Illustration by Cody Angell

Focused Excellence comes with a slew of good intentions and efforts to save an ailing UA. Not all UA programs can survive with so much less money after repeated budget cuts by the legislature, so the arms must be severed to save the body.

Following good business sense, the programs that bring the most money into the UA are the ones that will survive; those that do not carry their own weight will be sacrificed.

Take library sciences for example; a department that is working hard to fix a local and nationwide librarian shortage. It's not easy to get grant money for a library sciences department, nor is it easy for researchers in that department to make a breakthrough that will bring profits back to the university. In fact, it's next to impossible.

The planetarium can't charge exorbitant entrance fees if it hopes to educate the masses on the universe that surrounds us. Good exhibits cost money to maintain, and even more to build.

The Ph.D. program in French, and the master's program in Russian don't generally produce research breakthroughs that result in large sums of money coming to the UA either.

Kendrick Wilson

And so, survival of the economically fittest is the law, and those programs that are not profitable are cut to help make the profitable programs even more successful, no matter how valuable those economically unfit programs may be to the community.

Perhaps our university leaders are taking the only path the state has left open to them, but the damage caused by this mentality will run deep in the community.

UA is a public university, and thus should receive taxpayer subsidy. Government is here to do what is not profitable. While some have tried, it's quite difficult to make a profit providing fire and police protection, for example, at least not while providing an adequate amount of protection. So the government provides these services at significant cost to the taxpayers because they are essential to the community, which cannot function without them.

If it were profitable to run a university in Tucson, some private entrepreneur would have done it. Whether our state legislature, which seems to prefer bankruptcy to taxation, likes it or not, the UA has a social obligation to do what is not profitable, but necessary for the community.

Profitable programs are certainly important to our community and university and must continue, but those that do not bring money back to the university also have important social merits and must not be left behind.

Juliann Arnold is a pre-nursing sophomore whose department was not cut as a result of Focused Excellence. "I'm glad nursing wasn't cut because of Focused Excellence, but it shouldn't be kept only because it is Īself-sufficient,'" she explained. "It should be kept because we need nurses and the university has an obligation to help cure the nursing shortage we have right now."

Before switching to pre-nursing, Arnold was a health professions major, a program which was proposed to be cut under Focused Excellence along with medical technology. "The university is hurting the community by cutting these programs," she said.

While many have argued that "liberating" UA from the judgment of the legislature would be good in the long run, all it actually does is undermine the concept of public universities and reward the legislature for bad fiscal decisions.

Anyone who believes in public education should be sickened that our business school is named after its chief donor, Karl Eller. Does anyone take the time to recall that Eller is in fact a billboard baron who should take no small part of the blame for the ugly billboards that insidiously overrun our community?

It probably doesn't matter who Eller is when the students can hardly learn how to become businesspeople because the lectures are drowned out by the push to apply for grant money and perform lucrative research.

Our university president and provost are facing tough times. Their only option may indeed be to play the game of survival of the economically fittest and sever the arms that perform social functions, but can't rake in the profits. The legislature has effectively left our university leadership tied up in knots.

We've reached a sad day in Arizona when public higher education is dead, and the grave is nearly dug.