It's not the lack of response and energy, or even lack of commitment, but, rather, that the responses are, in fact, piecemeal rather than systemic, and therefore have no prioritization in any vision or mission so we may know where we're going. But the responsiveness simply represents a lot of bricks that make a nice pile but not yet a street or an avenue. One of the phenomena of recent years is the indispensability of universities to the economic development of their particular locality. Of course, the Japanese would smile at this because by that reasoning, we are putting, say, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in competition with each other in terms of economic development. But economic development still needs to be patched into the fundamental educational mission of the universities, because we're not in the business of economic development, except insofar as we're in the business of developing human capital.
Teaching awards are another nonfix.
We decide that we've got these great teachers who are unrewarded, so we find the most theatrical, effective freshman teacher we can, teaching the two subjects we don't really want taught, and give that teacher an award. The real issue, from the students' perspective, is whether they are in the right courses, whether they are being advised to be in the right courses, whether there is enough balance between large and small courses, and whether, in fact, there is direction to what they are doing that is being provided by the advising system. That is what students thought is important. Now, how we address those issues is a very different kind of investment from the one in which if you believe you have a lot of faculty who don't like teaching, or when they do teach, they do a lousy job. I think we greatly overemphasize that.