To achieve this status, he developed a strategy to raise intellectual quality and apply quantitative benchmarking and best practice, and led Miami in a significant capital improvement and construction program.
[citation needed] In 1999, Garland recommended to the Miami's board of trustees that four men's sports should cease to be supported to fulfill the university's legal obligation under Title IX; due to financial constraint he thought it difficult to meet gender equity without such cuts.
In an interview with Inside Higher Education in October 2009, where he presents public university education as vital but in need of change to survive successfully, he talks of four main areas of change that need to be addressed: Garland's views were acknowledged in The New York Times.
He spoke to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about financial concerns at Penn State University,[11] He told of his criticism of what he saw as the mismanagement of campuses to The Washington Post,[12] and in 2005, before the book was published, he expressed some of the same ideas to the same newspaper.
[13] Presidents of Miami University: John D. Millett, William Oxley Thompson, James C. Garland, Guy Potter Benton, George Junkin.