By Matthew Bisanz

Hofstra has announced that it’s going out for the presidential debates. And with rumors of the founding of a medical school on campus also swirling, one could easily believe that this university is really going places.

While I welcome these advancements, I question their cost to the entire university population. It’s been reported that the debates alone may cost upwards of $2,350,000, to be raised from alumni and corporate sponsors. Of course, my first question is: What else could that money go to if it is so easy to raise? By my matchbook calculations, that money is equal to 94 new endowed scholarships, or enough money create a new distinguished professorship, a la Presidential Studies.

The debates, if they hold true to past form, will last less than two hours. Months and months of planning will result in a single event seen by millions across the nation. However, unlike the renowned Presidential Conference series or even the NCAA finals, this event leaves nothing for the campus other than a line in the Bulletin that Hofstra hosted a presidential debate in 2008.

Certainly Hofstra will drag out the event, most likely with a First-Year Connections (FYC) cluster course devoted to presidential debates (think history, speech communication, and political science courses), but only so much can be said about a single show of manufactured talking points. Short of a fist-fight breaking out or one of the candidate’s stripping on live TV, it’s unlikely that anyone else in the nation will remember the debate a year after it occurs.

A larger question is the rumors of a new medical school to be built where the Jets currently practice. Most world-class universities have medical schools, and Hofstra most definitely aspires to that ideal. However, to quote a famous member of the campus community, “our name may begin with an H, but we aren’t in Cambridge and we don’t have a $25 billion endowment.” That statement, while true, doesn’t capture the entire situation Hofstra is in.

In the stepping stones of collegiate greatness, the basic path is Liberal Arts, Business, Law, Medicine and Divinity. While our liberal arts and business schools are humming along at a nice clip, our Law school faces many challenges.

As one of my undergraduate law professors said just last week, “don’t go to Hofstra’s law school” in reference to Hofstra’s declining Bar exam pass rate and overall academic quality.

I’d say that as a pre-requisite to devoting what must be millions of dollars and thousands of hours to building a medical school, recruiting faculty to teach at it, and then finding students who will pay to come to it, we should first make sure our other schools are in order.

Our law school has dropped almost 75 places out of 190 in the last decade or so of national rankings; this is something that should be addressed before a medical school is founded.

While we have a half dozen to a dozen major centers like the Center for Presidential Studies or the Center for Labor Studies, Cornell, a university recognized for its greatness, has over 100 similarly situated centers. These types of centers draw the nationally acclaimed faculty who in turn encourage better students to apply and contribute to the university.

In addition, compared to the other universities to which Hofstra is frequently compared, such as New York University (NYU), Columbia, etc., we are lacking in advanced graduate programs.

Outside of psychology, our MBA program and the School of Education, our other departments lack advanced graduate programs. While the cost to found a medical school may run into the tens of millions, it would probably not cost that much to add doctoral programs in, say, Political Science or English.

Over the years, Hofstra has come a long way from a branch campus of NYU based out of a little white house in what was then rural Nassau county.

While a medical school may be in our future on the path to greatness, I’m not quite sure a presidential debate is in our best interests.

If Hofstra does win the right to host the debates, I’ll be sitting somewhere watching and being happy I’m not on campus for the worst parking problem in history of the automobile.