The Southern Highland Reader

STATEWIDE–Elaine Mejia at NC Policy Watch reports today on state Senate majority leader Tony Rand’s remarks yesterday at the Budget & Tax Center’s legislative briefing in Fayetteville.

An excerpt:

… state tax revenues are behind projections by $90 million through the end of October. In the grand scheme of things that is not too much money. What is troubling about this is that the state’s revenue forecast assumes that the worst months would be at the beginning of the fiscal year and after that things would begin to head slowly upward. Moreover, the budget for fiscal year 2010-11 assumes that revenues will grow at a rate of 2.8%. If revenues continue to fall behind the forecast the Governor will be forced to take painful mid-year actions to address this year’s gap and the General Assembly will be forced to make another round of budget cuts sooner rather than later.

Read her post here.

Editors note: In late spring 2009, as the scale of North Carolina’s budget crisis became evident and the budget cuts at universities within the UNC system began to take effect, tension on Western Carolina University’s campus ran high. Jobs were being lost and departments changed. Late in the semester, at a faculty dinner, some administrators performed a skit that was video-recorded and circulated. Its contents were considered offensive by some, there was a certain level of outrage, and investigations were eventually initiated (they’re ongoing, we assume). We wrote about the skit here.

Our columnist is a faculty member who asked to remain anonymous.

CULLOWHEE–Getting fired sucks. Everybody knows it—even WCU’s Provost and his minions. This year the provost’s office has borne the brunt of the paperwork and abuse as Western has trimmed down to meet state budget shortfalls. Because universities are semi-functional hierarchies, many of the toughest decisions come down via Academic Affairs and the provost. Trouble is, sometimes the paperwork and abuse gets left on the wrong desk.

A very tiny group of Western employees, possibly a few who lost their jobs because of cutbacks, made some big noise over a skit the Faculty Center performed in April. This skit involved several high-level administrators, and though it wasn’t funny, it was harmless.

Those offended by the skit may be missing some fundamental knowledge of context here. (This, by the way, is why some folks lose out during budget crises; they lack the institutional memory and/or professional stamina to truly understand what is happening at their school. In other words, they don’t know much about their jobs, which is, occasionally, why they lose them. But I digress).

Here’s a little background:

• The skit was performed at the annual Faculty Appreciation Dinner, a voluntary event. The dinner is off the clock and neither an official meeting, nor connected to Academic Affairs. Neither is it a political event or a “schmooze-fest.” It’s just a free meal with a cheesy skit attached. Attendees are invited openly and RSVP on their own. This was no captive audience.

• In the skit, administrators dress up and pretend to take on new roles to meet budget constraints. None of these, which include duties like “morale busting,” are actually being cut. That’s because they are not real jobs. See, that’s the joke.

• The players announce, before and after the skit, that they hope their comedic efforts help us feel better about the economy. They announce that they support the faculty, they acknowledge times are hard. They do not joke about anyone getting fired.

• Virtually all the participants in the skit have felt cuts rather deeply in their own offices/divisions. Most have lost considerable sleep and hair this year looking for ways to save jobs, not get rid of them.

• At one point, a female administrator comes out dressed as a hag with a grey clown wig and balloon boobs. She calls herself a “sexy-tary.” It’s pretty stupid, and perhaps a tad misogynistic. But such a silly moment hardly constitutes a systemic disregard for female staff. This was a faculty dinner, so perhaps the intent was to poke fun at secretaries versus faculty, a rivalry as old as universities themselves.

• Someone important sent a campus-wide email with a link to video of the skit. Bad move. Even though it’s always satisfying to watch deans act like buffoons, this year’s skit ridiculed something none of us wanted to be reminded of. But the email is the only insensitive thing about the entire episode; the live audience knew what they were in for. The jokes themselves were tame, and the video was quickly taken down.

