A group of about 70 students, faculty and staff came together Wednesday to plan ways to force UNM’s administration to “focus on the University’s core academic mission.”
Graduate Employees Together, or G.E.T., organized the meeting, which featured information on the University’s funding.
The University’s tuition revenue has doubled in the last decade, because of tuition increases and a rise in enrollment, according to G.E.T. However, class sizes are now larger because the student-to-faculty ratio has increased and the six-year graduation rate has dropped only slightly.
G.E.T. member Liza Minno Bloom said similar statistics are common at universities around the country.
“This is a trend,” she said. “It’s insidious. We’re seeing universities be treated more and more like corporations.”
G.E.T.’s presentation said that Athletics has seen a funding increase of almost $800,000 since 2004, a larger increase in funding than any other University program.
Nonetheless, G.E.T. member Euan Mitchell said, the University is unwilling to cut Athletics and other programs that have seen increases in the funding they receive from student fees, choosing instead to cut programs that receive little funding and haven’t seen funding increases.
“As we all know, the money is starting to dry up,” he said. “But cuts are not being made in the programs that saw all this growth.”
Mitchell said the number of senior administrators has risen by 124 percent in the last decade, and the number of executive administrators has risen by 650 percent. He said the average administrator’s salary has risen by 64 percent in the same time period, and little money was put into academics.
“When times were good, tuition was up, enrollment was up, the University still wasn’t focusing on its core academic mission,” he said.
Mitchell said the University had $753 million in liquid assets in 2009, and therefore most recent cuts were unnecessary.
After G.E.T.’s presentation, it gave attendees an opportunity to make their voices heard.
At the end of the meeting, the participants split up into smaller groups to make recommendations about ways the group can pressure the University to change its policies.
G.E.T. member Megan McRobert said it made a list of all the groups’ recommendations and will take them into account in planning future actions.
“What’s really important for us is to not assume we know what peoples’ issues or concerns are,” she said. “So our biggest goal today was, ‘Let’s get together, and let’s hear what the issues are, and see where the connections are amongst each other and try to start building community.’”
The main suggestion the G.E.T. was given, McRobert said, and the next step they will take, is to write a plan outlining “why we’re upset and what our demands are.”
She said March is the National Month to Defend Public Education and the G.E.T. will organize a series of events that month.
Minno Bloom said G.E.T. was created to address issues faced by graduate students who also worked for the University, something that fell outside GPSA’s mission statement.
“GPSA is the graduate student organization that works with graduate student life, but there was really nothing to advocate for graduate students as employees,” she said. “And we’ve just been hearing and experiencing tons of grievances and unacceptable situations in terms of differential payment and lack of health care — all these things that workers deal with, but there was nowhere to go.”
She said the group decided to expand its goals last summer when it heard of budget cuts happening in academics at UNM.
“The picture just sort of broadened for us in terms of what it meant for the quality of education for undergraduates, what it meant for the quality of life for us, what it meant for rates of tenure. It all sort of started to connect for us,” Minno Bloom said.
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