Denver Post:

Higher education's ivory tower is crumbling. Colorado's public university establishment will tell you this demise is due to neglect and lack of funding. The truth, however, is much more complicated.

In 2007, we've got an opportunity to save our universities — redesigning them into competitive and innovative institutions that will thrive well into the next century and beyond. Will our universities allow this essential transformation to happen?

This month, Colorado's university presidents are pleading with state officials for $832 million in increased funding. They speak passionately about the need to hire more tenured faculty, reach out to rural students, and address neglected infrastructure needs.

We can only assume that this dialogue is a pretext for a conversation they will initiate with voters next year, pleading for more money through yet another statewide tax increase. But before we give them another cent, we need to make sure that the money they've got now is being spent in the most efficient way possible.

Ample evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that it's not.

As part of higher education's larger plea, Metropolitan State College president Steve Jordan is asking for $2.8 million to expand Metro's percentage of tenure-track faculty. But the last thing we should be doing is throwing money at a system that is largely broken.

In the aftermath of the Ward Churchill scandal, we should be asking questions about the value of our tenure system — which, in Churchill's case, served as a mediocre job-protection program for his unscholarly work.

While the University of Colorado has taken baby steps toward reform, it remains plagued by an inescapable conundrum: By making it so incredibly difficult to fire a professor — in Churchill's case, it took more than two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars — tenure largely removes the incentive for professors to compete and excel in their respective fields.