April, 2018
Lincoln -- The UNL chancellor has announced cuts to several academic programs in response to the Nebraska legislature's reductions in university appropriations. The fact that the reductions could have been much worse should not take attention away from the implications of the new rollbacks.
In a previous post, I suggested that the governor and the legislature should be demanding more from the university to help the state's agriculture sector, as opposed to trying to cut appropriations as a way to prosperity. The UNL college of agriculture should be a particular focus.
It is therefore not a good signal that the chancellor's first cut is to eliminate the Rural Futures Institute, launched in 2012 to considerable fanfare. Unless, of course, the RFI interdisciplinary approach to reviving rural Nebraska has not measured up and indeed should be on the chopping block. My sense of RFI is that it has had an impossible task given national and state trends in agriculture. On top of that, its approach was too much cheerleading and not enough sober assessment of the fundamentals of rural economies as they now exist given failing national agriculture policy.
Another cut that raises eyebrows is the downsizing of the Survey Research and Methodology Program and a concomitant re-arrangement of funding for the department of statistics. At a time when the integrity of academic research is threatened as never before by funding sources who want to skew findings favorable to their interests, universities need strong efforts in research methodology and statistics.*
The other cuts are more understandable. Universities must constantly update, which requires cutting as well as adding. Sometimes funding pressures can actually be good for institutional renewal.
The chancellor doubtless was tempted to cut the English department, as it has been attacked by a few in the Nebraska legislature who do not approve of its curriculum. Commendably, he did not succumb.
I must relate an anecdote about English teachers from two days ago, when I attended the annual Ron Ridenhour awards ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, sponsored by the Project on Goverment Oversight. Ridenhour was a courageous Vietnam veteran and reporter who first chronicled the My Lai massacre, fifty years ago. His eyewitness source was Army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who stopped the massacre by use of force against his fellow servicemen who were committing it. After Hugh Thompson left the Army he sought guidance about whether he should participate in a cover-up of the massacre. His old Boy Scout leader and his old football coach advised him to stay quiet. His English teacher told him of his moral duty to speak up. We are a better country for that English teacher.
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* If any statistics faculty are losing their jobs, they could get a measure of poetic justice on their way out the door by instructing the chairman of the board of regents and the president of the university about how to calculate and describe percentages. Both the chairman and the president, during this year's budget battle with the legislature, claimed that UNL administrative costs were "125% lower" than such costs at peer institutions in other states. Meaning what, exactly? That they were less than zero? The actual numbers, it turns out, are these: UNL, $52 million; peer group, $117 million. The former is not "125% lower" than the latter. Correctly expressed, one can say the peer group is 125% higher than UNL, or UNL is 44% of the peer group. The same error was made in describing UNO against its peer group, claiming that it was "100% lower." Again, meaning what, that UNO had no administrative costs whatsoever? What was meant, apparently, is that UNO costs are 50% of its peer group, or its peer group is 100% higher than UNO; that is, twice as high. UNO is not "100% lower." This is embarrassing for a research university.
