On Friday, Gov. Doug Ducey kicked off his term by unveiling his proposal to solve Arizona’s $1.5 billion budget crisis. Instead of proposing something bold, like asking for money to help chip away at the billion and a half dollars that the state desperately needs, Ducey – keeping with his pandering, party-pleasing pledge to never ever ever raise taxes – wants to cut spending to public universities by $75 million.
Because of his infantile, party-line reasoning, Ducey is putting the onus of the legislature’s ineffective budget policies on Arizona’s universities – one of the few public institutions in the state that are still respected nationwide.
During the recession, Arizona made the largest funding cut to public universities of any state in the country. In fact, Arizona – along with New Hampshire – was one of only two states to cut education funding in half or larger. It should then come as no surprise that Arizona’s public universities had the highest increase in tuition (78 percent) in the country over the same time period.
It should be the goal of Arizona’s policymakers to steadily increase funding so that our universities can eventually, once again, receive the state support that they had prior to the recession. And, in all fairness, that had been the trend, with universities receiving $735 million last year, up from $707 million the year before. But with the governor’s plan, ASU could be expected to lose $40 million from its state funding.
To his credit, President Michael Crow has already come out against raising tuition for in-state students to cover for this latest cut in funding. Now we must wonder anxiously how the school will react to a decrease in revenue. In the past, Arizona’s universities have responded by cutting jobs and academic programs. Here at ASU, where a myriad of opportunities offered to students is arguably the school’s biggest attraction, any cut in school funding could have a huge impact.
Disgraceful as it is, one must recognize the cowardly political strategy that Ducey is using. Because Millennials have a consistently low turnout rate when it comes to voting, it only makes sense that he takes out the state’s budget woes on the demographic that will not have a deleterious impact on his chances for re-election. While it is clearly morally wrong and a huge potential setback for our universities, it makes perfect political sense for Ducey to try to sell out higher education in an effort to appease his hardline Republican colleagues.
Gov. Doug Ducey, one of the co-founders of Cold Stone Creamery, has shown in his first week in office that he has the political courage of a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Before he had even been sworn in, Ducey had already ruled out the most intuitive, sensible solution when leading a government that’s short $1.5 billion. Asking the people of Arizona to make a small sacrifices in the form of modest tax increases would require a backbone that we should not expect Doucey to possess.
Reach the columnist at hneidig@asu.edu or follow @hneidig on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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