Can the new chancellor help transform UMKC into a first-tier university?

The controversy surrounding a University of Missouri-Kansas City professor who allegedly abused his students is shocking — students come to UMKC to learn, not to cut a professor’s grass or wait tables at a garden party.

For a university trying to make significant improvements, this scandal is also a setback — and an unneeded distraction that will divert attention and resources from ambitious plans for the future.

Everyone in the region has a stake in a better UMKC. Kansas City urgently needs a first-tier urban university. And it still lacks one.

“Kansas City is almost alone among important American cities in not having in its midst a world-class comprehensive research university,” an outside study committee wrote eight years ago.

UMKC has made enormous strides since that report and is a better institution now than it was a decade ago. But efforts to elevate the university to an internationally-known research school must be renewed and redoubled.

To his credit, Chancellor Mauli Agrawal, who took the helm in June, told us he’s pursuing an “aggressive strategy” to make UMKC a first-tier university during the next decade. He wants to increase undergraduate enrollment by 50 percent over that period, through enhanced curricula, off-campus study options and improved student housing.

“Enrollment is too low,” Agrawal said.

He’s correct. Undergraduate enrollment has actually slipped at UMKC, from 8,585 students in 2014 to 7,995 in 2018. Graduate enrollment is down during the same period.

Scandals at the pharmacy and business schools are blemishes on the university’s reputation. There are worries about substandard student housing at UMKC, a situation Agrawal wants to address. Neighbors are still leery of major expansion plans. Parking and tuition costs are perennial concerns.

No chancellor can overcome those hurdles on his or her own. If UMKC is to become a first-tier American university, it will need serious, sustained support from the state legislature, the governor, the University of Missouri board of curators and the local community, including philanthropists and politicians.

In this context, finalizing plans to build a new on- or near-campus performing arts conservatory is an important first step. The current facility is still substandard and potentially dangerous, the student newspaper reports.

But that’s only a start. State officials must stop cutting the budget for higher education when tax revenues drop. UMKC will only become a first-class university if the state fully commits to making it one.

Kansas City must play a role, too. Mayoral candidates should outline their plans for improving UMKC, including the relationship between the university and area high schools. Private interests should renew their promises of financial support.

And the curators could help by ending their whisper campaign against UMKC’s athletics program. Agrawal said a new athletics director is taking a close look at costs but that the school remains committed to a presence in Division I NCAA sports.

Reviewing the cost of sports is important for UMKC and for every university. But enrollment will never grow if the campus shuts down after 5 p.m. UMKC should be able to teach students and provide them an attractive on-campus experience at the same time.

Agrawal is right when he says fixing UMKC is about the future, not the past. He discussed proposals to expand online learning opportunities for students and to focus on training the next generation of data scientists during the next decade.

Both are promising ideas. Businesses leaders in and around Kansas City have been vocal about the urgent need in this area for more highly-trained students who are prepared for the 21st-century workplace. UMKC can be — must be — the place many of those workers are found.

It’s a critical time for Kansas City’s public university, which many still consider a “commuter school.” The shelf is crowded with five- and 10-year improvement plans for UMKC that promised growth but didn’t deliver. That must change, and Agrawal must lead the way.

A great city must include a great university, he told us. We have long agreed. It’s now his job, and all of ours, to make it happen.

This story was originally published November 25, 2018 at 5:30 AM.