Then, why have we made considerable advances in every catagory and ranking under her tenure including undergraduate rankings and admissions selectivity. Last year, we had a 25% increase in overall applications and a 50% increase from students with 32+ ACT scores. We reached a point under Holbrook where we're turning down nearly one out of every two applicants (48% rejection rate for the '07 freshman class). Something good must be going on at the undergraduate level because the top high school students are flocking to Ohio State in record numbers, we've left Miami in the dust on admissions and our national reputation hasn't been this good since the 1950s. While Holbrook (along with Kirwan and Gee) all were building on the real hard work that Ed Jennings did in the 1980s of undoing the Jim Rhodes' madness, she has done an admirable job in continuing their progress. If you want to see what an honestly bad university president is look down to Athens and that clown McDavis who bounces from one scandal to another all the while dropping 12 spots in the last two USN&WR rankings and pulling in freshman classes that have more students from the bottom half of their high school class than from the top tenth.
As for the whole research angle. Ohio State is a research university. It always has been. It was founded by Rutherford B. Hayes and the state's post-Civil War political and business leadership to be the state's comprehensive flagship university. In 1906, the state legally mandated (through the Eagleson Bill) that only Ohio State among public universities could offer doctoral education or conduct basic research. The law stood until the 1950s. In 1916, Ohio State was elected into America's premier organization of public and private research universities--the AAU. In 1938, the Ohio State Research Foundation was created to bring in outside funding for faculty research projects. Holbrook did not suddenly turn Ohio State into a research university. If somebody doesn't want to attend a "research university" they shouldn't apply to Ohio State nor should they expect Ohio State to change its mission to accomodate them. Let's also not lose sight of the fact that the 650 million dollars in external research funding that Ohio State received in 2006 translates, using the federal government's standard multipliers, into 24,000 jobs and 9 billion dollars in total economic impact, which for a state watching the erosion of its manufacturing base and suffering from a significant brain drain, should be cause to build Holbrook a statue at the statehouse.
