Editorial
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 28, 1998

Legislature should follow leaders

During a campus forum April 15, UA President Peter Likins told the university community that every time he turns around, another professor tells him how the university's budget cuts have hurt this department or that department.

"There's evidence of people being financially squeezed throughout higher education," Likins said. "We just need to increase the flow of money into the universities."

Each year, the university sends lobbyists to the state capitol to do just that: Convince state legislators, the keepers of the people's purse strings if you will, to spend more on higher education.

Year after year, the state's university system has been the whipping boy of the Republicans who run the state Legislature. Universities have been portrayed as the picture of waste.

Indeed, 10 years ago, the University of Arizona may have been a fat bureaucracy, but most longtime community members contend that budget constraints, rather than saving wasted taxpayer money, have cut into the muscle and bone of the university.

At the forum, Likins said in his time here the pessimism of the campus on financial issues had made an impression. His goal, he said, was to restore the optimism the community needs.

Looking back on this school year, there have been several extraordinary financial events involving the campus. From Canyon Ranch Inc.'s $10 million pledge to the Arizona Prevention, to Karl Eller's $10 million gift to the College of Business and Public Administration's entrepreneurship program, not to mention the Friday announcement of James E. Rogers' $20 million gift to the College of Law, this has been a banner year for university fundraising.

The $40 million these three donations will bring in over the next several years actually amounts to about 14 percent of the $289.1 million the Legislature appropriated for the UA and the Arizona Health Sciences Center last year.

That number is staggering, considering the near-standstill university budgets the Legislature and Gov. Jane Hull proposed earlier this year.

The Eller and Rogers gifts in particular focus on students, putting the UA in a position to compete with top national schools. At the same time budget constraints have cut into student programs that are available to most undergraduates, all but killing the campus community and threatening the diversity of opportunity available to UA's students.

As the Legislature moves in the coming week to fix next year's UA budget we suggest that it follow the lead of taxpayers like Eller and consider funding the state's universities at the level they need to provide the best education for the most students. In a state hellbent on bringing businesses to its cities and continuing it strong economic performance, our oh-so corporation-oriented legislature should look at where successful business people are putting their money and follow their lead.