budget cuts at UNO

We are facing huge budget cuts at UNO, and have been suffering through them for the last 2 years now. We had barely gotten on our feet after Katrina when the state decided that higher education wasn't an important part of making Louisiana a place people would want to call home. We think it is.

Email us your stories of budget-induced hardship at UNO and around the state, so we can compile a better picture of exactly how they are dismantling our universities.

In the middle of a recession, when more people need to go to college to learn the skills they need to adapt to the changing US economy, Jindal and the Board of Regents think it's a good idea to cut programs and raise tuition!

The very same problems we face are also being faced around the U.S., and California students are leading the way in fighting to defend public education. Links to some of their organizations and writings that are relevant to our situation can be found in the sidebar.

UNO is a diverse campus in a diverse city, and proud of it. This article about how California's budget cuts have hit students of color the hardest, applies in exactly the same way to our situation here: The Neoliberalization of Higher Education: What's Race Got To Do With It?

The budget cuts are hurting everyone, and they have disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities, which we have seen in the attempt to close LSU Press, which focuses on African-American culture, and in cuts to ethnic and womens studies programs. A proposal for so-called "performance based funding" for higher education, just as with Bush's "No Child Left Behind" will lead to an increase in funds going to richer, whiter schools and students. An article explaining the racialized impact on the Southern University system is here: Black College Advocate Questions Funding Formula for Southern University Campuses

UNO Chancellor Ryan was very excited to see UNO's bond rating improve from Baa1 to A3, which makes it easier to attract investors to fund construction projects at UNO. Is Ryan leveraging students' tuition to win a better bond rating like they are doing in California? Is he excited to get investors to build another brand new business building to house his precious MBA program (which by the way has a fee structure that is unfair to the rest of UNO students)? Or perhaps a new addition to the fitness center? Or will Ryan opt to put more funding into researchers' infrastructure, as Jindal suggests, which pushes UNO further along in the national trend of universities becoming capitalist research company, underwritten with student tuition and subsidized by taxpayers? In California, they see these bond schemes as creating an incentive structure for investing in projects that attract wealthier students who can pay higher tuition, which in turn can guarantee more bonds. Thus, the university further comes to be a site of privatization and exclusion rather than inclusion for non-wealthy students and non-profitable majors. For a good critique of the bond system and capital improvement projects, see: No Capital Projects But The End Of Capital

The PSERC has recommended that LA university tuition be raised to the median level for the Southeast (SBER) region. This would mean a 30% tuition increase for UNO. After that, "only" a 5% raise each year should be imposed. The document states that schools must meet retention standards to be "allowed" to raise tuition, showing, along with Ryan's giddy pronouncement on our new bond rating, which side the administration at the university level is really on. They want to raise tuition. They want to run the university like a business and not a public service.

Raising salary levels to the average of other comparable systems is the excuse the administrators use to justify their $600,000 salaries, as well. This very same rationale is trotted out by CEOs of Wall Street firms who make millions each year. Is this a negotiating tactic they teach in graduate business programs? The faulty logic in this is striking. If everyone raises their salaries (or OUR tuition) to the average, it means the average will go up, creating an endless, spiraling justification for ever-increasing salaries in the case of administrators, and ever-increasing tuition, in the case of students. When will someone call this out as the hollow excuse for transferring wealth to the rich that it is?

You can look up any state employee's salary, including the insanely over-paid administrators like John Lombardi (who makes $601,000 a year!), using the tool on the sidebar under "Resources" called State Employee Salary Search.

This article is a good overview of the attack on higher education nationwide: Budget Cuts Take Toll on Education

Stay tuned for fliers, articles, pamphlets, posters, events, and more in the coming week.