FACULTY FOR THE RENEWAL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION: The latest op-eds from the Daily

Friday, March 12, 2010

The latest op-eds from the Daily

The Daily is stepping up its coverage of the budget cuts. The links below are opinion pieces. The editors seem to share our lack of faith in top administration.

"Last Thursday, I observed a protest organized by numerous student groups. The point was to send a clear message to the top administrators of our University: Students pay too much to go to school here, and top administrators get paid too much to work here...The message was clear: If the administrators at the top of the University’s payroll would take a modest pay cut, they could prevent tuition hikes and cuts to programs and salaries of University employees who often live paycheck to paycheck. After following the passionate crowd for a while, I found it hard to argue with their logic. Why scrimp dollars from the bottom and jeopardize the well-being of many when you can easily find what you need at the top without endangering anyone? Why pay our head basketball coach and president so much money when we could use that money to enrich our programs and make them more available to everyone?" http://www.mndaily.com/2010/03/07/protest-consolidates-university-dissent

"Effectively and equitably filling that $80 million hole will require the cooperation and buy-in from all of this University’s disparate stakeholders — students, faculty, staff and administrators. Actually doing this has been deeply hampered by the complexity inherent in a $3 billion budget and by the University leadership’s unwillingness to clarify, quantify or explain it. The massive financial system requires 380 pages of account descriptions, and even a consolidated annual report weighs in at 86 pages. Rather than provide more succinct, accessible spending breakdowns, administration has chosen technocratic obfuscation. It is time for a University budget summit to bring the community together to publicly explain, hear, defend and to solicit input. Individual meetings between college deans, union representatives, faculty or student groups prevent a wider analysis that can more holistically build a better budget."
http://www.mndaily.com/2010/03/09/u-needs-budget-clarity

"If students and families want to avoid a repeat of 2002-2005, when tuition increased 56.8 percent, the time to get active is while budget cut strategies are being discussed." http://www.mndaily.com/2010/03/10/fairness-key-u-budget

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RECLAIM THE U!

As the administration has come to dominate instead of to serve the university, intellectual and educational values have been displaced by market ones like "efficiency" and "productivity." Faculty and students have been commensurately marginalized in the governance of the institution. We do not say that the university ought to be inefficient or unproductive, but we do demand that values central to scholarly and scientific inquiry and education be restored to the center of the university's endeavors, including (indeed, especially) the management of its finances. Our efforts have a fivefold focus:

1. Governance. The university should be governed by those who carry out its mission of teaching, research, and public service. At present faculty have little meaningful role in making decisions that are handed down from central administration. This state of affairs results from manifold causes, faculty in generations gone by having ceded governance responsibilities to an ever-growing body of administrators. We the faculty must resume our proper role in making, rather than merely reacting to, the decisions that govern our work and our workplace.

2. Transparency in budgeting. The administration should make all information about the university's finances, including expenditures as well as revenue sources, readily available to the public in comprehensible form. At present it is difficult or even impossible to find out how the university spends most of the funds at its disposal, effectively prohibiting people without privileged access and knowledge from scrutinizing the administration's allocation of financial resources. (N.B.: All these resources are public funds once they enter the land-grant institution's coffers.) We recommend an independent audit to open the university's budget to such scrutiny.

3. Accountability for the administration. Every office within central administration should be required to provide to the public an account of what it does, what relation its work bears to the university's mission, and why it costs what it does.

4. Workload. The administration demands greater "productivity" from faculty and staff at the same time that it reduces the resources we need to produce anything and increases the burdens that hamper our work. If resources are withdrawn, our workload must be reduced, not increased. We do not want to do less teaching or less research, rather, we demand that unfunded mandates handed down by the administration be eliminated. Meanwhile, adequate support must be provided to enable efficient and productive work.

5. Integrity of the university. We reject the notion that the university can somehow achieve excellence by cutting programs, faculty positions, and curriculum. All disciplines and all modes of inquiry are interrelated, whether directly or distantly; to excise one element affects others, and ultimately damages the whole. This principle of intellectual integration is encapsulated in the motto of the University of Minnesota, commune vinculum omnibus artibus, which is a phrase derived from the argument of Cicero that the study of poetry is essential to a career in law. To unbind the arts from one another, as if any form of human inquiry can stand in isolation from every other, violates not merely the motto but the principle of the University's existence.

FACULTY FOR THE RENEWAL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Friday, March 12, 2010

The latest op-eds from the Daily

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RECLAIM THE U!

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