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Plans for Ronald Reagan University
This should be of interest to all Tekes--especially those in Colorado.
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Supporters Push Ronald Reagan University
By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 28, 2004; Page A03
DENVER, April 27 -- On the silver screen, he was a college football hero and a cheerleader. He played cadets at two different military academies. He appeared as a zoology professor in the Hollywood classic "Bedtime for Bonzo." But now America's only movie-star-turned-president may have another dramatic role in higher education: as the namesake and inspiration for Ronald Reagan University.
Backers of the ambitious plan to build a private university outside Denver that would focus on the former president's economic and diplomatic principles asked the Colorado legislature this week to endorse the idea. With a 200-acre campus site donated by a prominent Colorado Republican, the plans call for construction to begin next year and a student body of 10,000 to be in classes before the end of the decade.
"We have worked with an architect, and we think we're looking at an $850 million construction budget," said Terry Walker, a former professor and administrator at the University of Louisiana who is serving as founding president of the proposed school. "We are planning for a full-scale university, with a law school, business school and a graduate school of foreign affairs and public policy. We also want a performing arts school, to reflect the president's long movie career."
Walker is Reagan U.'s only full-time employee at the moment. But he says he has won enthusiastic backing, and promises of financial support, from senior aides to the former president. He has not yet received a go-ahead, though, from the Reagan family. "We want to hold off on major fundraising until Nancy Reagan gives us formal approval," he said.
A spokeswoman for Reagan in Los Angeles, Joanne Drake, said: "We have recently received a proposal about the university, and we are reviewing it. We have taken no position on it as yet."
Plans for Ronald Reagan U. were made public for the first time this week when Colorado state Rep. Jim Welker, a Republican and a supporter of the idea, introduced a nonbinding resolution asking the state legislature to offer its moral support. "This resolution is a we-wish-you-well kind of thing, that's all," Welker said. "We're not going to ask for a single penny of taxpayer money for this project. It wouldn't really be the Reagan way to come up with the idea and then try to get the government to pay for it."
Rather, Welker said, the school's financial stance will probably be modeled on Hillsdale College, a private school in Michigan. Hillsdale refuses any government aid for faculty or students so that it will not be bound by the regulatory requirements that accompany public funding.
Reagan told biographer Lou Cannon that his political career really started in his college days, when he led a student uprising against the faculty at his alma mater, Eureka College. Reagan was still in his twenties when he signed a movie contract with Warner Brothers, and his all-American looks led to his being cast in many campus movies. He played a Notre Dame football legend in "Knute Rockne, All American," a Virginia Military Institute cadet and cheerleader in the "Brother Rat" movies, and a West Point cadet in "Santa Fe Trail." As he grew older, he shifted to playing college professors. In 1951, with his career winding down, he was cast as zoology professor Peter Boyd and co-starred with a chimpanzee in "Bedtime for Bonzo."
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