A closer look at university system cuts

For more than a year, Chancellor Jim Rogers has been screaming from the tops of the university system's ivory towers that Gov. Jim Gibbons is beyond irrelevant. The budget-cutting Republican is a political Neanderthal, a public official so loathed and isolated by his own repugnance that he makes Richard Nixon seem cuddly by comparison.

"The man has absolutely no regard for the welfare of any other human being," Rogers wrote in his freshest attack, a Feb. 22 commentary for the Nevada Appeal deriding the governor's opposition to tax increases and support for allegedly apocalyptic reductions in subsidies to higher education.

Rogers assures us that Gibbons is fully marginalized, that his fiscal policy will not be realized, and that the Democrat-controlled Legislature will raise taxes and carry Rogers' water by allowing the university system's funding to continue to grow regardless of the state of the economy that supports it. Yet Rogers resorts to name-calling to convince the masses of what he says they already believe -- kind of like picketing a PTA meeting to pan child molesters.

On the surface, it seems like wasted breath. Unless, of course, all this noise is being made to keep taxpayers and lawmakers focused on the university system's alarming version of the truth while distracting them from numbers that make the fiscal health of the system considerably less sympathetic.

In other words, cause a panic.

Gibbons' proposed general fund for 2009-11 totals $6.2 billion, roughly the same amount as the state's current modified, two-year budget. To avoid raising taxes on a recession-ravaged economy, and to preserve or bolster public school, public safety and welfare programs as much as possible, Gibbons proposed significant reductions in appropriations to higher education. His budget -- the one Rogers and legislative Democrats claim is already dead -- cuts about $375 million in university system subsidies, on top of the salary and benefit reductions he recommended for all state workers.

The state's colleges and universities are not constitutionally mandated services, and unlike other bureaucracies, they have many other funding sources, including tuition and fees, endowments, services, sponsorships, grants and donations.

Nonetheless, higher education officials and legislators loyal to the higher education system immediately began claiming that the governor's plan would cut the budgets of UNLV and UNR by about 50 percent. "We might as well shut down the institutions," lamented Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas.

But state general fund appropriations typically make up less than half of higher education revenues. Even if the governor's budget passed -- and we've been assured that it won't -- the system would have about $2.5 billion to blow through over the next two years, with $1.29 billion coming from taxpayers. The operating budgets of UNLV and UNR would have to be cut less than 20 percent -- that's deep, but certainly not the 50 percent figure that's being thrown around.

The scaremongering continues unabated. Regents Michael Wixom and Jason Geddes trotted out the doomsday scenarios in a Wednesday Reno Gazette-Journal commentary.

"With the proposed cuts, the state college and all four community colleges would be shut down simply to save the core functions at UNR and UNLV," they wrote. "If we were to save the state college and community colleges, UNR or UNLV would be eliminated. In both scenarios, Nevada's medical, dental and law schools would be closed."

Those desperate choices were presented again, in earnest, at a joint legislative hearing Friday morning. Not even the Lied Animal Shelter could rival the suffering and sacrifice outlined in officials' testimony.

It's all baloney. The governor's budget -- which, remember, is in rigor mortis and doesn't account for the state's full share of the federal stimulus funding -- allocates $349 million to UNLV, $253 million to UNR and $204 million to the College of Southern Nevada over the next two years. Subsidies to the medical, dental and law schools are nearly unchanged from the current biennium. Who are these people kidding? No part of this system would be forced to close, not even the ill-conceived Nevada State College at Henderson.

As a fail-safe, Rogers has hired former Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins, the Democrat who muscled this unwarranted expansion of the university system into the city he once represented, to lobby the Legislature on behalf of the system. Rogers has also hired former Assemblyman Josh Griffin to lobby for more funding. Those two men are being paid a total of $15,000 per month.

In addition, UNLV has retained at a cost of $5,000 per month its retired law school dean, Richard Morgan, to lobby the Legislature. (Wixom and Geddes say the law school faces closure? Ha!) And no fewer than 10 university system employees, from institutions including Nevada State College, UNLV, UNR and Western Nevada and Truckee Meadows community colleges, are registered as lobbyists for the 2009 session -- all paid by you to persuade lawmakers to do what Rogers and Democrats say is already a done deal.

That small army doesn't account for the fact that Assemblyman Ruben Kihuen, D-Las Vegas, is an employee of the College of Southern Nevada, that the wife of Senate Taxation Chairman Bob Coffin, D-Las Vegas, is an assistant professor at UNLV, and that the wife of Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, is a postdoctoral fellow at UNLV's College of Education.

It's good to have friends in high places, especially when more than 1,300 people on the higher education payroll have salaries of at least $100,000 per year, when less than half of the system's students go on to graduate and when it its tuition rates are among the cheapest in the United States.

University system officials and their allies need to instill fear in the public to maintain the scary rate of budget growth that colleges and universities are addicted to -- about 8 percent per year this decade. They've worked the political establishment too hard for too long to see the gravy train derailed. They're committed to bamboozling the public and the media so everyone believes general fund appropriations are higher education's sole source of funding, and that the governor is cutting the system's entire operating budget, not one part of its revenue.

Gibbons' budget is not the end of the world -- especially not in this frightening economic tumble -- but Rogers clearly needs it to be. Regents claim they've muzzled the chancellor, yet they're talking the same talk. Friday's legislative hearing is proof they're just getting warmed up.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.