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MN Legislature may follow ND's Higher Ed funding example

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Date: 24 Jan 2001
Time: 23:39:34

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I hope this does not come to pass. MN Governer Ventura is recommending drastic cuts in funding for MN's Higher Education system. This sadly will put the U of M and MNSCU's on a similar track to ND's. And this site does show some things that at least some are related to lower higher education funding.

http://www.startribune.com/viewers/qview/cgi/qview.cgi?template=politics_a&slug=univ25

<H1>Higher-ed funding battle is on</H1> <TABLE cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" class="headermargin"> <TR><TD>Mary Jane Smetanka and Patricia Lopez Baden</TD></TR> <TR><TD>Star Tribune</TD></TR> <TR><TD>Thursday, January 25, 2001 </TD></TR></TABLE> Girded for a fight over funding of Minnesota's public colleges and universities, higher-education officials on Wednesday began their campaign for public support, while Gov. Jesse Ventura took his case for a lean state budget to a Duluth college. A day after Ventura recommended slashing the University of Minnesota's 2002-03 request from $221.5 million in new money to $56 million, university President Mark Yudof said that all of the university money in the governor's plan wouldn't even cover the university's anticipated increase in employee health-care costs. The budget would force the university to raise tuition significantly or "cannibalize" faculty positions and impose severe cuts, he said. And he called the budget "a catastrophe" for the university's Medical School.

"In a year when we have one of the biggest surpluses in Minnesota history, we have one of the lowest increases in history," Yudof said. "It just doesn't make sense." The university plans to mobilize some of its 210,000 alumni who live in Minnesota to push for more money. Last week, more than 300 alumni volunteers showed up to listen to Yudof talk about the university's legislative agenda, about twice as many people as normal. On Wednesday, the University of Minnesota Alumni Association received e-mails about Ventura's budget, including one from a nonmember who said, "Ventura did it again. ... If there is anything I can do to help get the appropriate chunk of money for the 'U,' let me know." "To say we're concerned is an understatement," said Margaret Carlson, the association's executive director. "Everyone has been shocked." The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system fared even worse under the governor's plan. Ventura proposed $47 million in new funding for the 35-school system, well below the $255.6 million that it sought for 2002-03. MnSCU will take its case statewide next Tuesday, when school officials begin a two-day fly-around to eight communities. Yudof also will travel the state in the next few weeks. Appealing to the public Visiting the University of Minnesota's Duluth campus to begin his promotional pitch on the budget, Ventura strode into a packed ballroom and told more than 500 assembled students and faculty why they should like his budget. "I recognize President Mark Yudof may be shocked about my budget, but I believe that with a strong economy, low unemployment and growing personal income, the cost of government should not expand at an accelerated rate," he said. Ventura's budget remarks got a less-than-enthusiastic response, with many students sitting silently as he laid out his tax reforms and explained the penuriousness of a budget that allows for little more than inflationary increases in most areas. His budget would give the university a 2.1 percent funding increase, the third-smallest increase in a nonrecession year since 1945. The other low points were in 1994 and 1996. Yudof, who made the rounds of newspaper editorial boards Wednesday, said the university had just begun to recover from lean funding in the 1980s and 1990s and has filled 100 of the 500 faculty vacancies that went unfilled in those years. Under Ventura's budget, that would stop, he said. "Basically we will take those unfilled faculty lines and cannibalize them," Yudof said. "I'm not going to fire tenured professors." The governor's budget does not include the $58 million the university said it needs to cover rising health insurance costs or the $34.7 million it requested to recruit and retain talented faculty members. Yudof's plan to further invest in areas such as biological sciences, medicine, computer sciences and nanotechnology went unfunded, and the 7 percent raise that Yudof wanted to give many faculty members apparently would be limited to 2 percent. That would kill Yudof's aggressive plan to give faculty members significant raises over four years to bring the university to the average for research universities. In the end, Yudof said, "the net losers are students." Ventura said schools have to undergo the same self-scrutiny his agencies had. "Most of your professors get paid more than I do and I'm the governor," he told students in Duluth. "There are plenty of people in the college system getting paid triple what I do." Ventura tailored his remarks in part to medical students, saying he recommended increases for the university's Medical School and a loan-forgiveness program for up to 291 students a year. "I'm asking you to please stay and practice in Minnesota," he said. "We need you to keep our state healthy." But university officials said the $16 million the governor's budget allocates to the university's Academic Health Center (AHC), which includes the Medical School, is inadequate. University officials had hoped to get $33.5million to replace lost faculty, improve teaching programs and establish training centers for nursing, medical technology, pharmacy and dentistry in greater Minnesota. "We are going to have to cut programs if we don't get more funding," said Dr. Frank Cerra, senior vice president for health sciences. Yudof said the budget "will be a catastrophe for the Medical School." Faculty and the number of students would have to be cut and tuition would have to increase by double digits, he said. The AHC was also relying on the university-wide budget to pay for increases in employee benefits costs. Cerra said Ventura's budget would force the AHC to use its own money to pay for health insurance premium increases and cost-of-living raises. "My guess is that those costs will more than offset the $16 million that we would gain in the Academic Health Center," said Cerra, who predicted that the AHC would have to dip into cash reserves to cover costs. Bad news for MnSCU MnSCU Chancellor Morrie Anderson also predicted double-digit tuition increases and severe faculty and program cuts. If the system relied solely on tuition to cover its inflationary costs, he said, the increases would total about 23 percent over the biennium. MnSCU's budget request seeks $155.3 million in new money to cover inflation, as well as $51.1 million to create new programs in traditional classrooms and over the Internet, among other goals. In his budget address Tuesday, Ventura spoke of the benefits of competition among higher-education institutions -- public and private. "I think there's a fallacy in that for Greater Minnesota," Anderson said. True competition requires a "dynamic environment," he said, and too many outstate schools face serious enrollment challenges. Ventura will go to Worthington and Austin today to talk about his budget.

-- Reporters Glenn Howatt and Anthony Lonetree contributed to this report. Mary Jane Smetanka can be contacted at <A HREF="mailto:smetan@startribune.com">smetan@startribune.com</A> .Patricia Lopez Baden can be contacted at <A HREF="mailto:pbaden@startribune.com">pbaden@startribune.com</A> .</TD> <TD class="contentmargincell"> </TD> </TR>

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