Telling Comment on President Bruininks

(University of Minnesota)

in the Star-Tribune

Upset fan on Bruininks:

Actually, Bruininks has failed in almost everything

I'd be curious as to what the "very strong things" Bruininks has done academically might be.

Tuition for Minnesota residents has soared while he expanded the number of vice-presidents earning six-figure salaries, there aren't enough TAs to grade papers, his Driven to Discover campaign has done nothing to improve the U's national ranking - in fact it dropped this past year - and the U's own measure of the caliber of its students places it near the bottom of like-universities in median SAT scores and top 10% of high school graduating classes.

What Bruininks has done is invest a great deal of time and political capital into getting the new TCF Bank stadium built.

Yet for all the political and real capital expended, we're left with a stadium that isn't full at game time and a team that is a joke.

At the same time, the U men's hockey team has declined significantly while the men's basketball team seems to have topped out at good-but-not-great play under a national champion coach. From where I stand the administration has failed in both academics and athletics, some of the non-revenue sports notwithstanding.