The University of Maryland merger from two sides and the same voice
A university with multiple campuses “only adds complexity and public confusion to an already complex Maryland higher education structure.” The idea that a merged university will attract more federal grants is “poppycock.” Mergers are “not academic panaceas.”
These are all arguments that have been made by opponents of a proposed merger between Maryland’s leading public research campuses in Baltimore and College Park. But the words belong not to those critics but to the chief proponent of the merger, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller.
The trick is that Miller wrote them in 1992 when he opposed a proposed merger between the University of Maryland Baltimore and UMBC. Miller chuckled Thursday when asked if he remembered writing the 1992 article for a faculty publication at College Park.
“I don’t,” he said. “It was 20 years ago.”
Miller said that at the time, he believed a merged institution would create unnecessary competition with College Park, which had been declared the state’s flagship university in 1988. “You compete with your enemies, you don’t compete with yourself,” he said. Miller said a merger between College Park and UMB would be a different story because it’s common for flagship universities across the country to include the medical and law programs that in Maryland’s case, are located on the Baltimore campus. He added that geographical separation doesn’t mean what it did in 1992, when Internet communication was a glimmer on the horizon.“I didn’t know what a web site was 20 years ago,” Miller said. He said he remains convinced that the best way forward for the state is a merged university that would combine the undergraduate experience and broad-based research of College Park with the pre-professional schools and medical exploration of UMB.
The university system’s Board of Regents will issue its recommendation on Miller’s idea in December.
From our colleague Childs Walker.
Baltimoresun.com's 
