If you’ve noticed teachers looking more stressed than usual, it’s about more than grading final papers. University President Dan Mote’s campus-wide e-mail about the forthcoming budget cuts and furlough days this week was just the tip of the iceberg, and our professors know it.
Right now, departments are struggling to cut into already-thin budgets. They’re considering options such as cutting Honors programs, ending “extra” university services and turning small discussion classes into giant lectures. For our already overworked professors and graduate students, this means more classes, more students and less money. It seems like the universal reaction has been, “Boy, that sure bites. I guess we’ll have to make do.” I’ve come to a different conclusion.
When I received Mote’s e-mail, I was coincidentally reading Santa Clara University associate professor Marc Bousquet’s piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Taking the Austerity Bait Will Shatter Obama’s Plans for Higher Ed.” Bousquet writes that cost-saving measures like our budget cuts are designed to shift the way our education system works: away from labor-intensive small classes and seminars and toward increased “productivity.”
What this productivity means is doing more with less. It means a reliance on impersonal technology instead of professor-student interaction and cutting programs that give students a more in-depth learning experience.
But it’s no one’s fault, right? It’s the economy – nothing we can do about that. This line of thought is pretty appealing: We can tighten our belts, work harder and learn less until the markets improve. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Some people don’t mind the budget cuts and have no real incentive to fight them. Bousquet writes, “Many administrators welcome austerity. It’s what they live for. It’s what they know how to do; it’s their whole culture, the reason for their existence, the justification for their salary and perks, the core criteria for their bonuses.”
Mote may seem regretful and apologetic, but austerity is what he is supposed to enact. Consider other movements in our economy. What did General Motors do when it couldn’t make ends meet? Did it ask its workers to produce more cars with less materials and time? Of course not; that would be absurd. Instead, they went hat-in-hand to the federal government and asked for the money they needed.
If we can’t expect auto workers to make more cars, why would we expect professors to perform educational alchemy? The truth is that with these cuts, learning will decrease. No one can contest that. Professors and graduate students don’t have magic powers they’ve been hiding, and an increase in their number of students will decrease professor time per student.
The path Mote seems headed down is to try to raise private money to cover the shortfall. This is not an acceptable alternative. Aside from the recession hitting donors as hard or harder than the state, accepting private money to replace state funding tells Annapolis that we don’t need much help after all. And it fundamentally changes the way the university operates. Outside funders’ interests will not be the same as those of the students, and to say that won’t affect how the university is run is naive at best.
There are other options. Mote needs to recognize that if he wants to continue running a strong educational institution, he should go, hat-in-hand, and get the money we need. Surely public universities, investments in the future of our nation, are as worthy of bailouts as private financial institutions. Don’t take “no” for an answer. When workers at the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago were refused the money they deserved, they occupied the factory. This week, they got the money.
What we have now is an education that’s getting more expensive when families can least afford it, while at the same time reducing in quality when the United States needs bright young minds. We have a university with beautiful and extravagant building projects and a bowl-bound football team, while the educational base crumbles from within. By appearing to operate as usual, we let the state get away with under-funding our education. Mote should suspend all building projects and athletic events, not because it will give us more money to spend on education – it won’t – but to demonstrate that the university won’t appear to operate normally under these conditions. To make university funding a political problem for the state and federal governments, we can’t pretend it’s business as usual.
Malcolm Harris is a sophomore English and government and politics major. He can be reached at harrisdbk@gmail.com.
