Even as the announcement
serves as a scare tactic, the possibility that the Louisiana State University
System and perhaps others higher education systems or institutions in the state
could declare partial or entire financial exigency could pave the way to
helpful changes – or simply make the problem worse.
LSU System Pres. and LSU Chancellor
F. King Alexander announced that the system’s Baton Rouge campus was putting
together plans for financial exigency, a condition that allows an institution
greater latitude in making decisions about programs or personnel as a result of
adverse financial conditions. By way of example,
the LSU System receives such authorization from its Board of Supervisors for
any of the entire system, institutions within it, or academic units within an
institution, after an institution’s leader consults with the faculty and
petitions. This allows, for example, for a school to furlough, lay off, or even
terminate contracts with faculty members prior to these ending or in the case
of tenured individuals to bypass other for-cause requirements for their
discharge.
Of course, Alexander did not have
to tell the world that he had asked the institution to begin drawing up such plans,
so that served as a public relations move more than anything else (affirming
this primarily was a scare tactic by adding “We don't say that to scare
people”). He piled on with the imaginary terrors by stating “You'll never get
any more faculty” if declaring exigency and lamenting that, at budgeted levels
without changes in current revenue-raising capacity for the state of which the
Legislature is trying to alter, the taxpayer portion per LSU undergraduate student
would drop to $660.
But that figure seems hardly
credible. The budget
as is reports that the LSU System, where about 73 percent of the student body
attends the Baton Rouge campus, is down for around $56 million in state
funding, or about $1,250 a student (including
graduate students but excluding nonresidents). And that’s counting only the
funds specifically allocated to the system, before general fund dollars are
imported from the Board of Regents according to its formula, which would add
another estimated (by proportion of students, which doesn’t even take into
account that the per student allocation to LSUBR would be higher because it has
the highest costs and the highest proportion of full-time students) $3,500 per
student. Even subtracting out the assumed revenue changes that pump in around
$400 million to the BOR number, it’s still $2,100 more per student. Alexander
needs to explain how he’s getting this $660 figure when budget figures suggest
it’s five times higher. (By the way, the flagship University of Oregon, which
is under no financial difficulty as it proceeds under its relatively new
quasi-privatization, gets about $3,000 per
student from its state taxpayers for its students.)
More subjectively evaluable is
Alexander’s claim that exigency will scare away future faculty hires. For the
most part, that is sheer nonsense. With the social and technological changes
roiling the traditional model of higher education, there has come a tremendous
glut in available faculty, especially in the humanities and social sciences.
Conditions may be tighter in the sciences and business, but if any school puts
out in any discipline an open position, especially if for a tenure-track slot,
with such a buyer’s academic employment market, you won’t be hurting for
applicants. And, if nothing else, when the University of New Orleans had to
turn to exigency after the hurricane disasters of 2005 and the Southern
University System found itself declaring exigency a few years back, they kept
finding plenty of applicants for the relatively few jobs they could advertise.
To be charitable, Alexander greatly exaggerates the negative impact that
exigency would have on faculty recruitment.
As it is, the question of whether
to declare exigency is largely unrelated to the genuine problem facing
Louisiana higher education – particularly at the senior level, there are too
few students chasing too many institutions. That is a macro-structural problem
that had Louisiana
recently ranked 18th in per capita spending on higher education,
while exigency deals with the micro-structure – how efficiently institutions go
about delivery higher education. Yet obviously the micro considerations affect
overall efficiency of the system independently of structural considerations,
and therefore exigency can be a tool to system reform.
Unfortunately, it also can make
matters worse. One might think, given the opportunity through exigency, that
institutions would seek to pare away high cost, low return programs and people
in order to set themselves on the surest footing for financial stability. Think
again: politics seeps throughout academia, based upon personalities and
ideology, and, with fewer market-based incentives to act otherwise caused by
taxpayer subsidization, decisions often get made on these bases. So, using the
latter as a hypothetical
example, if you have a faculty member who costs about $5,000 per student,
but who arrived in his tenured post more for political connections than any
real demonstrated teaching aptitude and who visibly champions the prevailing
orthodoxy to the approving noises of the faculty lounge, he might keep his job
while the guy who costs about $225 a student, teaching far more of them, who
came to tenure through the usual track, but who also dissents and visibly from
the typical political liberalism that courses through academia’s veins (and who
occasionally notes that the system president is wearing no clothes), that more
productive instructor may not stay on.
This means in the final analysis
that, should the LSU System or any other or any institutions get a declaration
of exigency, there’s no guarantee that the cost-cutting actions that result
will create any long-term improvement in higher education delivery in Louisiana;
in fact, they could exacerbate some of the very conditions which have caused
such inefficient delivery, in the aggregate, of higher education in the state
in the first place. In that instance, whether exigency declarations should be
feared or cheered is uncertain.
But policy-makers should not let
themselves get distracted over this sideshow. They need to keep their eyes on
the ball: Louisiana higher education does not have a revenue problem, it has a
spending problem, and budgeting should come in the context of prodding the
system towards reform that reduces the inefficiency, whether in how it’s structured
or in how it delivers, that has brought it to this point in the first place.
2 comments:
I don't understand the hate here. It seems obvious that LA has too few students seeking too many universities in the same market. Why bail them all out each fiscal year?
Re:"they themselves are guilty of."
Wow - that reply was really insightful about the hate part. It sounds like this is a personal vendetta to you.
Seems like a simple issue to me - LA has more major universities than it has students to attend them, and the tax payers are footing the bill. Rather than raise taxes, let's close or merge a few universities and maybe cut down on some of the cost.
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