It’s a Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fa-a-all

Come gather round students wherever you roam
And admit that the budget has shrunk, it ain’t grown
And accept it that soon your TA will have flown
For the endowment is a-shriii-i-iinkin’

The auto industry is begging Congress for cash, the banks are failing, and America is being overwhelmed by a vast economic shopocalypse. This sucks, especially for investment bankers (cue schadenfreude), but what does it mean for us? Where will this financial storm toss us poor, beleaguered sailors on the seas of intellectual exploration?

As it turns out, universities aren’t doing too well. Harvard’s endowment has lost more money than ours has ever had (again, schadenfreude appears to be a newly dominant emotion this recession) and the Grey Lady has announced that soon no one will be able to afford an education. Private college tuition is currently equivalent to 76 percent of the median American family income. We predict that Columbia will be making cuts. This will undoubtedly be necessary, maybe even desirable, but there are moral and immoral ways to cut any budget, and we’d like to humbly offer some suggestions.

There are a few things that must be protected. The first is that great educational equalizer—financial aid. This is obviously critical to building a student body based on academic achievement and diverse interests and talents rather than access to trust funds. We applaud the University’s recent increase in grants to undergraduates (although a great deal more could have been done), but with the New York Times reporting that “the rising cost of college—even before the recession—threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans,” Columbia needs to be particularly careful that hard economic times do not translate to an abrogation of the moderately democratic admissions system.

We hope to limit the effect of these budget cuts on the quality of classes at Columbia. Perhaps professors should teach more than one class. And we’d like to keep our TAs please. This isn’t their fault, and they’re already eating cup-a-noodle. The University exists to generate and share knowledge, so any expenditures related to those functions should be off limits from cuts.

As you might imagine, there are a few things which the same moral rubric can easily judge and discard. The top of the list is Prezbo’s ludicrous salary. The fact that he made over $1.4 million this year is egregious, but his half a million dollar raise in the past year verges on criminal. Certainly Bollinger deserves credit for the spate of huge donations in the past few years, but a personal kickback from the Trustees is a slap in the faces of students, faculty, and administrators alike. Bollinger should pander to us a little by pledging to take a $1 salary for the worst years of the crisis and maybe pull a Palin on the company car. The dent wouldn’t be too bad either, considering the money Prezbo earns from his board positions on the Washington Post and the Federal Reserve Band of New York.

The other easy target is the University’s wide variety of PR-related expenditures. This is everything from resodding the lawns seven million times per semester to funding the plasma screen disease in Lerner to buying us T-shirts every Thursday. These things are questionably useful even in a robust economy, but the aesthetics of the school should be the first thing on the chopping block. Not only would it save money, but the school would actually get good PR for publicly proving that the school would rather be good than look good.

The second line of defense are programs which are great in theory but simply haven’t panned out. Unfortunately, football is one of the most expensive examples. The team has a dismal record, and few prospects of improving. The weakness of the team is practically a badge of honor for students at this point. It would make sense to let the team go the way of Swarthmore’s football team, which was discontinued after the 2000 season. According to ESPN’s list of the worst college football teams of all time, Columbia ranks fourth to Swarthmore’s sixth. Although the effect on players and staff would be regrettable, the team isn’t currently serving its function as a generator of school spirit or alumnae money.

There are also a few things the school could do to stem the tide. Bringing in more undergraduates would raise money, but would strain other resources. One viable option would be to allow student groups to fundraise outside of their SGB/ABC/CI budgets. This might reduce pressure on the governing boards and class councils to dole out the dough.

More fundamentally, the school could make big strides in increasing transparency. This column suffers from lack of information because we simply couldn’t find a lot of relevant data. Students should have easy access to all financial information that the University can legally disclose. Throw up a Web site, why dontcha? It’s easy. This would have the added bonus of contributing to the democratization of the University. If we have information, we can be expected to make educated decisions, and we will have leverage to demand that our opinions are solicited. The school already has innumerable levels of decision making with token student members, but for major decisions like these, we should consult student opinion on a larger institutional scale.

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Shock and Awe would also like to commend SGB Vice-Chair Jacob Taber for his speedy and dedicated action to address concerns expressed in our first column of the semester. Hurrah Jacob!

Sarah Leonard is a Columbia College junior majoring in history. Kate Redburn is a Columbia College junior majoring in history and African studies. Shock and Awe runs alternate weeks. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com">Opinion@columbiaspectator.com