Budget debacle hurting students up the road

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Ahead of the terrible Wright State budget cuts, their AAUP Chapter gave some wise advice to the board that every board in the country (not to mention the US presidential candidates soon to debate one another at WSU) should hear:

“We are concerned about the opaque way in which the budgetary issues have been presented, starting with the fact that no one has been at all clear on exactly how large the needed budget cuts actually are. Likewise, we are concerned about the decision to address these issues at the very end of the academic year…

“We…recommended a fairly large number of alternatives to making substantial reductions to the instructional budgets of the colleges…The faculty senate’s budget priority committee’s…recommendations largely reinforce the AAUP’s recommendations…

“We believe that it is a self-defeating strategy to make reductions to the instructional budgets…

“If the increased allocations to public services, student services, and institutional support, all cost centers within the university, had been equivalent to the increases in instructional spending, the savings over the last 14 years would have amounted to $9.2 million. Moreover, beyond the $86.4 million in budget subsidy that has gone to intercollegiate athletics, over the same time period, intercollegiate athletics has had expenses in excess of revenues totaling $6.3 million with $4.3 million occurring since 2009…[T]he idea that making cuts to the instructional budgets of the colleges will somehow be less painful than reducing the allocations to the other cost centers seems a very skewed perspective…”

A full list of the chapter’s (excellent, and ignored) recommendations is here. The chapter has also submitted an open records request on WSU spending.

What’s happening at WSU is also happening in Illinois and elsewhere, the result of years of skewed priorities at both institutional and state levels. Let’s turn this ship around.


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