What our good friend C. B. Forgotston wrote the other day about all the hysterical crying from the Higher Ed Establishment:
The sky is falling — YAWN
Southern University System President Ronald Mason Jr. said the university has cut all that it can in the past four years.
Were not going to be able to cut our way out of this. At this point were cutting into the bone, Mason said. Baton Rouge Advocate, June 8, 2012.
This semi-annual ritual of the last four years reminds me of the movie “Groundhog Day.” The characters in the movie keep repeating the same day over and over. It’s no different with the public colleges in Louisiana.
Memo to the LA College Presidents, Chancellors and sundry administrators:
1. We’ve heard it all before. If your colleges had truly been cut to the bone, there would be no bone left; it would be bone meal.
2. Prepare for at least one or two more substantial mid-year cuts during the fiscal year that begins July 1.
3. Stop with the sky-is-falling routine; it’s not working. You college folks need to at least come of with some new clichés. What you really need to come up with is solutions to the state’s, as House Clerk Butch Speer called it, “institutionalized budget crisis.”
4. You folks are supposed to be teaching our “best and brightest.” Until you stop whining and start doing, we have to question whether you are intelligent enough to teach our young people. You aren’t teaching the students how to find solutions to problems, but only to cry about it when faced with a problem.
Meanwhile, we don’t believe you when you tell us the sky is falling.
06/11/2012 at 10:44 am |
The Universities came up with a solution long ago: take the ability to set tuition away from the legislature (Louisiana is the only state in the Union that does this), and give it to each campus. Until price reflects actual cost, the Universities are kept dependent on the state, and that because of the state, not the Universities. This is the way the state wants it. But it is also the reason our state has no nationally-competitive public universities.