Numbers show brighter future for UI

MOSCOW – There are signs of renewal on the University of Idaho campus after years of financial and image problems.

Enrollment and research grants – key indicators of a university’s health – appear to be leveling off or increasing after several years’ decline. Faculty numbers, cut in the early part of the decade as the university reduced spending, are beginning to rebound.

The University of Idaho Foundation has restructured itself after problems that grew out of the university’s attempt to expand its Boise campus, the Idaho Statesman reports in its Sunday edition.

The university still wrestles with problems, but feelings of pessimism are being replaced by hope.

Enrollment, which fell 10 percent in five years, has yet to show a healthy rebound. That makes it harder to recruit students and faculty and makes it tougher for the school to get more money from the Legislature.

UI is in planning stages for an estimated $300 million capital campaign aimed in part at improving student financial assistance. The amount is nearly twice the size of a campaign recently announced by Boise State University.

Many credit President Tim White, who took over in fall 2004.

“I never lost confidence we could make a huge difference here,” White said. “But I was sobered by the magnitude of the job in front of us.”

White said he took over a university that had splintered into camps where colleges and departments were protecting their own turf and hoarding resources.

In a move to bring them together, White set aside $5.5 million for projects to bring several colleges together on a single course of study. Five of 43 proposals presented by faculty were selected.

In the last four years, the university has cut a $20 million deficit to $14 million and has a plan to pay it off; has reduced staff after higher education budget cutbacks; and was bruised by the failure of University Place, a proposal for a three-building satellite campus in Boise that fell apart in 2003 over questions of financial management. The project led to the resignation of a popular college president and to state and federal criminal investigations and multiple civil lawsuits.