• Lastly and most importantly, there are indeed people at Western who want to cut jobs and classes. But those people had nothing to do with this skit. And they’re still on the loose. For the vast majority of us, this very real enemy is a much, much bigger concern.

• Only a few found malice in the skit, but the response to it has been unquestionably, universally hurtful. A “concerned” employee posted it on an external website, and anonymous letters were sent to journalists and Erskine Bowles, clearly intended to take down the men and women upstairs. This kind of friction is incredibly counterproductive.

• Moreover, the damage done is worse than any mild offense the skit caused. The unfocused, false righteousness in these complaints caused infighting and investigation of several good people who are on OUR side. As we face even more cuts next year, these same administrators will find their hands tied as they try to build trust and preserve our salaries and resources.

If you found the skit offensive, ask yourself this: As we endeavor to educate our students and stand together in tough times, who exactly does your outrage help?

SYLVA-A pal has a good story from her college days, back in the nineties.

Seems she and some friends, a couple of whom might’ve smoked a little more pot than the optimal amount, took a long weekend road trip from their midwestern school to the nation’s capitol. They wanted to see some tourist sights.

So they drove all night, crashed on somebody’s Washington floor for a couple of hours, and got up early to go see the shining city on the hill.

It occurred to them – slowly – as they were walking up the steps of their first stop, the capitol building, that one of them carried a considerable amount of weed, along with a water pipe, in her backpack. So they had a strategy session, and a foolproof plan was adopted: one of them would stuff a big bag of pot in her bra, and another would disassemble the water pipe and place the pieces in different parts of the same backpack. And then they would go on in.

Later, in the capital building police station, just before he let them go, the chief said “kids, it doesn’t really matter to our department what you do with your spare time. If you want to sit around the house and smoke all the marijuana your hometown has to offer, that’s your business. All things considered, though, it might be best if you didn’t bring it with you to the capitol building.”

It’s one of those great, simple lessons that life offers up every so often, which is why it came to mind a few weeks back, when, buried in a news story about the sentencing of the students who last fall dumped a bear carcass at the entrance to the campus of Western Carolina University, was the news that two of the kids involved were tossed out of school.

For those whose memory of the event is appropriately in line with its actual significance, a refresher:
1. College kids go camping.
2. Near their campsite, they find a smallish black bear carcass, shot through the head dead from a head wound after being struck by a car.
3. College kids spend the night, and go home.
4. Eureka! Wouldn’t it be cool to go back up into the woods, fetch that dead bear, and take it to a few parties?
5. Later, the kids discover that the head wound is oozing on their vehicle. Blech.
6. They grab a nearby campaign sign, which is folded over the top of a wire stand and taped down the sides, and is thereby engineered to fit perfectly over an oozing bear head. Problem solved.
7. It’s an Obama sign.
8. Later, it seems like it might be clever to dump the bear body in the roundabout at the entrance to campus, as a prank.
9. All hell breaks loose, as the action is interpreted as a veiled threat to candidate Obama, the feds become involved, and the national media goes with it. And goes with it. And goes with it.

Kids, we don’t care of you like to hang out with rotting bears in your spare time. That’s your business. All things considered, though, it might be best if …

WCU’s administration, being sensitive to criticism, was very embarrassed. But was the expulsion of these students the best outcome for all parties? When it comes right down to it, the failure to dispose of animal corpses in an appropriate manner is not such a big deal, so it seems as though these students got tossed because they embarrassed the school.

As an alternative, it might’ve been refreshing to hear the school say, in so many words, “helping young people become adults is what we do for a living, so while this incident has been an embarrassing distraction to the school, we look forward to helping our student body — including the students involved — to learn, grow and ultimately, to move on.”

Besides, the football team gave up 69 points to Florida State and most of them are still around.

However, just when it seemed like I might be able to file the capitol steps anecdote away for another year or two, along came one more layer to the story.

