The end of state universities
October 07, 2008 By: almostgotit Category: UT, Uncategorized, University of Tennessee, education, finances, higher education, parenting, public education, public higher education, sales tax, state budgets, state funding, state universities 
If we can’t support them, we need to get rid of them.
Top Tennessee economist Bill Fox, among many others, has already given us the hard numbers: sales tax collections do not ever keep up with economic growth, and thus are a terrible way to provide ongoing funding for anything, including public education. This is true even when the economy is in good shape: when it isn’t, consumer spending slows and tax collections plummet.
Moreoever, the University of Tennessee, like many state universities, already receives less than 20% of its total funding from the state, even as it remains fully accountable to Nashville for every dollar it spends… including the millions that Nashville does not even provide.
Nor has UT ever done a very good job of presenting the seriousness of current and past funding cuts to the tax-paying public. A major barrier to reforming UT’s regressive funding structure is the persistant public perception that universities are rife with excess spending (or) that the whole point of a state university is to field a football team.
UT’s Development, Alumni and Communications offices are good at wearing orange but have always been too tentative about promoting UT academics, nor have they yet aimed high enough with their private fundraising goals.
So how about this: move the football team to Nashville and privatize the rest of UT — under a new name, of course. Let’s stop pretending that we can support, or that we even want, publically funded higher education.
Only a fraction of Tennessee’s taxpayers takes advantage of higher education in any case, so why should taxpayers pay for it, either? Why not reserve our tax money for other government projects (K-12 education? Public transporation?) — or even give it back to the people who earned it?
U.S. universities are still the best in the world, and one reason they are is that they are very good at raising their own money. Universities are also better than legislators at managing their own budgets and setting their own curricula, without state interference.
Why not let them?
October 7th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Most people also do not realize how little there is to cut at Tennessee universities after a series of major cuts in the 90s and earlier in this decade. I manage a large academic department at one of the state campuses. Ninety-two percent of our budget (which is about half of what Coach Phil Fulmer makes in a year) is for faculty salaries, another 2% is for our miniscule staff (3 poorly paid–but excellent–budget and secretarial staffers for a dept. with 23 faculty members, 7 lecturers, 280 undergraduates and 75 graduate students), the paltry remaining 4% goes to operations. So where are you going to cut without cutting out real faculty and staff, thereby decreasing the number of courses that your daughters and sons will be able to take, thereby making classes bigger (and we already have five fewer faculty members than we did three years ago).
If anyone thinks, by the way, that these faculty members are lazy because of tenure, and that they should be working a lot harder, I will happily meet him or her any time of any day to show them what goes on in my department where most faculty members work a lot more than 40 hours a week. They win international awards for their research, they bring home teaching awards year after year, and they are in the classroom with your children day after day. They do all this, by the way, for signficantly lower salaries than even other SEC schools pay.
And yes, we probably are going to become essentially private within my lifetime. Other public universities–e.g. Virginia–are already there. The only way anyone at any state university can hope to grow a department or program is by raising private money. No one in public education thinks that states are ever going to give more than the ever diminishing sums they are giving now. The day is coming when they will give us nothing.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Tennessee’s reliance on sales taxes as its main revenue source will always keep it behind the curve.
Your point about the perception that a state university exists mainly to field (serve?) a football team definitely applies to the school in question. I moved away in 2002, but I knew plenty of people who lived and died by the Vols but had no connection to the university at all. During my son’s freshman year at UTK, I mentioned his scholarship to my brother-in-law, and he responded “I didn’t know he played football.” He was joking, but he had a point – a “football school” tends to be more about football than school. (My son didn’t play football, but he did get his engineering degree in 2007.)
The flagship universities of a few states (Pennsylvania and New Jersey come to mind) are private, and I think you make some good arguments in favor of that.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Frank DeFord (NPR sports commentator, SI writer, author) made a brilliant proposal a few years ago during one of his radio spots. It was, simply, to move college football programs out of college athletics departments and into the realm of campus entertainment. Pay the athletes; buy them fancy BMWs; put them up in shi-shi housing; hire prostitutes for them—whatever. Just don’t do it on the academic dime. The result, he contends, would be athletics departments that exist for actual athlete-scholars.
I think you’re spot on. In the performing arts world we like to beg the government for money so we can continue to ply our trade. But state-sponsored art is usually horrid. Executive directors of various performing arts institutions like to make pretty much the same curtain speech when the house lights go down: ticket sales account for only a small percentage of this company’s budget. Some grant monies are often mentioned, but in the end, it’s usually private benefactors keeping things afloat. A good development director is worth his/her weight in gold.