This is neat: Pecuniarities is running the site’s first blog contest, and the prize is nifty: a six-month subscription to the Wall Street Journal. This is worth, in pecuniary terms, $129…and a lot more in connect-to-the-world terms. Check it out!
The devastation of higher education in Arizona
Here’s the University of Arizona president’s statement on the Draconian cuts our legislators propose to inflict on the state’s already constricted higher education system:
Earlier today legislative leadership put forward figures on possible cuts to higher education in the State of Arizona. They have suggested mid-year cuts to the university system that could total $243 million, approximately one-quarter of the entire budget, with a total reduction of $388 million into fiscal year 2010.
Mid-year cuts to the University of Arizona would total $103 million under this scenario.
These figures are so extreme that they would absolutely cripple higher education in our state. At the very time that our state needs to stimulate the economy, the Legislature is talking about absolutely devastating cuts to the most powerful economic engine in our state. If enacted, these cuts would compound the current economic challenges in our state and make it harder for Arizona to recover from the recession. This is simply irresponsible.
The state needs to protect its universities, not dismantle them, if it has any hope of building an economy for the future or aspiring to more than mediocrity.
We are very conscious of the difficult deficit challenge facing the state, and all three universities are prepared to do their part to cut budgets. But cuts of this magnitude wouldbring irreparable damage. It would force the closure of colleges, increase the costs for attendance, and ultimately cut access to the best hope of a better way of life for our young people.
Compounding the budget cuts are proposals to micro-manage the universities. This is simply unacceptable.
We plan to continue conversations with the governor and key legislators, and to focus on helping them understand the key role that The University of Arizona plays in spurring theeconomy, improving the quality of life in the state and affording access to upward mobility.
And we encourage every citizen of this state who cares about their quality of life, who wants their children or grandchildren to have an opportunity to attend a quality university, to speak up now and to speak loudly.
An enormous number of Tucson residents are employed by the University of Arizona: the figure I heard most recently is one in nine.
Obviously an attack like this will be devastating not only for the state’s oldest and best institution of higher education but for everyone associated with it…directly or indirectly.
Dear reader, if you live in Arizona, now is the time for you to contact your legislators! Go to this site and follow the instructions for how to find your state elected legislators. When you enter your zip code in the search engine, you’ll get the number of your legislative district. Go back and click on the link to the roster of legislators and, using File > Find on this page (in Windows) or, in Mac, the search function on the upper right side of your toolbar; search the number for your legislative district. This will bring up a bunch of irrelevant finds, but keep searching until you find the several people who represent you. E-mail links appear near their names in the roster. Write to them and tell them to think twice about this insanely self-destructive plan.
You should also write to Senate President Robert “Bob” Burns, and to Arizona House Speaker Kirk Adams, whose e-mail addresses appear in the roster.
If you have friends or relatives who live in Arizona, please urge them to write their elected representatives in opposition to this scheme. If you are an alum of an Arizona institution of higher education living out of state, write to Governor Jan Brewer, Senate President Burns, and House Speaker Adams to remind them that young people need to be educated and that a population of ignoramuses does nothing for a state’s economy in the long run. If you are a person who cares about education in general or about the future of America as it is directed by the quality of its young people’s learning, write to these worthies. Do not wait!
Remember that if you are a university or other state employee, it is against the law for you to use the university’s or the state’s e-mail system, telephone, or stationery to communicate with your elected representatives. You must use your own e-mail address. If you don’t have one yet, go to Google and get a free, no-hassle e-mail account and use that.
If you don’t know what to say, here’s what I sent off this morning. It uses the figures that apply to Arizona State University, but these can be deleted or adjusted for the other universities’ budgets. Feel free to copy and paste at will:
It is wrong to balance the state’s budget on the backs of its citizens’ children. That is what the massive budget cuts proposed for the state’s university system will do: penalize our young people for the crimes and stupidity of our country’s political and financial leadership. This is unfair and simplywrong.
