November, 2019
Lincoln – The NU Regents have selected retired Vice Admiral Walter E. Carter, Jr., to be the next president of the University of Nebraska.
At first glance, the choice seems incongruous. Admiral Carter is a native of Rhode Island; he does not have a doctorate or a record of scholarship; he has no experience at land-grant universities and is untested in the agriculture arena, critical to Nebraska.
He might, however, be a good choice. I confess to a touch of enthusiasm because NU and the U.S. Navy are both institutions dear to my heart and there is more commonality than one might think.
• Admiral Carter has led two academic institutions successfully, the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island and the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland. He knows governments and bureaucracies, federal and state, and faculties. The Naval Academy is located in a state capital, Annapolis, as is NU in Lincoln.
• NU has a Navy unit on the UNL campus. Students can minor in Naval Science and receive commissions in the Navy and Marine Corps. Perhaps Admiral Carter will be given a faculty post in the Naval Science department, from which he can draw on his USNWC connections to explore national security issues for the benefit of NU students and faculty.
• Certain issues transcend state and national borders. Climate-change flooding threatens the Annapolis campus and the nation's harbors, just as climate-change flooding threatens Nebraska agriculture. This should form a quick, common bond with the leadership at NU's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, which for years has been sounding the alarm, despite the issue's unpopularity in right-wing political circles.
There are three immediate challenges at NU that I hope Admiral Carter will meet with "early and decisive action," a phrase he will know from ship-handling at sea.
One is to re-establish better relations with the Nebraska Legislature, based on mutual respect and the Nebraska Constitution, which places authority over university governance with the Board of Regents. There must be no more occasions where an NU president is summoned to a freshman senator's office and told which instructors to hire or fire. A vice admiral should have the stature and experience to handle such situations. (Perhaps that is one reason for the Regents' hiring decision.)
The second challenge is to bring a broader perspective to matters of agricultural export markets, on which the Nebraska economy is overly dependent. The current agricultural leadership in Nebraska, including many elected officials, is desperate for a trade deal with China. Nebraskans now surely realize that it was a grave mistake for President Trump to scrap the TPP, giving China the upper hand in Pacific trade, and to impose tariffs for which farmers suffer retaliation. Is Nebraska agriculture ready to accept or endorse an even greater blunder to try to restore Nebraska's China exports? There are clear warning signs that President Trump will abandon Hong Kong and the South China Sea (he has already spoken to Chairman Xi about it) for a trade deal that may please farmers in the Midwest before the 2020 election. But is this in the U.S. national security interest?
From the Naval War College Review, "Getting Serious About Strategy in the South China Sea:"
Today, the situation in the South China Sea is reaching a critical stage as
Chinese advances accumulate, America’s room for maneuver diminishes, and
observers throughout the region wonder whether the United States is up to the
challenge. And yet Washington still is searching for a strategy.
Admiral Carter, as former leader of the Naval War College, is positioned as no other candidate for NU president to grapple with these issue of immense importance to Nebraska.
The third challenge also deals with rural Nebraska, where the population, counterproductively, is increasingly giving up on higher education. The results of the 2019 Nebraska Rural Poll "showed a sharp decline in the perceived importance of higher education among respondents." What got into Nebraskans to make insularity and ignorance attractive? This is alarming and deserves immediate priority from Nebraska's higher education leadership.
Admiral Carter, welcome to Nebraska. You have tall orders.
