Before signing any petition or showing up to any rallies during the next few weeks, inform yourself. People throughout UF are wasting too much effort in fruitless endeavors.
Yes, UF is facing a budget cut that will affect some departments, faculty and staff. Tuition will likely continue to increase toward the national average. Despite the great uncertainty surrounding the administration’s decisions, you can still do something, though it will take more than a Facebook post or a signature on a petition. There are many things at stake in these last weeks of the semester: the quality of your education, your career prospects and the livelihood of your faculty and staff.
Half-baked attempts to mobilize the Student Body will do more harm than good for what could be (and should be) an important movement against political meddling in our university system. There is no “flagship” department at UF. There is no point in jumping the gun before proposed cuts are announced. There is no sense in putting out incomplete information that will misinform and fractionalize student support.
What we need is a coordinated effort among the students and departments, the involvement of parents and supporters of the university and the attention of the media and state representatives. We have organizations capable of such coordination. Let’s put them to use and create a solid movement.
First and foremost, the faculty and the Student Body need to realize that their efforts should be directed toward Florida politicians. This budget cut has been handed down with little or no input from UF faculty, staff and administration — partisan politics is responsible for the cuts. The administration can mitigate some of the impact by “trimming the fat” in a few areas, but it cannot seize many of the daily operations or contractual obligations it has.
There is little “fat” in this university. All efforts to make it leaner will ultimately fall short of meeting the budget cut, primarily because there really is little to cut, but also because the immediate actions that can be undertaken will have little impact; some of the actions that could have greater impact will not produce effects until next year.
Administrators face the most difficult task of all: keeping the university running while trying to protect every job they can. It is not as simple as cutting back on landscaping to save a handful of staff positions. It is true that some departments have more staff and service fewer students while others teach more classes but produce less research. How does one assess the value of a department, faculty member or staff member uniformly? There are very tough choices to be made in the coming days and the faculty, staff and administrators have been deliberating for weeks, if not months, on what to cut and from where to cut it. The Student Body should give credit where credit is due and place blame where it truly belongs.
Everyone in the state of Florida needs to realize that this is not a “public” university, per se. UF receives 20 to 25 percent of its budget from the state, despite being its “flagship” university; the rest comes from private sources.
One would understand the lack of oversight if the majority of the funding came from the state, but it is ridiculous to think partisan politics are affecting university operations under the current budget allocation. Administrators could explore the options of making the university a fully private entity to untether it from unjust political oversight, but the South needs another Harvard like Florida needs a polytechnic university.
Parents and students are the ones caught between a rock and a hard place in this scenario because privatizing the university would incur greater tuition increases despite the ability to attract better professors and attain higher national standing and prestige. The solution is to kick politics out of higher education.
On one hand, it is too late to do anything about the state budget — it has already passed. On the other, it is never too late to do the right thing. Faculty should teach the courses that are most in demand so the university can maximize the state credit it merits. Administrators should seek innovative funding strategies to wean the university off state support. Students should organize a massive letter-writing campaign targeting their local representatives and Gov. Scott to tell them that, despite party lines, you will not vote for them until they return control of the university to our administrators by restoring the budget allocation.
Remind them Florida is always a swing state and presidential elections are right around the corner. Citizens control politics by making politicians accountable for decisions through the power of the vote. Let’s send them a clear message: Meddle in our future by trying to alter our education, and we will meddle in yours during the next election.
Victor M. Olivieri is a third-year political science Ph.D. student
