The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘We are the only flagship university in the state’
UConn students, with band, rally at CT Capitol in battle over money — and equity
Busloads of UConn students and staff descended on the state Capitol Wednesday in such huge masses that they actually outnumbered the army of UConn graduates and strong supporters in the House and Senate.
It was not about basketball although hoops has come up in this debate, as you might expect. No, this rally with an estimated 700 people on the steps of the Hartford landmark protested cuts the UConn community says Gov. Ned Lamont wants to foist on the state’s flagship university system.
It led into a public hearing right afterward by the
UConn-friendly legislative committee that oversees spending, exactly a week after Lamont delivered his budget to lawmakers.
The oddity here: Lamont says he’s not cutting the UConn budget one bit, he’s adding to it. Which side you believe depends on how you count.
At the rally and hearing, we heard all the ways UConn boosts a state trying to be a better place – in social equity, economics, vibrancy and culture. For example, the university spun off $5.3 billion a year in value to the state economy and supported 26,000 jobs as of 2018, according to a 2019 study, by, well, UConn.
“We ar the only flagship university in the state,” said Radenka Maric, the recently anointed UConn president, told committee members. “What that means is that we are accessible and affordable for the citizens of Connecticut.” She added that 77 percent of UConn graduates stay in the state and 70 percent of current students come from instate.
Clearly, this fight over money is more than just about money. It’s about a university, and a state, with high aspirations and a governor who shares those dreams – but with the pragmatic pull of reality tugging at his pants leg.
“If inclusive opportunity and financial growth are truly a priority for the governor, the health and competitiveness of Connecticut’s institutions of higher education should be a cornerstone of the budget, not an afterthought,” graduate assistant and Ph.D candidate Susan Tilbury said in
written testimony to the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee for the hearing. “Training and research programs for the next generation of workers and innovators are crucial for Connecticut’s financial future.”
UConn folks noted the large percentage of firstgeneration students at the university; tech spinoffs that are finally starting to show solid results; the UConn outreach to small businesses; the powerful presence of UConn Health in Farmington; and the ways UConn helps address global crisis such as climate change and human rights abuses.
The issue has exploded beyond UConn as groups such as Recovery for All have embraced support for higher education as an engine of racial and economic equity. Among those testifying for UConn: The head of the CT Communist Party.
Numbers tell two stories
There is a fairly easy way out of this standoff. It’s hard to find anyone who will disagree with the big goals, certainly not Lamont and his budget chief, Jeff Beckham. And there’s the rub: Does Lamont’s spending plan for UConn in the two years starting July 1 in fact cut resources?
The numbers tell two stories. UConn’s base, two-year allocations have grown steadily from $613 million in fiscal 2018 to $753 million in 2022 to Lamont’s proposed $776 million in the upcoming two fiscal years. On top of that, UConn received allotments of the recent state budget surpluses and more than $200 million in federal pandemic relief money, bringing its total to $1.08 billion in the two years that end June 30.
Lamont is pitching another $110 million in pandemic money UConn’s way for the upcoming two years. But that still leaves the university $195 million short of where it stands in the current two-year cycle.
Beckham is quick to point out that everyone knew the surplus cash and the federal pandemic relief money were oneshot deals, to be used for non-recurring expenses in the crisis.
“They need to get back to regular operations
which they ought to be able to fund with our regular baseline appropriation,” he told me Tuesday. “If they are not able to do so, that’s at least circumstantial evidence that they’ve built the one-time revenue into ongoing expenses, built it into the base of their budget – which is not a fiscally prudent thing for anyone to do.”
The grants are on top of about $200 million in debt service paid by state taxpayers for construction over the years, which has dramatically reshaped Storrs and other campuses.
“Governor Lamont is a strong believer in UConn’s contributions to the economic growth of Connecticut, and that is why he has proposed increasing
state funding for the university every year since he has taken office,” Lamont spokesman Adam Joseph said Tuesday in an email.
I’ll describe one more twist here among many: UConn was set to pay some $108 million in the upcoming fiscal year for legacy pension and health costs, its share of Connecticut’s liability albatross.
It wanted out of that chokehold in order to help researchers win grants from funders who don’t like to see their dollars going to such payments.
Lamont and Beckham, in response, restructured the health and pension costs in a way that left UConn even with where it has been, swapping some expenses in and out. That’s a good change for winning grants but not exactly the outright relief UConn hoped to see.
UConn argues that it needs the extra money for regular operations in part to pay for such rising costs as salaries, which Lamont negotiated, and post-pandemic student services. Without it, UConn officials will argue Wednesday, the university would need to raise tuition sharply or hold larger classes and offer fewer of those services.
Don’t go back to Kansas!
Maric even went as far as to suggest those hallowed basketball games by the men’s and women’s teams at the XL Center in downtown Hartford could see the knife. The UConn Daily Campus newspaper quoted her in a journalism class last week: “So, I was telling the governor, if there is a cut that I have to do, I’m not going to put the cuts on academic quality, I will do the cuts and make the decision to pull out of the XL.”
Whoa, that’s hitting below the foul line – the UConn equivalent of a school superintendent telling the selectmen that football and the gifted and talented programs will vanish if they don’t fill her request.
And it’s personal: Those lawmakers who support UConn dearly love to sit in the stands at a game just a few hundred yards from the gold dome after a long day of deliberating.
The easy solution is this: The legislature will up the grant, though maybe not for the full UConn request. To make Lamont, Beckham and we the taxpayers happy, UConn needs to show it can boost its efficiency to save money where it can – more than it has already done.
Nobody needs to talk about deep cuts; just a bit more judicious spending. Susan Tilbury, that Ph.D candidate and graduate assistant, wrote, “I quit my job in 2021 (at the age of 51) and moved here from Kansas to attend one of the most innovative and unique Ph.D programs offered at UConn. Cutting funding may make it impossible for me to continue pursuing my research, aimed at developing new interventions to promote human resilience.”
Resilience seems apt. We’re not going to send Tilbury back to Kansas.