The Board of Regents clearly hasn't been reading my columns.
At any rate, the regents are not taking my advice. I think we can all agree that a 4.3 percent tuition hike - after years of annual tuition hikes - is a bad idea.
I can't really complain about the lack of protest, seeing how I didn't organize a protest myself. But I figured at the very least, if the hike passed without protest, it shouldn't pass without comment. In spite of all the world-shaking events surrounding us these days, it's worthwhile to take a moment to focus on those issues closer to home.
Of course, the tuition hike is not entirely the regents' fault. They made the final decision, but the conditions that led to that decision were set by others.
The additions in the budget passed by the Legislature weren't enough. And, of course, that budget was vetoed by the governor anyway. Legislators would probably argue that they didn't include more funding for UNM because the governor would definitely have vetoed it then.
So the regents were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Under-fund programs and faculty salaries or raise tuition. They did a little of both.
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But such funding difficulties can't get in the way of the University's most important program: athletics. We may have to neglect our underpaid faculty, but it's worthwhile as long we have a $500,000 salary for a new men's basketball coach.
I don't know much about sports, but from what I can gather from office chat, the administration should have learned from the Fran Fraschilla debacle that throwing large sums around won't necessarily net a good coach. Then again, what am I thinking by pointing such things out? Athletics are ever so much more important to a university than academics.
Still, I am forced to concede that UNM's administrators have done some things right. For one, they at least bothered to lobby for more funding. When I was lobbying on behalf of students at the State University of New York, administrators weren't quite so generous. After representatives from many of their 64 campuses, several departments and the Faculty Senate expressed the need for increased state funding, the SUNY Board of Trustees lobbied year after year for a flat budget.
And I have to credit the regents for being sure to make this decision while classes are still in session. The SUNY trustees had no qualms with making major policy decisions in the middle of the summer at a remote campus while hardly any students or faculty were around to voice their concerns.
And, as I said before, it's not all their fault.
But that's just the problem. The regents pass the blame on to the Legislature, the Legislature passes the blame on to the governor and no one takes responsibility for anything. Meanwhile, students hold forums and voice opinions they know aren't going to be listened to anyway.
At the same time, the state's idea of a good way to improve education is to punish schools that aren't meeting standards, rather than help them. Teachers are fleeing the state for better pay elsewhere. Students are graduating from high school without the basic skills to get through college, dictating University core curriculum requirements that border on remedial instruction.
Education has always been at the center of my life. When I was younger, my parents talked with me about making education part of a lifelong process. The two years I took off of college were spent organizing students to lobby for higher education funding. When I write, I don't do it to convince people to agree with my ideas; I do it in the hope that I can stimulate some to think in new ways about their own ideas.
I don't understand how we can let our incredible faculty go without raises and our students pay more and more for the right to learn.
As I contemplate how much more debt I'll be in by the time I graduate, I can't help but wonder how many students have already stretched their resources as far as they can go and won't be back next year.
by Sari Krosinsky
Daily Lobo Columnist
Got any good ideas or grammatical complaints? E-mail them to Sari Krosinsky at michal_kro@hotmail.com.