The proposed Arizona State University budget cuts for 2009 and 2010 would be the largest higher education budget reduction in the state’s history. Cuts of this magnitude would require ASU to reduce costs by up to $126 million and $194 million next fiscal year.
If every student at ASU decided, voluntarily, to donate an equal portion to the State of Arizona to make up for these slashes, each student would have to cough up $1,880.59 this year and $2,895.52 next year. To survive, clearly ASU will have to raise its tuition by about those amounts.
These are not students who can afford private colleges or universities in other states. Most attend ASU because it’s what they can afford to pay for, and for many, the existing inflated tuition is a hardship. [If you have a relevant personal experience, insert it here; in any event, delete the following, which I’m leaving as a for-instance: My son wants to pursue a master’s degree at ASU but is given pause by the prospect of student loans that could put him in hock for decades.Not years:decades.Any increase will be a hardship for him. You can be certain that spikes in tuition of that size will keep him out of graduate school. He won’t be alone.] These proposed funding cuts and the tuition increases that will inevitably follow will bar many of Arizona’s young people from four-year degree programs, period.
ASU is prepared to do its fair share to help our state out of the budget crisis; however, these proposed disproportionate cuts are simply impossible to institute without gutting the university.
Seven hundred jobs have already been lost at ASU. The proposed drastic cuts to ASU’s budget will mean large numbers of university staff and faculty will lose their jobs. More programs will be dismantled, more course sections will be combined to make impossibly huge classes, and more classes will be eliminated. This will demolish the quality of higher education that our state has so desperately needed and for which legislative and educational leaders have worked so hard. It will set the state back two generations.Crippling cuts will also severely compromise our state’s future, so much so it may never recover. Our legislators must realize the long-term consequences that are not easily reversible, such as lost business, workforce and related revenues. To fail to acknowledge this is not only poor public policy, it’s irresponsible and unconscionable.
Don’t wait. If you live in Arizona, write to your legislators now. If you have friends or relatives who live in Arizona, urge them to write. If you give a damn about young people, write to Arizona’s congressional leaders and governor. Our future depends on it. Our children’s future depends on it. Our grandchildren’s future depends on it.
Bye, Little TV Set; Bye, Evening NewsHour
Speaking, as we were yesterday, of Evan Mecham, Arizona’s late great moronic governor—a man who could whip W in an Olympic-level stupidity contest, hands-down—in just a few weeks now I will lose the TV set that allows me to watch the PBS Evening NewsHour. This is the only source of in-depth national news that’s easily and consistently available to me.
NPR does run some news, but most of it is commentary and yak. The actual news reports are short and perfunctory. And because I listen to NPR mostly in the car, getting the news this way is a catch-as-catch-can process.I try to read a national newspaper in the morning—the local metropolitan paper has been converted to a tabloid and no longer carries much news at all—but there just isn’t enough time to do more than skim the front page. Often I can’t even get that much read.
What does ole’ Evan have to do with a television set, and why is it about to go away?
Evan Mecham’s tenure in the Governor’s mansion was a nonstop sideshow. Every day he would open his mouth and something ludicrous would come out. It soon got to be so outrageous and so hilarious that everyone went out and bought a small, cheap television set for their office so as to catch the latest antics as they happened. I picked up one at Smitty’s, the now-defunct supermarket chain, for about $40 (can you imagine?).
Mecham was thrown out of office in 1988. But my little Evan Mecham television set still runs cheerfully, after more than 21 years of faithful service.
These days the Evan Mecham television resides on top of the refrigerator. I’m usually fixing dinner right about the time Jim Lehrer comes on, and so that’s when I turn the TV on to watch the news. The little television set is so old it probably doesn’t have a connection for the new HDTV box that we’re being made to purchase if we want to keep watching TV off the air, nor is there room on the fridge for the box and special HDTV rabbit-ears: two new dust-catchers.
