UConn Reflects Unhealthy Trends

By William A. Collins

We all honor,

UConn’s pluck

Just won’t give it,

Needed bucks.

State universities everywhere hold high cards in the capital budget game, especially if they sport a high-profile athletic team. In Connecticut as elsewhere, the legislature is packed with alums who still harbor a warm feeling toward the old place, and championship teams expand that sentiment outward to the public.

This sentimentality regularly reaches its zenith in the annual bonding package. Nothing is too good for the old Blue and White while lawmakers are spending money that will later have to be paid back by somebody else. Buildings of note have sprouted like mushrooms on what not so long ago was a bucolic and pedestrian campus. Now it’s a big time place.

Happily, the state colleges and community colleges have also benefited from this construction fallout. By pointing to the building boom in Storrs, the other schools have shamed lawmakers and governors into ponying up for their schools too. The architectural and enrollment effects in these colleges have been gratifying, with their mortgage payments likewise being left to unknown successors.

But unfortunately, the sentimentality that nurtures bricks and mortar rarely succeeds in nurturing annual budgets. That’s where the rubber meets the road, and lawmakers are even more sensitive to taxpaying voters than they are to the welfare of their alma mater. As a result, stinginess has compromised the oversight and maintenance of those grand buildings. Not to mention the quality of education itself.

Lamentably, salaries and benefits must be paid for here and now. Thus the higher education operating budget seldom matches the soaring buildings and PR rhetoric that we associate with our beloved public colleges. And so to save money, deans and presidents resort to that same tested cost-cutting strategy as is used by their private college and corporate peers: Outsourcing. But in this case, it’s not just the grounds crew and the cafeteria. It’s the professors. Gradually the use of part-time (adjunct) teachers has grown, thereby weakening the fabric of the university’s storied community of scholars. Yes, adjuncts are surely cheap. They get no health insurance and no pension.

Other changes also result from this underfunding. The biggest is tuition. What used to be a low-cost education is now a major burden. More kids have to work and more kids have to borrow. A lot. Nationally, loans are now up to half of all student aid. In the 70s, they were just 20 percent. At the same time, federal Pell grants have eroded and wages for students, both on and off campus, have not kept pace with expenses. Many kids have had to drop out.

Sagging government support has also forced college presidents to do more begging. Less time running the school, more time prostrating themselves to donors. This gambit, as with private colleges, often works. Doors stay open. But at a cost. Corporate (and alumni) money often comes with strings. Especially the big stuff to pay for professors. Frequently those professors are expected to turn out research, not graduates. Thus ever more graduate assistant teachers and adjuncts are needed.

And like having a pile of alum lawmakers, top athletic teams are also a mixed blessing. UConn has lately been enjoying a surge of higher-level applicants for admission. (And thanks to Jen Rizotti, the University of Hartford will probably follow close behind.) But that fame and adulation have also spawned arrogance. UConn has now become the hallmark of incompetent construction management, environmental water abuse, and misreporting of federal grants. Power still corrupts.

No, colleges are surely not as corrupt as corporations, but that’s not much of a standard. Remember that UConn spent nearly $1 million just to renovate its president’s house. But even more negligent is the legislature’s reluctance to properly fund our colleges’ operations, as they fall further behind in the worldwide race for enlightenment.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)