Cuts in higher education? Is this a good time? And a comment on UW football

 

 S.H. Knight Geology Building, 1986

Earlier this week Wyomingites were reading about new UW President Laurie Nichols declaring a "financial crisis" in existence that will allow her to act with greater freedmon in making the $41,000,000 in cuts that she has to make due to budget shortfalls, brougth about by the decline in energy revenues.  This followed the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees declaring an emergency to be in existence.

And an emergency it surely is.

And its an emergency for the University of Wyoming because the funding isn't there, but that  is, in part, a man made emergency.

It makes me sound  like a follower of John Maynard Keynes, which I am not, but this is a very poor time for the state to be cutting our colleges and university in terms of funding. The worst possible time, in fact.  Young men and women who were working in the energy sector will not be enrolling in college and university in droves, hoping that education will give them a second chance.  And for many of them it will.  Law school gave me a second chance when the energy industry collapsed in the early 1980s.  And I'm not the only one who was in that situation, and law wasn't the only route taken.  But the educational opportunities were there.

Class room in the S. H. Knight Building, 1986. 

This state makes a lot of noise about "learning" from our past mistakes. But we don't.  We don't diversify our economy. We don't seem to learn that limiting education means exporting our young population.  And we don't grasp that trying to grab the Federal domain, which we attempted in an earlier Sagebrush Rebellion that we're trying again, comes back to haunt us.  

Cutting education now is a terrible idea.  If we are really going to diversify our local economy, the generation entering college now is the generation that's going to do it.  This guts their chances, and ours by extension.

Before I leave U.W., I'll additionally comment, although I probably shouldn't, on the pablum in today's paper about UW football.

There's a column in the paper today just gushing about how "we" all love "our" football team.  It's just flowing with gushing admiration and praise about how this institution pulls the state together.

Well, bull.

I've lived in Wyoming my entire life and I haven't ever seen a UW football game.  Never.  I attended UW twice, starting off in 1983 and finishing up in 1990, and not once did I go to a game while I lived there.  When I lived there I mostly noted the home games by the influx of alumni and football attendees flooding Laramie, which after all isn't that big.

And I'm not a lone in that.  Yes, while I attended UW students went to the games, but I don't recall there being a fanatic devotion to the team while I was there.  Indeed, the basketball team seemed to have a bigger following, perhaps because it was really good in that time period.

Now, I'm fine with people having a fanatic level of devotion to UW football, but how is it that that the same week I'm reading about education, which is the real, and only, purpose of a university, being cut, while still reading about a program, football, that's entirely surplus to that purpose?  Something is amiss in that.

 

UW women's rugby. . . there are other sports other than football at UW.