Back before the November 2004 elections, MI State Rep. John Pappageorge (R-Troy)
made news when he said that the Republican Party needed to "suppress" the Detroit vote. More specificall, Pappageorge was quoted as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."
Pappageorge admitted these words had left his mouth, but, he said it was just a matter of "a bad choice of words." Pappageorge said that in no way shape or form should these words be "be construed as racist."
Neither, of course, should the most recent budget for higher education. Despite appearances to the contrary. But they got a lotta 'splainin to do.
See if you can guess which districts are Republican and which are Democratic, which are white and which are not just knowing what happened in the Higher Education budget voted on by the Michigan legislature. Check out the rotating photos of the students to get a sense of student demographics and what sorts of students they want to attract from the links.
Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI would get 22% more, Oakland University in Rochester gets 8% more, and Saginaw Valley State University in University Center also gets 8% more.
The big loser is Northern Michigan University in Marquette was cut by 10% and Wayne State University in Detroit and under the leadership of President Irwin Reid was cut by 5%. NMU is a puzzle. It is not in blue territory. Here are remarks by President Wong on the budget. But Detroit makes sense when you have a vendetta against blue counties. The vote in the Detroit precinct where I did election protections was 29:1 Kerry : Bush.
As reporter Peter Luke observed:
Dubbed the WIN (Workforce Investment Needs) Plan, schools in districts represented by Republicans do, in fact, WIN. Universities in districts represented by Democrats? Well, with a couple of exceptions, they don't WIN.
Under a proposal that purports to reward research effort, Michigan's major research institutions, U-M, MSU and WSU, all would receive less money in 2006 than what was appropriated in 2005. Wayne State in Detroit would lose the most, a whopping $20 million. U-M's Ann Arbor campus would lose nearly $5 million and MSU about $600,000. Other losers are Northern Michigan University and Michigan Tech and Eastern Michigan universities.
It's an audacious proposal that seeks to correct perceived past wrongs. Backers of CMU and GVSU complain those schools have long been slighted even though from 1983 through 1998 Republican leaders who had a final say on university budgets -- John Engler and Dick Posthumus -- hailed from Isabella and Kent counties.
Although it needs work, the formula does address an important point in that it rewards schools for producing graduates. Still more financial incentives could be provided to schools that grant degrees to students who left school years ago, but have returned.
Lawmakers can complain that the smaller schools haven't received their due over the years. They fail to acknowledge that overall, state aid for higher education has been slashed by nearly $300 million since 2002 in part because of GOP-authored income and business tax cuts.
Even with their proposed redistribution formula, Republicans would be providing Grand Valley about $500,000 less than what the school received in 2002; CMU, about $8 million less.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm will not sign a higher ed budget bill that cuts universities in Democratic territory like Detroit, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, East Lansing and Marquette. That makes this funding formula more of a political document than anything else. A curious one at that.
By seeking to correct the past, GOP lawmakers would punish thousands of college students in the present, and their parents, who invariably would be forced to pay higher tuition bills to cover millions in lost funding from Lansing.
Surely some of those households vote Republican.
But logic and the welfare of the entire state just doesn't seem to matter when there is a political coup under way. So we have budget and higher educaition - vital to our welfare - as a grudge match and a mere political ploy.