journaling: enabled

The early estimates are out that my place of work … my alma mater … the University of Wisconsin-River Falls … will face a 16.4% budget cut for the budget year beginning July 1st, 2015.  Even with what I learned in my college composition class, my speech class and all my other communication experiences, I don’t think I can adequately convey the impact this has, but that’s not going to stop me from trying.  And likewise, the cuts aren’t going to stop us from trying as an institution to do what we’ve always done to educate and make the world a better place.

Teach more with less “they” say. We’ll still teach English.  That can’t stop of course.  But the student who needs more clarity because she didn’t understand the explanation … she might not get that opportunity as there are now 12 other hands raised in the class of 120, instead of 3 others in a class of 30. The student who needs some help with wordcrafting on a Friday afternoon? Yeah, he’s on his own too.  The instructor is busy providing academic career guidance to the extra 50 student she had to take under her wing after her coworkers were laid off.

You don’t do enough work “they” say. We’ll still teach biology.  That won’t stop of course. But the student who’s doing undergraduate research on a promising treatment for pancreatic cancer might miss that breakthrough discovery that would improve the lives of thousands. Her mentor is too busy grading exams for an extra 60 students this semester to look over her notes from the afternoon’s lab research and ask a question that would change her life.

You need to focus on preparing people for the workforce “they” say. We’ll continue to do outreach as well of course. But that boy who would have benefited from the spark of excitement seeing the magic of static electricity at his elementary school’s STEM night won’t be inspired to pursue a career in electrical engineering. He’ll bounce from job to job, struggling to support his family as he’s been unable to find his passion.

These are all hypotheticals, but I hope they illustrate very real ways these cuts can impact both our current students and potential future students. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to pick an instructor from any academic department at your local higher education institution and ask them what effect cutting 15-20% of their institution’s instructors would have.  We’ve already had our “fat” cut these past few budget cycles.  I won’t argue about whether it was really fat, because that’s water under the bridge.  What’s left is people. Real people, whose driving desire is to make a difference in the lives of our students.  People who want to help those students achieve their goals, whether they’re as small as understanding the physics problem on today’s homework, as big as being the first person in their family to graduate from college, or as lofty as the pursuit of a PhD and discovering a treatment for pancreatic cancer.

Please understand that the time to speak up is now. May is too late. Regardless of the fact that our legislators don’t have to vote until June (or even later as has happened in the past), our students will be deciding in April what classes to take this Fall. This means we need to decide which classes are going to be offered and whether we’ll have staff to teach them.

Unfortunately, I don’t really think the people who most need to understand this message will ever see it. If you’re a Wisconsin resident who understands how you’ve benefited from higher education, whether it be a UW campus or other institution, please make sure your friends and legislators understand that the cuts being proposed will be very damaging and in fact are doing damage to our state’s reputation already.

This year has been stressful so far.  I’ll get to that more in a later post … really … I promise!  I want to focus this post on higher education, specifically at the University of Wisconsin.

I think many people who’ve not been through a public university really understand what these institutions provide.  On the outside, sure, they’re just another place to acquire the knowledge you need to embark on a career.  But they’re really much more than that.  I’ll start with that p word I put in there … public.  Public institutions are supposed to be accessible to the public (at least more so than their private/for-profit counterparts).  In many cases, that means they are government subsidized to enable that access.  In return, not only do these institutions provide quality learning for the students who enroll there, they provide a resource of information to the public and perform a variety of outreach activities. They do all of this while competing against private institutions for both students and the quality faculty to teach those students.

I say all of this in light of yet another large budget cut directed at the U of Wi.  “Faculty should teach more” they say.  “They only teach an average of 14 hrs a week” they say.  “Be more efficient” they say.  For fans of market competition, they’re conveniently forgetting some truths.  For one, faculty do far more than lecture.  They mentor research projects.  They advise career paths.  They grade tests.  They plan course materials.  They research and revise course materials to keep them up-to-date.  They perform outreach, such as participating in STEM presentations to area grade schools, or hosting science days to expose middle schoolers to cutting edge demonstrations. They counsel students who turn to them for help. They blow on a spark of knowledge to turn it into flame of passion for it. Yes, there are some “bad eggs”, but generally our faculty put in far more time outside of lecturing than they do behind the podium. As far as teaching more, prospective students are looking for attention that requires low student:faculty ratios. So not only are we dealing with budget pressure that deters good faculty from wanting to work at the UW, we also are being pressured to teach more students with fewer faculty, thus driving students away.

I’ve observed a lot of general hostility towards the comprehensive education that our 4-yr UW schools provide. That’s understandable. After all, why should an engineer need to take an art class, right?  That’s a waste of time. Until you realize that down the road, that engineer could be looking at the problem of how to display an image and think back to the art class where they learned about pointillism and construct the image point-by-point. If that engineer has to write up any proposals or supporting documentation, they ought to have some language skills. Problem solving works best with a variety of viewpoints, and there is something of a trend in that direction, bringing together multiple disciplines to solve problems. A university degree provides more well-rounded individuals who are going to be better problem solvers.

I wish more of our voters, as well as our legislators, understood what they have, before they try to trim it and mold it into something else entirely.