By Jack dugan
Earlier last week, a letter was sent to Thomas Bradshaw, one of the nearly 3,000 students affected by the recent University of Iowa scholarship cuts. Bradshaw lost $2,600 in tuition funds earned through exemplary academic accomplishments.
Part of the letter, penned by UI President Bruce Harreld, reads, “It is with great disappointment that I share this news. Please know that the elimination of this program in no way diminishes your admirable academic accomplishments. Unfortunately, because of a shortfall in state revenues, the Iowa Legislature decreased funding to the University of Iowa by $8 million. This devastating cut has forced us to consider every expenditure and its contribution to our core education mission of education, research and discovery.” The letter finishes with: “We pledge to continue to operate as efficiently as possible to ensure a world-class education at an affordable price, honoring the University of Iowa legacy.”
The UI legacy is quickly becoming something that resembles a fiscally driven private institution (though perhaps this should not be surprising given our president’s corporate background). With UI faculty leaving in record numbers and academically accomplished undergraduate students losing incentives to stay, his notions of preserving a “world-class education at an affordable price” seems more like a PR move than an ethic in action. When this is coupled with the graduate-student union’s loss of its collective-bargaining rights, students and their contributions to “education, research, and discovery” is the least of both the Iowa Senate’s and Harreld’s concern.
Bradshaw’s response to the letter, which he published on Facebook, reads “Thanks, Iowa Senate Republicans! You just robbed me of $2,600 I earned for my academic performance. Hopefully, I can still afford to pay for my last year in school so I can still graduate — with HONORS. But [****] me, right? Poor people can’t be smart, so why even let them go to college? I need to learn my place and stay in my lane, apparently.”
Dissent toward the Republican-dominated Iowa Senate is entirely valid, but we must also hold our university administration accountable. In the midst of these cuts, athletics is seeing a $90 million renovation of Kinnick Stadium and administrative salaries remain astonishingly high — the 118 administrators consumed $26.56 million of the 2016 budget alone.
While the Iowa Republicans are urging the administration to make up the difference with the $2 billion recently raised by the UI Foundation, Harreld asserts that UI officials can’t just “slosh money around.”
Though there is bound to be bureaucratic red tape involved with anything green and the university, seeing students personally affected by austere cuts to public-university funding juxtaposed to lavish and wildly expensive renovations to a sports stadium leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It seems that there is an incredible amount of money being mismanaged.
The UI administration should work for the students, not against them. Defunding public education has sincere and tangible effects on students. Funding public education is also not an easy endeavor to handle, but given the gratuitous salaries our administration enjoys, the administrators should be able to figure something else out to navigate what a callous corporate well-fare inclined state Senate throws their way.