Should colleges be exempt from budget cuts?

The provocative title above preceded both a YES and NO answer. Jane S. Shaw of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy provided the NO answer, and a couple of points presented by her really scrolled my nerd. Ms. Shaw is one of those people who don't seem to know anything about higher education, but that doesn't stop them from criticizing what we do. Firstly, she serves up the familiar and tiresome caricature of "many faculty would rather do scholarship than teach" charge, and of course, for some of my colleagues this is true. But she then dismisses such scholarship as a great academic waste of time. One of our state legislators once asked me "Fine, fine, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how anyone working at one of our Lincolnland universities can justify spending their time studying rain forest in central America." Much to the consternation of the administrative dweeb showing them around, the Phactor, standing right their in the door to the greenhouse, chose to answer. It's simple really. 1. Biology doesn't pay any attention to political boundaries; there isn't a biology of Lincolnland, it's all one. 2. Research isn't easy to do, and to remain motivated to exert such physical and intellectual energies the topic has to be something of great interest to me. But the actual topic doesn't matter as long as the research is biologically meaningful and of a high quality. The reason we do science, and other scholarly endeavors, is that a very important part of our job is to teach students how to learn; to do science rather than learn about science. So students must apprentice with scientists and what kind of this-is-how-you-do-science teacher would I be if I didn't do science? Would you hire a swimming coach who didn't know how to swim? So the actual subject matters little, but we have to be scholars to show students what it's like. And how can someone who understands so little about higher education think themselves capable of suggesting how it should be run? Well, Jane? You miss the whole point of higher ed but feel perfectly OK justifying our economic sacrifices.
Second, the other main thrust of her opinion piece was that fiscally colleges are "coddled, complacent and resistant to cost control" and whenever budgets get tight colleges just raise tuition. In fact our tuition has gone up faster than the cost of living over these past 20 years, but during that period of time the state legislature has cut their percent of support from 64% to less than 23%, and when you factor in the withdrawal of support, the real costs of running the university, including all kinds of unfunded state mandates, are way behind the cost of living. Certainly our salaries haven't kept pace with inflation so we slowly watch our standard of living erode. The Phactor feels so coddled. Members of our foundation board asked me if my salary, an over 30 year full professor, could possibly be less than $100,000? It made me laugh!
But what do you expect from Jane, the president of the Pope Center? Here's their mission:
• Increase the diversity of ideas taught, debated, and discussed on campus;
• Encourage respect for the institutions that underlie economic prosperity and freedom of action and conscience;
• Increase the quality of teaching and students' commitment to learning so that they graduate with strong literacy and fundamental knowledge;
• Encourage cost-effective administration and governance.
Ah, yes, all the right wing what's wrong with higher education buzz issues. In other words, let's run higher education like a business where us subordinates (faculty) are told what to do rather than be given any say in the running of the institution. Forget that colleges exist because faculty hired administrators in the first place so that we could concentrate on academics. Now the college consists of bricks & mortar and the administrations; the rest of us are employees or customers. And Jane wants to know why so many students are doing so poorly? Doesn't she know that the customer is always right? Parents and administrators constantly intercede on behalf of students rather than letting us hold their feet to the fire. Only wish that people like Jane really knew what was going on rather than making it up and cherry picking information based on conservative ideology, which she might learn if she had done some real scholarship, isn't a valid method.

Problem Solving 101 - Higher Education Sets the Example

Here's a wonderful example of bureaucratic problem solving in higher education. The physical plant at our fine institution was looking for ways to cut their operational costs, just like everyone else. And some remarkable intellect figured out that the science buildings were using way more expensive paper towels than other buildings because - gasp!- laboratories have sinks, and sinks need paper towels, and labs need sinks because biology stuff is messy, hands get dirty, and so on. A candidate for outstanding administrator of the year found a way to cut costs by transferring the responsibility for laboratory paper towels to the academic department. Ta Da, the physical plant saves money. Now understand this, all central administrators are in the business of counting beans in the form of credit hours generated, and academic departments who are the only units that cultivate this particular crop are regularly dunned if their credit hours decline, however never, ever are the academic departments ever given the tuition generated. This of course would solve many of the problems right away, and credit hour generation would certainly become important if the people making them got the rewards, but the clear risk is that they might decide they don't need an assistant to the night manager in charge of paper towel distribution. But academic departments when faced with a new cost and a budget that has been static for more than a decade adopt their time honored approach - passing the cost on to students via laboratory fees, which themselves were instituted because not enough of the tuition money made its way back to departments to buy what was needed for teaching laboratory courses. Oh, but increases in fees and tuition are a real no-no right now, bad PR and all that, so the bean counter-in-chief of our particular college declares that this new cost CANNOT be passed on to students. This is a zero sum game, folks. So something has to give, and you may rest assured that our overall budget for such purchases was not what we would call flush. Yikes! Don't say flush! We'll end up buying our own TP! So we will have to do without something that we previously had thought we needed for educational purposes to buy paper towels, or like a nice little day care center we can have all the students bring little towels to lab classes, and that would be OK since it won't show up on the balance sheets. In the meantime someone somewhere is getting the award ready for the person who excelled by cutting costs so well. The same person shall receive the Phactor's short-sighted detriment to education award. Well done everyone!