Western, a major economic engine for the region, has fired a big bunch of people this spring because of state budget cuts. The atmosphere there has been appropriately tense, all the more so because several shiny buildings are under construction on campus, and because plenty of money continues to be spent on athletics (we know, different “pots of money”, but still). Then, a little more than a week ago, news of some end-of-the-year hijinks among WCU administrators turned up and made our friend’s friend’s dope-between-the-boobs trick look like rocket science.

Seems that some of the institution’s most highly paid administrative minds put together a skit for one of their year end get-togethers. The skit included a good bit of crude sexism — or at least what qualifies as crude amongst faculty members on college campuses. Mm-hm. OK, that’s odd, but it was their get-together, so, so what? First amendment and all that. Well, “so what” is that the higher-ups video-recorded their skit and emailed it to everyone on campus.

Now that’s thinkin’.

So everybody with me now, in your best italicized voices:

Kids, we don’t care if you have dumb skits at your parties. In fact, we’d all like to encourage you to party more often. Pop open a box of Franzia. Loosen up some. Maybe even invite a few of the little people.

All things considered, though, it might be best if …

One of the people who emailed us the video — all anonymously, oddly — wrote this: “People are scared at WCU. Top down administration plus bad economy means pressure put on faculty and staff to do more. We have never had much power under (the current administration) and it is only getting worse.”

CULLOWHEE–According to information released by Western Carolina University last week, the school will lay off 31.75 employees due to ongoing state budget cuts. 92 jobs have been eliminated campus-wide, but only 31.75 are currently held positions.

Western is Jackson County’s leading employer, with over 1,500 employees.

In addition, among the apparent early victims of budget cuts at Western Carolina University are these programs and initiatives:

• The Institute for the Economy and the Future
• The Clinical Lab Sciences Program
• Summer Ventures Program
• Legislator’s School
• Reading Center

Here’s an overview from Josh Mitchell at the Smoky Mountains News.

Of these program cuts, one, the clinical lab sciences program, hits particularly close to home. As the Sylva Herald’s Justin Goble describes, it isn’t a flashy program, but it is a productive one.

Here’s a previous post about Western and the budget crisis.

CULLOWHEE–Officials at Western Carolina University are dancing the digital flamenco this week, stamping out fires sparked by myriad budget cuts, while waving attention to record-breaking applications for the fall. Changes are coming one after the next.

The school announced yesterday that among many of the early cuts brought on by the state budget crisis was summer commencement, which is a relatively small affair, but still quite costly. Read the school’s release here. Read our earlier post on cuts here.

The budget cuts discussed yesterday were relatively straightforward, but additional, more complex moves will have longer-term impacts, not just on WCU’s educational programs, but on local economies as well. Many adjunct instructors and non-tenure-track professors have been or will be laid-off. Hiring is essentially frozen. Structural reorganization — such as ongoing discussion about dividing the school of arts and sciences — will be disorienting, as will be the curriculum reorganization necessary when faculty and staff cuts meet a growing student body.

At the same, though, work is moving forward (paid for from a different pot of money) on the schools’s new health building, and as Asheville blogger Ashvegas points out, there are economic opportunities aplenty in the project.

More good news from the university, also yesterday, on the school’s enormous pile of applications for fall semester:

With a record number of applications for the freshman class for the 2009 fall semester in hand, Western Carolina University’s enrollment management office is instituting a “wait list” to enable admissions counselors to properly evaluate every prospective student.

“We already have received more than 11,500 applications for the approximately 1,500 spaces we have available for freshmen this fall,” said Fred Hinson, senior associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at WCU. “Our admissions staff is working tirelessly to process applications, which continue to pour in. We are committed to giving a thorough review to every single application we receive, and setting up a wait list will enable us to do so.”

The piece went on to discuss the school’s growing honors program:

WCU’s Honors College is especially competitive this year, said Brian Railsback, dean of the special residential academic community for high-achieving students. The college, which developed out of an honors program that in 1996 served 77 students, has grown to nearly 1,400 students with an average high school weighted grade-point average of 4.3 and SAT score of 1803.

