Erik Flesch

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," argued then-Sen. Abraham Lincoln in 1858 against admitting another slave state into the Union. The University of Arizona today is at a similar moral turning point, facing a fundamental inner contradiction that pits the individual against the collective in its administrative policies.

The university administration is simultaneously trying to conform to two opposing philosophies. On the one hand, it claims to offer a valuable education at a good price for the benefit of qualified, paying individuals; on the other, it increasingly emphasizes a duty to serve society through tuition and admissions policies that profile and penalize students according to socioeconomic class or ethnicity.

Now that legislative budget cuts threaten to bankrupt our university, the administration has been thrust into the politically uncomfortable situation of having to explicitly define which philosophy it will embrace - and which will be sacrificed. The outcome could be far more nefarious than any financial woes because at stake are student's minds - our means of survival.

The two options UA has at this point are to either move toward greater financial autonomy and administrative integrity, or to scream bloody murder and intimidate the deeply indebted state Legislature into refilling its massive financial morphine drip.

The Arizona Board of Regents' Changing Directions initiative and UA's Focused Excellence plan at first seemed to indicate a long-overdue move in the direction of integrity. The UA administration has taken a lot of heat over Focused Excellence, which many have criticized for favoring economically fit departments over those that are simply perceived to fulfill a social obligation.

Yet this approach should be commended: It is based on the principle that a department's value lies in its objective value to somebody. It is a popular myth that no "pure" academic subject could ever have enough value to anyone to attract funding. Every "applied" subject - which employs the theories of academia in meeting the existential requirements of people's lives and happiness - requires the abstract products of its useful counterpart. Mining requires geology; journalism and publishing require languages; engineering requires physics; architecture requires art; every field requires philosophy, etc.

It is proper that universities should slate part of any revenues earned or attracted by the applied fields as well as tuition to help finance their pure counterparts. But to claim that any subject or university policy has intrinsic or "social" value apart from any benefit to individuals willing to pay for it voluntarily is to pervert the very concept of value.

And although Focused Excellence may be rewarding objective value in academics, President Pete Likins has misrepresented the value of his proposed tuition hike. Under the guise of lessening the effect of state budget cuts on our school services, Likins proposed a tuition increase of $1,000 for in-state undergraduate students (more for other students). Students motivated by their rational self-interest have naively been quick to agree to the increase. But Likins has in reality already pledged to redistribute 60 percent - $600 - of that tuition hike to "needy" students, as if the rest of UA's students had money to burn!

At an interview with the Arizona Daily Wildcat staff Monday, student body president Doug Hartz revealed the sentiment behind Likins' proposal: "An education is not for a student's individual benefit," he said, "but to serve society." This morality echoed that of more than just Likins, who has been itching to institute such a class-based tuition policy for years: "Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects. Hence for us, man himself is mutually of no value," Karl Marx wrote. "The wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit," declared Adolph Hitler in "Mein Kampf."

This call to servitude must not be tolerated. The only just alternative is to raise tuition for all students fairly and equally. In the long term, UA must lobby for a state constitutional amendment making university assets, including tuition money, hands-off to the Legislature, and continue an aggressively focused approach to reorganizing and managing its own finances.

What is to become of UA? To paraphrase Lincoln, I believe this university cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect UA to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.