When 47 is Not a Lucky Number

Last week, the University of Florida President, Bernie Machen, announced $47 million dollar budget cuts for the entire University, including elimination of 430 faculty and staff. This is a six percent across-the-board cut for all the colleges. Unfortunately, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) had been recovering from a $9 million debt created by poor accounting on the part of a former dean, and the already squeezed college is looking at another $6 million reduction from this most recent cut. The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees today and spared some of the faculty layoffs and cancellations of PhD programs in CLAS, which had particularly targeted the language programs. With much of the state of Florida's revenue based on tourism, the state budget is now suffering, and I suppose we knew these cuts were coming. Additionally, there is no income tax in this state, so property taxes and sales tax provide much of the state revenue, and we all know about the housing crisis and reduced consumer spending, which also adds to decreased revenue.

Related to the budget cuts, the Department of Zoology is now being forced to merge with the Department of Botany and the Biological Sciences Teaching Program (a separate department that mainly provides undergraduate basic biology classes). The faculty of Botany and Zoology are definitely not pleased with the merge, and the cooperative, familiar and friendly environment that the Department of Zoology has been able to boast about and use to attract students and faculty may be lost. My advisor, the chair of Zoology, who walked in to the shocking and stressful financial times of the debt in her first year as chair two years ago, thought things would get better, but it only seems to have gone downhill since then. A Botany student proposed BOZOW (Botany or Zoology or Whatever) as the new department name. We have to find something to laugh about in all this.

I agree with my friend, Kathleen, who says there is a simple solution for all of this: charge for classes. A program called Bright Futures pays tuition and fees for graduating high school students who have maintained a B average and score 970 or higher on their SATs. The idea is to prevent brain drain from the state schools when students opt to leave the state for Ivy Leagues. First, I question whether they are truly retaining the students they want; I'm sorry, but a B average and 970 is not Ivy League material. And second, the state is paying for 95% of freshman at the University of Florida to attend college. Often, these students drive around BMWs (because Mom and Dad can afford to spoil their child who doesn't have to pay tuition), trash their luxurious condos and apartments, and fail to maintain even a B average during their time here. Ironically, the scholarships are funded by the lottery, which means the scarce dollars of poor Floridians are paying for the education of many students who could afford it on their own. There's something obviously wrong with the system here.