As colleges and universities around the country brace themselves for the impact of budget cuts handed down by their respective states, the University of Wisconsin System held an open forum yesterday to discuss possible ways to deal with the cuts currently under consideration by the state Legislature.
UW’s Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education had planned the event to coincide closely with Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget presentation, according to Michael Abelson, WISCAPE project assistant.
“Investment in the higher-education area from the state perspective in the last four to five years has been terrible compared to other areas of state spending,” Abelson said.
The forum was held in the Memorial Union’s Tripp Commons and featured the presentation of position papers by David Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and Terry MacTaggart, the University System research professor for the University of Maine System. Don Kettl, professor of political science and public affairs at UW, moderated the discussion.
“This was an event to have an open forum to put Wisconsin’s budget issues into a national perspective,” Kettl said. “As long as you talk yourself into the idea, you can’t tackle the big issues — you won’t be able to. Increasingly, institutions of higher education are getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie.”
Breneman said that in researching alternative ways to deal with budget cuts he looked at the incomes of several states.
“What we’ve tried to do is look at the income profiles of the state and factor out financial aid to get what we call the state’s general income,” Breneman said. “Our purpose with this report card is in part to get state legislators to take notice of the problem.”
“High tuition is easy to come by; high aid isn’t,” MacTaggart said.
Breneman said abysmal budget situations in states across the nation are keeping state governments from being squeamish about cutting college funding.
“We’re in the phase now where the governors and legislators are more than willing to let us raise tuition,” Breneman said. “But sure as shooting, we’re going to get caught by this. The next governor elected might come in and say, ‘Those dastardly universities, they’ve raised tuition too high.'”
MacTaggart said it was important that regents and legislators keep in mind that the poor fiscal situation many states are currently in will not last.
“The first thing we have to do is move higher education closer to center stage,” MacTaggart said. “If we don’t do that, we’re going to come out of this recession and there are going to be four to five huge programs in front of us for any new money.”
MacTaggart recommended “vigorous communication and political action” to ensure that the interests of colleges and universities did not fall by the wayside.
“Many of the solutions for society’s problems will come out of universities. On the whole, we’re not that good at affecting social change,” MacTaggart said. “The biggest opportunity we have for social change is to educate people so they can make a better life for themselves, intellectually and economically.”
