasn't exaggerated. And that many of those opinions had the kind of shaping that a historian can bring to a topic - much the way I remember Quigley did. So later I called Dr. Lombardi to talk further about Florida education, both higher and lower.
Does Florida have a tradition of caring about education?
"Florida has always had a particular enthusiasm for education. For a state with no income tax, we put a heck of a percentage of the budget into education until recently. In 1990, the bottom fell out of real estate and other markets, so the legislators took 15% out of education and never put it back."
How can Florida have college tuition that averages only $1,700 a year and also cut back on public funding?
"The Legislature was able to instill the notion that education should be virtually free to all citizens, which is a great idea. But when the state wasn't able to pay the cost of education, legislators found themselves between a rock and a hard place because they didn't want to give up the rhetoric of cheap tuition, but neither did they want to discuss generating additional tax revenue.
"It's catching up now. Each time you add students at less than the cost to educate them, you are not able to reinvent the quality. So gradually your library falls behind, laboratory facilities get slightly out of date, computing isn't up to par. And you wake up one morning and find you have to do something about it, and you don't know where to get the money."
I've heard Florida compared to California in terms of its need to develop an education system.
"We're probably about 1952 in California. Oh, we're doing okay, but I wouldn't say we're doing terrific. And, I think the big difference is we're at 1952 and not looking at a boom. They were at 1952 looking at a boom, and a huge amount of money was spent in the '60s on higher education."
And California had a big and diverse economy.
"Big industrial base, a commitment to spending on taxes, a commitment to long-term economic development, recognition that in order for people to prosper in the state of California, you had to invest in infrastructure and education. Florida is a real estate enterprise in which the idea is to make a quick buck off of worthless land and move on."
Isn't the business community a strong supporter of improved education?
"It's like business communities everywhere, it wants government to give it something for nothing. The business community is all in favor of more effective universities, but isn't in favor of more taxes to build them. Boom and bust real estate business empires that we have in Florida don't, for the most part, turn on things that require academic quality. The television industry needs people to write and read, be imaginative, creative, or Silicon Valley industries require people to be of very top intellectual caliber to succeed. Whereas here, you've got to be lucky and move fast.
"We've had extraordinarily good support for research in agriculture, because of the citrus business. So the Ag program at University of Florida is one of the best in the entire country because it has had terrific support and has delivered to those Ag industries what's really the success of their business. You couldn't grow citrus in Florida without an enormous amount of research to keep from killing the damn fruit off."
You've called Florida a strange mixture of conservatism and socialism.
"Absolutely. Everybody in Florida is very conservative, Republican or Democrat. There are no wild-eyed liberals out there trying to give away land to the poor and stuff like that. At the same time, they are very socialistic about what they think the state ought to do for them. They think the state ought to give them free education. They think the state ought to intervene in all kinds of ways that are really not very private enterprise, entrepreneurial competition oriented."
What is the quality of the students you get from high schools?
"We get good kids. Your top 20-30% of kids graduating from high school is pretty good. I mean they get high scores on national tests. You know they compete with anybody in the world. Then there are the kids who are a problem in K-12 and don't ever enter our radar screen. Those kids drop out before they graduate from high school. Or they graduate barely literate, barely functional and require tremendous remediation, if they stick with it at all.
"That's one reason the state spends so much time on universities and colleges; we're fixable. People think K-12 is just too big, it's unfixable. They don't know what to do with it, so they say, oh, the hell with it! We are the toy of the system; we're the only good news there is. With K-12, you don't know where to start, where to finish. But universities, they're doing great, so let's mess with them."