[Oh, lovely: 4:22 in the morning and the locals are shooting at each other. That sounded like a semiautomatic pistol, rather than the usual streetsweeper. Close enough to set the dog off…jerks!]
Where were we? Oh yes, the television: Our beloved government’s enforced changeover to something many of us don’t especially want or care about will render my old friend unusable. And in doing so, it will bring a stop to my watching the evening news. It will close off a major source of news for me.
The local PBS station does rerun the NewsHour on one of its new ancillary HDTV channels later in the evening, but by the time I’m ready to sit down in front of the bigger television, I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. I usually fall asleep within a half-hour after I turn the thing on.
To my mind, a TV set is no decorator item. I do not want a battleship-gray eye staring at me in my living room, and I consider it rude to have the thing nattering on and on while guests are here. The main TV resides in one of the back bedrooms (so designated “the TV room”), and there is noooo way I’m bringing that thing and its ugly HDTV rabbit ears and its dust-catching HDTV box into the front of the house. Even the smallest of new TV sets, at least as far as I can tell, are so absurdly expensive that I can’t afford to replace the little guy.
So, come February and the mandated switch to HDTV broadcasting, it’s good-bye to Jim Lehrer.
Amazing,isn’t it,how these technological advances enrich our lives?
Legislators propose to shoot us all in the foot
More scary news from the Great Desert University: Our beloved president sends an announcement that our ever-astonishing legislators yesterday recommended cutting the university systems’ funding by $243 million in what remains of FY 2009 and then by another $388 million in 2010. That is huge: the largest cuts in higher education in the state’s entire history. And this is not a state known for its support of education.
Arizona has only three public universities, and you can count the private institutions of higher education on the fingers of one hand. None of these are exactly world-class institutions. A few departments are excellent: the University of Arizona, for example, has one of the world’s leading astrophysics programs, and Arizona State University has cultivated a good business school and a research emphasis in bioengineering. But by and large the universities reflect the general quality of education in this state, which as we have seen before, is not high. In an Arizona university classroom, it’s possible to guess with some accuracy which students grew up in the Midwestern states where citizens invest in education, simply by observing the students’ basic writing and logical thinking skills. Nine times out of ten, I can identify a kid who came from Ohio, Minnesota, or Iowa just by reading a paper or two.
This is the direct result of Arizona’s chronic underfunding and neglect of education.
“Budget reductions of this magnitude,” says Arizona State University President Michael Crow, “would have a serious and immediate impact on university operations.” The $39 million that had already been cut in the 18 months leading up to FY 2009 have so far resulted in the elimination of almost 500 staff positions and more 200 faculty associates, the dismantling of two schools, and a reduction in the number of nursing students.
Arizona State University serves 67,000 students. It graduates 14,000 a year, and its president claims it pumps $3.2 billion a year into the state’s economy. The planned cuts, Crow reports, will require additional layoffs, furloughs, and reduction of programs that already have enrolled students for 2009.”The fact that the legislature has known about the state budget problems for months and failed to take appropriate and effective action to minimize harm to Arizona’s families and economy is unconscionable,” he adds.
Unconscionable, yes. But surprising or anything new? No. This kind of thing is standard operating practice, historically, for the state’s legislative leadership.
With Governor Janet Napolitano leaving to head up Homeland Security, the state loses its strongest advocate for intelligence and commonsense, one whom our legislators have resisted and fought every step of the way. Her replacement will, according to the state’s constitution, be the present secretary of state, a dim light whose politics and retrograde thinking echo those of the blessedly exiting presidential administration.
Our new governor, heaven help us, is the woman who is responsible for state employees losing all choice in health-care plans: her husband, an executive of a large insurance company, was involved in submitting a bid for the contract to insure state employees that was below the break-even point, so that Blue Cross/Blue Shield, at the time the only decent insurer we had, pulled out in protest of the blatant conflict of interest. For a time, we had just one insurer, the one for which our new governor’s husband worked. This company was so roundly hated by the medical profession that many doctors (including most of mine) would not accept it. If you wanted to go to your doctor, you had to pay in cash and then try to extract the money yourself from the insurer, a process that at best required three to six months. My dermatologist would not let me set foot in his office, even after I said I would pay in cash! To get care from the doctors I knew were reasonably competent,I had to buy my own insurance on the open market. Today the state has to self-insure its employees, thanks to that fiasco.
