Nov
11
Written by:
William Lutz
11/11/2009 12:06 PM
In yesterday's edition of The Daily Texan, the paper's editorial board takes both the UT administration and the UT Student Government to task for the secretive way it is approaching the next round of tuition increases. This must-read editorial notes that the Texan sent a reporter to a meeting of the UT-Austin Tuition Policy Advisory Committee, only to be denied admittance.
Here's my question: what happened to all these promises about how tuition deregulation will add openness and transparency to the university budgeting process?
Right after tuition deregulation passed, then-UT-Dallas President Franklyn Jenifer wrote an oped in The Dallas Morning News (June 11, 2003) titled "Don't worry about tuition 'deregulation'" In that oped, Jenifer writes,
"The good news is that when, and if, those tuition increases occur, the citizenry will know that a process was in place – a broadly consultative process – to ensure that they were both justified and difficult to come by."
. You can read Jenifer's full oped here.
The UT-System's own tuition website states:
"Every UT System campus has established a process that involves consultation with students regarding proposed tuition increases."
So how is thowing a Daily Texan reporter out of the advisory committee meeting "broadly consultive"?
The editorial quotes UT's chief financial officer, Kevin Hegarty, saying: “[Opening meetings] will inhibit discussion, and having these meetings are all about encouraging honest dialogue,” said Kevin Hegarty, UT’s vice president and chief financial officer and an administrator on the committee. “Having a reporter there or having people in a gallery watching naturally will cause people to, I think, not say things that they might otherwise express.”
Here's one rather key insight on how higher education works: Student governments are normally fairly compliant with the administration of the institution. After all, the student body president does not usually run for re-election. The editorial takes current UT Student Body president Liam O'Rourke to task for referring in the first-person plural when talking abou thte committee. The editorial notes:
"O’Rourke notably groups himself into the institutional “we.” He should not forget that he was elected to represent the concerns of students to the administration, not those of the administration to the students. It is thus his responsibility to inform the student body of his influential committee’s activities, and unless The Daily Texan is allowed access, he and other committee members are the sole representatives able to inform students and solicit their input."
This is a fair observation. Since tuition deregulation was passed in 2003, the UT student government's leaders have acted like a bunch of lackeys for the UT President. The student government even endorsed the massive 2003 tuition increase.
Here's another fair question: Is UT closing the meeting because it wants to manipulate the student government officials into endorsing an unjustified level of spending, and therefore, tuition? Remember, four of the nine members of the committee are administrators, so they only have to peel off one of the students to get the committee to endorse a big budget hike.
Here's the lesson from all this: when university administrators say they favor broad "student consultation," they mean only with those students who are likely to endorse their spending and tuition increases.