Illustration by Cody Angell

While UA is struggling desperately to get its head above water financially, the state education machine is only dragging us down. We are desperate for a constitutional amendment to rescue the integrity of the UA budget.

Commonly considered by university communities to be a kind of financial I.V. ÷ an apparatus for the intravenous delivery of money needed to sustain departments that don't attract many research dollars or private donations ÷ the Arizona General Fund is proving to be equally adept at sucking the blood from university resources.

State budget proposals unveiled Tuesday indicate that any additional revenues UA may raise by instituting a long-overdue tuition increase may not be spent to benefit the university after all. Rather, our tuition would be reallocated to pay off huge state debts incurred by irresponsible state legislators obsessed with spending other people's money.

Erik Flesch

The scandal is not that the legislature may choose to reject Gov. Janet Napolitano's fiscally absurd promise not to cut university subsidies further, forcing UA to be more financially independent. Rather, the shocking realization is that current state law prevents the three Arizona public universities from ever becoming financially self-sufficient by forcing them to fork over every penny of their unrestricted revenues ÷ those not earmarked for a specific department ÷ to the politically controlled general fund for diversion to any state program the legislature arbitrarily decrees.

The money the schools pay into the general fund is tossed in with taxpayer dollars, then appropriated back to the universities at the whim of the legislature, minus a tidy sum charged to cover administrative costs. When the state had money to burn, it condescended to return the money plus a bonus drawn from the fund, upon which UA came to rely liberally.

But now, the state has a deficit to cover. Dick Roberts, director of the Budget Office, said that if legislators decide to reduce the amount of money the universities receive from the general fund, any money generated by a tuition increase will be appropriated for something else, the Arizona Daily Wildcat reported Tuesday.

In other words, what students thought they paid to cover the costs of an education is actually a "special use tax" imposed without their knowledge or consent that may be used to support other state programs. This policy is at best fraud, at worst, theft.

The irony is that the Republican-controlled legislature threatening further reductions of general fund appropriations to UA has put the university in a helpless position that would doom any business; yet it simultaneously boldly advocates privatizing university dormitories and state prisons to give them the independence they require to operate responsibly.

How is the financial integrity of those enterprises more urgent than those of the state universities? A principled approach to solving the university's budget problems demands allowing our universities to maintain the same standard as any other entity. This starts with eliminating byzantine bureaucracy that undercuts UA's budget and giving UA full ownership of its tuition and all other revenues and assets to keep, spend or sell for its own needs.

Part of Gov. Napolitano's campaign platform was a pledge to pass an amendment to the state constitution that would free state universities to invest in private enterprises. She and the legislature must now apply the same principle to propose and pass a more significant and sweeping amendment ÷ one that would allow all university assets and revenues to be wholly owned by the university itself, to be used as the university sees fit. This constitutional amendment would be the consistent, principled application of Changing Directions and Focused Excellence to the governance of Arizona's public universities.

If the people of Arizona are willing and able to offer additional money to help out UA, we are in no position to turn it down at this point. But considering the present crisis, it would be morally commendable that they ask to make state universities more fiscally autonomous. It is also appropriate that they advocate privatizing such assets and services that can and should be provided by private entrepreneurs on a contractual basis ÷ dormitories and campus parking garages included.

We students who value our UA education understand the present crisis and will gladly find some way to pay a tuition increase. But we must ensure that legislators keep their hands off.