And she’s pretty typical, this new governor. Remember, this is the state that once elected Evan Mecham, the stupidest holder of elected office in the nation’s history. After Mecham made a laughingstock of Arizona, his predecessor, an affably muddle-headed fellow, looked smart: he was the one who announced that he had never read a book from cover to cover except the Bible and had finished school with a junior college diploma—and he didn’t see why anyone else needed to do anything any different. After all, look how far he’d gone!
That one’s favorite byword was (I kid you not!) “It’s a beautiful day in Arizona. Leave us all enjoy it.”
You can see where all this is going: straight back to the Dark Ages.
So, to personalize, it appears that the danger of a layoff where I’m concerned is still very real and very immediate. The university’s administrators are already firing library staff, and I’m sure they soon will move beyond that.
Related Posts:
The Devastation of Higher Education in Arizona
The Perqs of Penny-Pinching
Moments of Fame
Mama Bear hosts the beloved Make It from Scratch Carnival this week at I’ve Got a Little Space to Fill, where Funny’s recipe for and analysis of DIY glass cleaner appears. And by golly, Mary at Simply Forties leads off again with another of her amazing recipes: Baked Adzuki Beans with Eggplants and Tomatoes. I dunno what adzuki beans are, but I’m planning to find out soon. Speaking of new-to-me foods, check out HowToMe’s recipe for a South African snack called rusks: it’s a kind of a sweet biscuit, interesting and it looks good. The only way to do justice to all the neat posts that appear in this carnival would be to copy and paste the whole darn thing here! So be sure to go to Mama Bear’s site and explore for yourself.
Money Beagle has posted an interesting Money Hacks Carnival this week…don’t miss the hilarious pooch pictures, BTW! Here, a spin-off of the DIY window cleaner project, the DIY spot remover, made editor’s choice amid a host of much more august writings. For us intellectual cheapskates, Monevator reports that Stanford researchers have kindly demonstrated that you can spend 20% less than usual on presents and still elicit the same pleasurable response from the giftee. Take a look at Len Penzo’s figures that led him to conclude that paying off a mortgage is the smart thing to do: this thing is a tour de force. I paid mine off, over three financial advisors’ protests, as a matter of gut instinct; Penzo produces some good evidence to support that strategy.
Credit Withdrawal hosts the 160th Festival of Frugality. This thing, as usual, is huge. Funny’s grouse-fest about Scientific American‘s questionable subscription renewal policies appears in the crowd. Fortunately, CW highlights a number of especially excellent posts near the top of this week’s round-up. My eye, of course, was instantly drawn to Lazy Man & Money’s advice on how to stock a bar. He makes some recommendations for staples, high-end and low. Money Ning contributed a nice article titled Five Surefire Ways to Stop Thinking Your Paycheck Is Never Enough. With M’hijito now seriously considering full-time pursuit of a master’s degree, Jim’s post, at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, on the importance of filling out a FAFSA application for low-interest student loans was a good lead.
This week’s Carnival of Money Stories is hosted, with an entertaining Blog Championship Series theme, by Adam at Your Money Relationship, where Funny’s latest shoe-buying tale appears. In the arrrrghhhh! department, check out Consumer Boomer’s story of the amazing deal Terminex proposed to install insulation (yes…they’re diversifying, apparently). Free Money Finance confirms my feeling about Macy’s, which IMHO needs to revamp its business plan if it’s to survive. The Financial Blogger’s house renovation project is finished, and he offers some reflections on the process. And finally, here is a very interesting post on class and moneyat GRACEful Retirement that has generated an enormous amount of lively and even passionate commentary, not to be missed.