Universities get the shaft

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published September 10, 2007

Gov. Charlie Crist is a Florida State University graduate with a self-professed devotion to higher education. That makes his brutal budget treatment of universities all the more confounding.

Little more than two months ago, Crist sat around a conference table with university presidents and pledged to help them get more money from the state budget. "The 11 state university presidents and I agree to work together with the Legislature," he then wrote, "to find ways to fund state universities that mitigate, if not eliminate, the need for increased tuition revenues."

Crist added: "This partnership will be a powerful force working to improve the quality and status of the state university system."

Seldom have words been so quickly erased by deeds. Crist's $272-million in proposed higher education cuts this year are almost punitive in nature. He would cut universities and colleges at double the rate of the rest of the budget. More revealing, for every $1 he would cut from prisons, he would take $10 from universities.

The budget proposal also contains some curious inconsistencies. Crist would cut $34-million from matching university construction grants at the same time he would speed up other construction to fuel the economy. He would cut $10.2-million in first-year startup costs for medical schools at the University of Central Florida and Florida International University while handing over $80-million in startup costs for a medical institute at the private University of Miami.

University system chancellor Mark Rosenberg, normally restrained in choosing his words, was reduced to this reaction: "It seems we have a governor who wants to protect K-12, but is willing to throw higher education under the bus."

Rosenberg's exasperation reaches well beyond this latest budgetary insult. In lean and prosperous times, the university system has become a punching bag for legislative budget writers. In the past 15 years, it has endured $484-million in appropriations cutbacks, dropping its inflation-adjusted funding per student by 20 percent. The student-faculty ratio is now the second highest in the nation, and the instructional cost per degree is the lowest.

Some of the same university presidents with whom Crist met in June have already been forced to institute enrollment and hiring freezes. The university Board of Governors has joined a lawsuit aimed at protecting the universities from further decline.

The roots of this financial crisis in higher education run deep, which makes another round of budgetary cutbacks anything but routine. Crist surely didn't intend to betray the universities this time, but his budget plan does. As long as he and lawmakers cling to the fiction that universities can survive with low tuitions and shrinking state support, then Florida can aspire to mediocrity.

[Last modified September 9, 2007, 23:00:37]