DEREKH FROUDE/Arizona Daily Wildcat Third-year architecture students Hillary Ross and Anne Armstrong work together on a project yesterday afternoon at the metal shop on North Fremont Avenue UA architecture students each have about 25 square feet of work space. At peer institutions, the average is about 60 square feet per student.

University funding cuts cause educational losses

Editor's note: This is the second article in a three-part series focusing on the University of Arizona's ongoing budget crisis.

Part 1: Paying for the past [4.02.02]

Part 3: Facing the inevitable [4.04.02]

Following last fall's budget cuts, UA's top-tier administrators believed the worst had passed and it was time for the university to recoup its damages.

In a handwritten letter to University of Arizona Provost George Davis on Jan. 4, President Peter Likins wrote that he hoped to go after yearly raises for university employees, funds to ensure that there remains at least one professor for every 22 students and other dollars for the university's extensions.

A few weeks later, the state was prowling for an additional $200 million, after cutting $675 million from its agencies in the fall, to feed a general fund starved by poor tax revenues, according to documents from Gov. Jane Dee Hull's office. For 2003, about $1 billion must be removed from the state's budget.

All progress hoped for has been halted. Every university branch is cringing at the loss of more funds.

"I've resigned myself to the fact that everything I was trying to do over the last eight or nine years got junked - kind of driven right in the ditch," UA Budget Director Dick Roberts said.

The budget office is not alone in that sentiment, as many UA colleges and departments are teetering on the edge of having to flush large projects and years of growth because of a budgetary shortfall they had nothing to do with.

Architecture can't build

Among the university's newest colleges, the College of Architecture has been working to bring all of its tentacles into one building. Its current facility, which overlooks the underpass just east of North Park Avenue beside the Center for Creative Photography, does not have room for the School of Landscape Architecture, which it recently created, Dean Richard Eribes said.

An addition to the building's rear has been planned and an architect hired to design it, Eribes said. This renovation, however, could be threatened in the next round of budget cuts for 2003 if the state's cuts go too deep.

Right now, Eribes said he plans on keeping the funding loss within his administration and away from students. Architecture's Associate Dean Charles Albanese is retiring at academic year's end and, rather than searching for a replacement, Eribes will use the salary allotted for that position to absorb the cut.

While protecting the dollars for classes, the building addition and staff, it adds a whole administrator's workload to Eribes' already filled plate. He now also serves as interim director of landscape architecture as they continue to search for someone who is the right fit, Eribes said.

"I sleep about five hours a night now. "Everybody is just working really hard," Eribes said, "We'll all end up in a psycho ward or something."

Though seemingly drastic, others say this has become commonplace for those who run branches of universities, because it keeps the students from being impacted.

"I would think that any college on campus would be using that strategy," said Jim Shockey, associate dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.'

Hurting for elbow room

But creating more stress for staff and faculty is not the solution to the university's budgetary issues, Roberts said.

"The psychological part of this is you really consume your people in that scenario, and you have to be very, very careful about that," he said. "As you start to put pressure on the remaining employees, what you start to consume is loyalty."

And for many at UA the past few years, the loyalty well ran dry with the funds.

According to university documents, an average of more than 100 faculty members annually are offered positions at other institutions with greater pay. Of those, nearly half leave.

This phenomenon is widely classified as "brain drain" and is referred to as primarily a money issue. Though a number of employees leave each year to positions offering greater salary packages than those found here, many of them are also leaving to jobs that have more potential for professional satisfaction, said Richard Powell, UA vice president for research and graduate studies.

"Mostly, faculty members end up getting lured away because the professional long-term opportunities are greater elsewhere," Powell said. "Salary is always part of the issue, but it's not the issue."

In the case of former UA architecture professor Renee Cheng, who now teaches at the University of Minnesota, part of the difference between retention and becoming a statistic of brain drain was workspace for students.

AMY WINKLER/Arizona Daily Wildcat Ed Wright, associate professor of Judaic Studies, teaches "History and Religion of Israel in Ancient Times - the Biblical Period" yesterday morning in the Judaic Studies department. The department is struggling to retain faculty in the wake of budget cuts.

Here, architecture students, known for work habits that keep them in their building all night, have about 25 square feet each. At peer institutions like the universities of Minnesota and Michigan and Ohio State University, the average is about 60 square feet per student, Eribes said.

