Thoughts on the budget

 This is a frightening time in the history of our university. In a few short years, USM has gone from nationally recognized to nationally ignored, and the books have gone from black to red. We're angry, but at who? Who can we blame?

I love my Southern Miss. I like our small campus, our excellent faculty and small teacher to student ratio. We have a diverse campus, and a couple of nationally recognized sports teams. But our talking points and triumphs are being buried under messy budget shortfalls and controversial leadership. Our national rankings have plummeted since the departure of Shelby Thames in 2007. We've dropped dozens of places in the U.S. News & World Report Listings, and we've fallen from the Princeton Review altogether. Even the Washington Monthly listings, which placed us near the top in 2006, no longer list our university in their rankings. As much as I love this school, my teachers and my life here, recent developments are making it harder and harder to justify inviting friends and loved ones to come pursue their education here in Hattiesburg, and it breaks my heart.

The loss of the economics major last year was overlooked by the majority of campus. We turned the other cheek, and aside from a few marginally sincere gestures of solidarity, we ignored it. But as budget shortfalls continue to redden, staff cuts across the board are beginning to affect everyone. The campus community is in an uproar over the release of Dr. Dan Capper and several other religion and philosophy instructors from the College of Arts and Letters; somewhere between five and eight, depending on the source. But the Academic Planning Group's death list recommends cutting between 17 and 19 positions from Arts and Letters, and recommends dozens of other cuts, both fiscal and human, from Science and Technology; the Gulf Coast campus almost has its own section. Rumors are flying as to which teacher, which discipline gets the axe next. This fearful atmosphere is hardly conducive to scholarship, and I daresay that the sterility that the sitting administration has taken to addressing these affairs only adds to the gloom of what is already a desperate situation.

I present two somewhat random items for your consideration: 1) The average salary for a public university president is $436,111, according to a January article in the Chronicle of Higher Education—higher than that of President Obama; and 2) the total support amount for Mississippi universities decreased 17.50 percent between the 2010 and 2011 state budget, while the Department of Corrections grew 18.96 percent.

The first one's worth an eyebrow raise or two, but it's the second one that got me digging up statistics. According to the National Institute of Corrections, a government entity, Mississippi in 2008 had a crime rate that was 12 percent lower than that of the rest of nation, and violent crime rates were 37 percent lower. Here's where it gets interesting: our incarceration rate was 38 percent higher than the national average, despite our lower crime rate. Mississippi also releases 57 percent fewer parolees than the national average. The benefits of rehabilitation over incarceration is an entirely different discussion, but think about it for a minute: we as taxpayers are paying for some guy who robbed a Texaco to eat three meals a day while the foundation of our university crumbles around us. I present this information to suggest that maybe our country's priorities are a little jumbled, but that too is a separate argument. I will say, however, that where Haley Barbour doesn't seem to understand the importance of education, Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree is more than aware of our troubles, and I doubt he would forget them were we to elect him Governor next fall.

Budget priority is something you can often draw down party lines, but financial hardship, a simple lack of funds, is not. Money is short everywhere; cycles of recession are part of the deal when it comes to free market economics. If we still had an economics department you could ask them about it.

This budget crisis has a chain of custody; you can follow its progression from the student saddled with upped tuition, to the university proper, on up to the state and then the federal level, itself burdened by two foreign wars, a recession, and fallout from the Bush tax cuts.

As disappointed as I am in the way this situation is being handled, I have hopes that the next few years will be better. The war is Iraq is finally drawing to a close, which means some of those ridiculous sums of money that we funnel into the defense budget can be shifted in education. The money spent in Iraq to this point could have solved USM's budget crunch alone something like 49,000 times. Go back and read that again. 49,000 times. I'm not even adding in the billions from Afghanistan.

I believe I speak for the rest of the student body when I say that I do not approve of the methods taken to balance the budget. As an academic myself, I can also speak for others like me, who plan on pursuing even higher levels of education, that we do not wish to live in a world where tenure means nothing and academics takes a backseat to petty office politics.

That said, I must honor the difficult truths of the situation: we cannot entirely blame the sitting administration for these difficult times. Except maybe in the case of the sacking of Frank Barthelme. Or maybe the purchase of the infamous private jet. Or maybe the irresponsible number of scholarships handed out in recent years.

The university's battle cry has never had more meaning than it does right now, looming over a campus filled with students fearful for their disciplines and instructors fearful for their careers. We have nowhere to go but up. So, let's dig in, my friends, and do what we can to survive this and place our Southern Miss back in the national spotlight.