“Our admissions are up 53 percent over last year at this time, so space is tight in the Honors College for the second straight year,” said Railsback. “However, we are able to accommodate more honors students than ever before thanks to a new residence hall coming online this fall. This means we can admit a select few latecomers throughout the spring.”

STATEWIDE–Facing a state budget shortfall of as much as $3 billion, as well as the need to make “draconian” cuts to state programs if no federal help materializes, Governor Beverly Perdue Thursday asked all state agencies to immediately tighten their budgets by 7% – 2% more than has already been requested by former Governor Mike Easley.

“As Governor, I have a constitutional requirement to balance North Carolina’s budget,” she said earlier this week, “and I intend to do so responsibly.”

In addition to the additional 2% budget cuts, Perdue asked state agencies to cut funds using the following methods:

• Stop any purchases of goods or services unless specifically approved by a department head. This does not apply to equipment or materials needed for classrooms.
• Suspend travel and training except for public safety, public health, job requirements, economic development  or emergency situations. Exceptions must be approved by department heads.
• Put on hold any pay-as-you-go appropriations for capital improvement and repair and renovation projects.
• Do not fill any vacant positions unless a prior commitment has been made. Department heads can approve filling vacancies as an “extraordinary exception.”

Meanwhile, Perdue traveled to Washington Wednesday to lobby North Carolina’s for emergency funding. Wrote Barbara Barrett in the Raleigh News and Observer:

Perdue asked Congress for two separate pots of money: One, at about $18 billion, would pay for new infrastructure. The projects include work on airports, highways, schools, clean water systems and public and private colleges. The projects on this list were presented as “shovel-ready.”

The second pot of money, an unspecified amount, would be used to fill North Carolina’s budget shortfall for next fiscal year.

Perdue has said the state is about $2 billion in the hole, and that while she can find some savings, she can’t find enough. And a day after declaring a budget emergency in Raleigh, Perdue also disputed the idea that any shortfall is the fault of the state.

“It is a crisis caused not by bad stewardship on the part of North Carolinians, but because of a global meltdown,” she said.

“I don’t believe it’s a handout,” Perdue said of her request. “It’s not just coming up here and saying, ‘Bail me out.’ “

Perdue’s request received mixed reviews, with N.C. Sen. Richard Burr, a Winston-Salem Republican, the sharpest critic.

“Only if they’re in the form of a loan,” Burr told Barrett. “But I’m not interested in substituting the usual appropriations process and fulfilling states’ shortfalls with emergency money just because the states aren’t making tough decisions they need to make.”

“They didn’t wake up six days ago and realize they have a … deficit,” he said.

Perdue otherwise hopes for relief through the federal stimulus bill now before congress, and hopes that the federal government will take on a higher percentage of medicaid costs.

More from the News and Observer here.

SYLVA–Last month’s statewide reversion of funds cost Jackson County schools $148,172, Superintendent Sue Nations told the Jackson County school board last night.

An expected state budget shortfall led to a belt-tightening request from Governor Mike Easley.

Nations also told the board about a couple of addition reversions, one of $32,732 due to a lowered per-gallon gasoline allotment, and another of $12,000 in supplemental funds reversed because the system has fewer students than projected. In total, the school system has returned over a quarter-million dollars to the state budget this fiscal year.

RALEIGH/STATEWIDE–The Raleigh News and Observer’s “Under the Dome” blog reports that two progressive groups have tried to claim the high ground in the coming state budget battles.

A report from the N.C. Budget and Tax Center, written by Meg Gray Wiehe, makes the case that state spending per resident has actually dropped in the past nine years. Rob Schofield, of  N.C. Policy Watch, urges work toward comprehensive reforms, “such as broadening the sales tax to include services, rather than simply across the board spending cuts.”

Read the piece here.