I am completely incensed by something that I just read in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Add to all of that—wait for it—federal stimulus funds. My state's new governor, in his recent State of the State speech, warned that everyone in our state who accepted stimulus dollars in the last state budget would now have to pay the piper. Higher education received a lot of stimulus revenue. The governor said we should have known better than to accept the federal bailout. Really? Well, as they say, hindsight is always 100-percent accurate.
But seriously, should I have known better?
I was a hero (among a small group of people) when I brought home the stimulus dollars in the last state budget. Wouldn't I have looked like a goat if I had argued against my institution taking stimulus money when our sister schools in the system were accepting it? I probably would have become an unemployed goat.
http://chronicle.com/...
Let me be the first to admit that I don't know what state the above quotation refers to. The article was written by one Peter Onear:
Peter Onear is the pseudonym of a vice president for government relations at a university in the Midwest.
Given the publication, the Chronicle of Higher Education, I expect that the statement above the fold is correct. Part of my reason for posting this here, I hope somebody knows what state the author is talking about. The other reason is that I'm completely incensed with what is described in this article and need to vent a bit.
I've always believed that the job of an elected politician is to serve the community they represent. For a State school to take federal grants should be the ultimate no brainer. Federal grants bring outside money into a community. This generates tax revenue. Hopefully, some of those taxes will go to making long term improvements in the community. Federal education money may also, we hope, help produce a workforce with the education and skills to bring higher paying jobs into the community.
What is described above is a situation where one group is being told that they should not have accepted money from the federal government and now will be punished for doing so by the state. On this site we like to talk a lot about Republicans shooting their mouths off about nullification and succession. Those are the headlines, this is the reality. And what does that reality look like:
While it is difficult to talk with members of Congress, it is pretty easy to speak with state elected officials if you know what you're doing. In the past, government-relations officers have found the politicians who represent our university in the statehouse to be generally amenable. But for many of us, that has changed. And that, perhaps more than anything else, has caused us real problems in influencing legislation like state budgets that seriously affect our institutions' bottom lines.
Quite frankly, there are not many options if lowly legislative aides don't even take your phone calls. In fact, about the only strategy that works is to get your president to reach out. Most legislators will still take a call from the university president, although it might not do much good.
When a major employer, public or private, can't get a word in with a state legislator we have a problem. The normal political process no longer exists. Instead we are seeing the rise of politics aimed at the destruction of the opposing party. Those getting benefits from the opposition today will pay a price tomorrow. Worse, if your child becomes involved with a group favored by the opposition, in this case by going to a public university, they risk being collateral damage in the fight. If we have gone from the politics of personal destruction to the politics of groups destruction then the entire concept of rule of law in this country is called into question. Have we really become a country that is willing to liquidate our young in a political fight? Down that path lays nothing good.
In short, we need to figure out what governor is trying to pull this and make him eat it.
Updated by sdelear at Thu Apr 21, 2011 at 12:49 PM PDT
Take a good look at what the Chronicle Author is saying. He is not saying that his institution made commitments based on temporary federal funds in the expectation of getting state funds to back them up.
What the author is saying is that institutions who took federal funds are now being ask to pay those funds "back" to the state in the form of cuts to their, State, operating budget based on the amount of federal funds received in a fiscal year OTHER THAN THE ONES the funds were received in. Further the funds are non recurring, meaning that the state is not adjusting the University's budget on the bases of what they will get from the feds this yea. The state is punishing the university for taking federal money by cutting their state budget next year.