EDITORIAL: Death to the plan: Life to education 
February 4, 2010 by The Rebel Yell
Nevada students are not fighting for their education because they’re greedy, naïve or misinformed. We are not fighting because we want to pay comfortable tuition rates or because we want to be able to say we attended a fancy school.
We are the voice of reason. We know that crippling the Nevada System of Higher Education beyond repair and throwing away decades of progress – decades worth of education that it cost money to build – is a very wrong choice.
At the least, it is fiscally irresponsible – a sign of fundamental misunderstanding of simple economics.
At worst, it is a willful turning away from any attempt to salvage the economy of this state. It is a statement that it is the right choice to let die the notion of Nevada as a viable place to live.
Cutting education is not the only option. It is not one of several options. It is not even the worst of many options.
Cutting education is no option at all.
If the leaders of this state want to have a budget left to manage, let them hear this: Nevada needs higher education more than any other state institution. Nevada must pour every available cent into education if it is to have any hope of saving the rest.
If we do not feed our most valuable resource, we cannot expect to retain the others – we do not deserve the others.
Chancellor Dan Klaich said it best at Tuesday’s meeting:
“We will lose the ability to train the workforce necessary for the very economy we wish to attract… We will own some of the worst higher education funding in the country, a powerful disincentive to any company wanting to relocate in Nevada… We will drive Nevadans and Nevada businesses out of state.”
Do not for a minute think that funding education is not possible in this economy.
Florida is our sister state in this crisis of education funding. They face the second deepest deficit. We have the first.
While Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons glares at the faces of the students, businesses, individuals and families he has lain on the chopping block with his plans to require $110 million in cuts to NSHE, Governor Charlie Crist of Florida has recommended a $100 million increase in annual state university spending.
It’s part of the five-year goal of $1.75 billion that he plans to send to the state’s 11 public universities.
They’re calling it the New Florida plan – they want a “knowledge-based economy.”
We have no such knowledge among the voices of this state’s economic planners.
Florida’s new public education money will fund science, technology, engineering, math and medical research and $100 million is proposed in incentives to attract research institutes.
We’ll watch our dreams of becoming forerunners in sustainability research flounder as we struggle to keep our schools accredited.
Governor Crist has proposed no tuition increases.
Governor Gibbons would see Nevada’s own turned away, unable to pay the thousands more per year it would take to earn the meager education a Nevada school could provide.
It can be done. Florida is doing it. Why is Nevada failing?
Of one thing we can be sure: We, students and faculty of the Nevada System of Higher Education, are not the reason.
We flatly refuse to be.
We are the voices raised above the dim of devastating self-interest and short-sightedness. Ours are the fists clenched, the jaws set, the hearts beating.
Ours are the minds driven by reason, rationality and compassion. Ours are the souls that know right from wrong.
If our future here is to die, our voices will die with it, exhausted from a lifetime of shouting at the tops of our lungs, “We will never stand for this!”
I am a custodian at UNR but all of this has been on my mind with all of this troubling news of late with the state budget. Cutting education is self defeating as education is the economic engine that pulls the industrial train down the tracks into the future. Derailing education is the worst possible alternative if this state ever wants to diversify its economy. I suggested to both Senators Bill Raggio and Assemblyman Bernie Anderson that Nevada implement a temporary stop-gap emergency tax that immediately increases the state’s tax on motor fuel by twenty-five cents per gallon which would neither add to the unemployment or break people’s budgets until this severe economic recession is over. This I think would help keep tuitions down and programs and departments at the state’s higher education system in place. I am pleading with Governor Jim Gibbons not to destroy Nevada’s economic engine that will pull its train of new future businesses and green technology jobs into the future.
I agree that education is very important but there are a few things I would like to point out.
1. The state must (by law) balance the budget every year. That means in bad years like this they must make cuts which they have already done. Where would you have them make additional cuts? Edwin, I saw that you would raise taxes to cover the difference.
2. Our state spending billions of dollars (millions more than several western states) and yet we are continually around number 50 in all education categories. If money mattered so much to our school system would the increases over the past few years have improved the schools instead of had no effect at all? I personally believe the School Districts (especially Clark County) and the Regents are spending the money poorly and so we should have additional money available to cut. The problem with those people is that they are willing to cut every single teacher and all school programs before they cut their six figure salaries. I say do a 20% salary reduction on all of the top school people before we allow them to look at other areas to cut.
You’re right David!
Here’s someone else who agrees:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/02/misguided-university-students-protest.html
Thanks for the link. I only wished they pointed out the amount of teachers and administrators in Nevada making that much money.