C. 20 years ago the state support staff jobs at the university were detached from the rest of the state pay scale. So the same job at university could give 10-20% lower pay than the same job at other state agencies.

The University began corporatizing quite a long time ago. In fact for a few years till recently the official title of the web home page was "Corporate Web Page."

For support staff, longevity pay raises were tapered off to near zero as the number of pay grades were greatly reduced so that it became increasingly difficult either to promote oneself into higher earnings. Raises when granted by admin would be in the range of 1% when admin were getting 20-30% and more at the time I left.

Research began to decouple from the university to allow outsourcing, which reduces the fraction of grant money available to underwrite university infrastructure, and also increasingly privatizes research and its results.

Although it's a land-grant university and required to accept all OH high school grads, OSU has for some time been looking for a higher class of clientele. By the late 90's I think there was only one quarter of the admissions year that was truly wide open enrollment.

A useful glimpse of the university's view of its role in society is the incident when local Republican billionaire Les Wexner brought former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to campus for a private meeting with a couple dozen business school grad students. This was in the 90's, sometime around the Gingrich takeover. They didn't want to "bother" the nation's largest public institution of higher learning with the "hassle" of a visit from a world leader. A contestant on a Jeopardy game mentioned being one of those students a few years ago.