Our Dear Friends in the Minnesota legislature have just sent a higher ed funding bill to our Beloved “Governor”, who has promised to veto it the moment it hits his desk. Oh, joy.
What’s really depressing is that the bill going forward is hardly impressive.
“Over three bienniums, we are still 6 percent below what would we would have been if we had just been doing an inflationary increase,” [Sen. Sandy] Pappas said. “So this is not a generous budget.” [Source]
“Governor” Pawlenty essentially held the legislature hostage with his veto threats, which did nothing to generate enthusiasm for the process:
“We took a bill that was 110 percent likely to get vetoed and reduced it to 100 percent,� Sen. Ray Vandeveer. [Source]
Golly Neds, that sure makes me want to play.
What ticks me off, though, is the hypocrisy and/or stupidity of the players, especially all those “fiscal conservatives” who just can’t seem to grasp the idea of a public investment in the future of our state and region. Our “Governor” and the Republican dominated legislature of the past several years has led a gutting of the state’s education system from K-12 through to higher ed. The Morris Area School District is struggling to keep some of their best (but unfortunately junior) teachers, in significant part because of failure to appropriately fund at the state level, and the U of M has been forced to balance cuts on the backs of student tuition.
Sadly typical of the process has been the continuing tuition debacle. Drastic cuts to the U’s budgets have led to significant increases in tuition; there were hopes that some budget increases this year could help end the double digit percentage tuition increases, but it’s clear that Our “Governor” and his Repubs aren’t genuinely interested making education broadly available to the state’s citizens. This is hardly rocket science – the U’s two main sources of funding are the state and tuition, and if you slash one, you have to increase the other to stay in business. And still some our elected representatives have the nerve to whine about the tuition increases they directly helped bring about:
Rep. Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan, mocked the bill’s language informing college administrators the Legislature expects them to keep tuitions down.
“Just the expectation — Just the, ‘Would you pretty please not raise tuition so gosh darn high?'” Buesgens said. [Source]
What’s this guy want? He could try slashing the U’s budget again and see if that lowers tuition…
I really want to rant about the textbook cost nonsense, but that needs to wait – papers must be graded.
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