hats in hands… (or: taking "class" warfare to a new extreme)
Disappointing, but - especially as a former university employee; a grunt in the offices of pseudo-power - not particularly surprising:
So it is with a heavy heart that colleges come begging their alumni for cash, and their pleas will be compelling. If you don’t send them money, they’ll tell you, they could be forced to turn away well-qualified low-income students who rely on financial aid, and lay off remarkable professors in favor of cheaper ones. They’ll slash their athletic budgets, and cancel that planned high-tech upgrade to the medical school. If you don’t give, and give generously, you’ll be complicit in starving the institution that gave you a world-class education just when it needs the help the most.
Should you tell them to take a hike, even if you can afford to send them some money? Absolutely. Here’s why: Colleges manage money just about as moronically as any institution in the history of the planet. Giving them more cash is, to paraphrase a recent Saturday Night Live skit, like giving your junkie cousin a hundred bucks for rent, then running into him at the dog track and forking over another few hundred. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s no way to foster intelligent future spending decisions.
Think of it this way: If you believed that the government should have bailed out the automakers with no strings attached so that they could continue business as usual, then by all means: send money to your old school and pray that they decide to use it smartly. But if Detroit has taught us anything, it’s that large, old, entitled institutions don’t restructure until they’re hamstrung. Economic turmoil is forcing everyone, from corporations to individuals, to reexamine their finances and reconsider their poor choices. This is a good thing, and a lesson to be learned for colleges too, if their alumni will let them learn it.
- Zac Bissonnette, “Why Giving Money to Your Alma Mater is Immoral,” The Daily Beast
They’ll slash their athletic budgets?
That’t a funny one. Apparently Zac Bissonnette has never been to Texas. Hell will freeze over before any BCS school in Texas will cut one cent out of the football budget, and thanks to Title IX, if they don’t cut football, they’re really in no position to cut anything else.
That point aside, I’ve been witness first- and secondhand to plenty of robbing Peter to pay Paul in the prestige arms race that the state schools in Texas are engaged in (because naturally, Texas A&M and Texas Tech must have campus master plans comparable to UT and such, although there’s precious little justification for any of them) and all the capital projects end up siphoning money from other sources through sleight-of-hand multiple times a day, all of which ends up, as Bissonnette suggests, bitch-slapping the students around with the audacity of… well, it’s going to take me a few minutes to think of something audacious enough to describe the way Texas Tech put the screws to its students during the Montford mansion fiasco.
And let’s not even thing about universities that make their prestige more important than actual results in the classrooms…
Just one of those things where the end justifies the means, even if it pulls the institutions apart, I suppose.