Unless you’ve been spending a lot of time in caves lately, you know that the state and country are suffering financial difficulties. The most worrisome development is that 150 fewer of my fellow graduate students have jobs this year. Even worse, Gov. Chet Culver’s recent announcement of a 10 percent across-the-board cut to the state budget means that an additional $24.7 million must be cut from the university’s budget, which will likely mean the loss of more teachers.
The loss of such a large chunk of the teaching workforce at the UI would seriously undermine the quality of education here, both graduate and undergraduate. Undergraduates have vastly more interaction with teaching assistants not only because of the ratio of faculty to graduate students, but also because faculty members have heavy time commitments to research and teaching.
Fewer TAs means larger class sizes and heavier workloads for those who remain. It means less time to prepare to teach, more to grade, and less individual attention for students. Loss of teaching assistantships means that many graduate students will not have the funding necessary to complete their degrees or will be forced to search for outside funding and loans, lengthening the time to completion and putting these graduates deeper into debt.
At a time when there is such concern about a “brain drain” out of Iowa, we can’t afford to cripple our university’s ability to produce those well-educated brains in the first place.
Faculty members at the UI are concerned as well. It’s difficult to attract graduate students if there isn’t any funding for them. Professors need graduate students to help teach classes and assist with research.
Education is — rightly so — a large part of the state budget, and a large share of the university’s budget goes to employee pay, including teaching assistants. The state Board of Regents has responded to concerns about the loss of assistantships by stating that because of the 10 percent across-the-board cut in the state budget, there isn’t a better choice.
This is not true.
It just seems less contentious to cancel funding for incoming and returning teaching assistantships than, for example, to reduce the number of disproportionately paid administrators or at least reduce their salaries and refrain from giving out large bonuses.
They think there won’t be any backlash, but there certainly will be when students find themselves in even larger classes with instructors who have essentially no time for them. Because we’re dedicated to the quality of education at the UI, there will certainly be backlash from graduate students as well.
Often during economic crises, in the business world as well as in academia, institutions cast aside the very people who make those institutions work, insuring an even faster decline and sacrificing those people in the process. I urge the regents to seek a solution that does not so disproportionately affect the work of our university.
Bill Peterson is a Ph.D. candidate and the president of the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students at the UI.