This fact was just one of many that lead to Cheng's decision to head for a Midwest institution where a greater investment in higher education is being made, Eribes said. Factors that can seem small - like new office furniture or even a sense of enthusiasm - are sometimes the difference between retention and faculty loss.

Other areas of the university are not sacrificing personnel but whole programs. The department of public administration and policy, within the Eller College of Business, may have to shut down its evening master's degree program, said Associate Dean Arthur Silvers.

That program is also a new addition to UA, established as a response to requests from the surrounding community that many people, especially those in the health care industry, needed to take evening classes to complete advanced degrees, Silvers said.

"We're trying to figure out every way around it," he said.

But, when the Legislature decides what money it needs returned, it will likely be given up so that the daytime master's and undergraduate programs can stave off funding reductions.

The College of Science's plan for the next cuts affects all of its branches, Dean Joaquin Ruiz said. It could include a self-imposed hiring freeze that would last years, eliminating general education courses along with some in majors programs and laying off an undetermined number of employees.

"It includes absolutely everything. It impacts the research; it impacts the education," Ruiz said. "These cuts are going to impact the College (of Science) for years to come."

Blinded by tassels

It's mid-May, a few clouds keep the sun from making things too uncomfortable as thousands are covered in black gowns, bathed, perfumed, clean-shaven and thinking of how they will celebrate the closing of a successful University of Arizona career.

And, of course, in Ed Wright's imagination, they are all smiling.

"The best part of my job is graduation," said Wright, Judaic studies department head. "All I see is a sea of smiling faces', no one's complaining about tuition. The parents and family are there smiling because they know (the students are) better off because of that degree."

Unfortunately, Wright acknowledges, those days are few and the ones between them have become increasingly uncertain for the university and its employees.

At the Judaic studies department the Thursday before spring break, "one person, today, is interviewing in the state of California," Wright said, adding that another member of his full-time faculty had been contacted about a teaching position at a University of California institution but had opted not to act on it.

Judaic Studies has only seven teaching positions.

"I've already told one person he may not be here next year," Wright said.

The instructor whose job is in question is an adjunct professor teaching half the department's sections of Hebrew.

Without that employee, Wright said, many of the 120 students who take the foreign language each semester could have their graduation schedules knocked off-track since fewer class sections would be offered.

When thinking of that graduation day from his desk, Wright said forcing legislators to attend might be an effective and cheap bit of lobbying.

Fahey, however, said that is unlikely and that some think the state already pays enough for others' educations.

The clouds are darkening

Talk of a large-scale tuition increase has emerged in the wake of the last cuts, with more on the way. Likins said the idea that higher education is more a private good - for the individual receiving a degree - than for the community has prospered recently.

Individuals who earn a bachelor's degree earn an average of $10,000 more annually than those who do not, according to the journal Postsecondary Education Opportunity. Over a lifetime, that figure can mass into a $1 million difference.

University officials say they have attempted to show the value of higher education when trying to lure businesses and other revenue sources to the state but have failed to get many results.

Since the personal benefits of higher education are so great and the public benefits are not immediately gratifying, some legislators have argued that if the state's universities want to maintain all the things they do, they should look to the students getting the best of the deal.

Right now, the state pays for more than 30 percent of the University of Arizona's expenses and a majority of its educational enterprises, university budgetary documents show. Tuition represents a little more than 10 percent.

In some ways, the university is still grappling to quantify the impact of dollars lost months ago and continues to release revised figures of how many jobs were lost, Likins said. And as bad as those were, he warns the worst is yet to come.

"The clouds are darkening, and we do not yet see a sign of relief," Likins said.

Both Eribes and Wright said that to be a dean or department head, one must be an optimist. Roberts, who has been at UA 17 years, is confident the university will grow back, even if it happens after he retires.

"We're getting buffeted, and we're getting slapped around and these scenarios are going to be even worse - but we'll survive this stuff. We'll survive it and we'll figure out a way through it but it's only because people who care about this institution hang in there and try to work out these problems that we solve them," Roberts said. "But will we be a different institution in two years from now than we are today? I think the answer to that is likely yes.

Will we be a better institution? In some cases the answer will be yes and in some cases the answer will be no because we have these value decisions and value decisions are very difficult."

Likins and his vice presidents continue to meet and create plans for how to react when the time comes and to spark new ideas for UA to possibly find its own way out of this fiscal quicksand,

"We're talking about it a lot but there's no major innovative suggestion that's come out of our discussions," Powell said. "It's a tough situation right now and people are just desperately trying to find the way."