ASU is a huge part of Arizona.
The institution that provides thousands of jobs, creates an influx of out-of-state students (also known as consumers), and most importantly, educates the future.
It might sound a bit cliché, but it’s the truth: on ASU’s four campuses you will find the businessmen, educators, engineers, journalists, etc. who will be serving you in the future. And you will be one of them.
In many ways, ASU students are facing a huge obstacle in the state Legislature.
The way things stand now, Arizona has no money. And in the eyes of the Legislature, ASU is one of the largest and only pools to draw from — except for the fact that the pool is drier than the desert it’s in.
“We’ve already taken dramatic permanent cuts, to the level that we think we can’t go below and still operate in our present mode,” Crow said on Wednesday in a meeting with The State Press editorial board.
In order to acquire much-needed stimulus money from the federal government, the state made a commitment not to cut funds to the University below fiscal year 2006 levels. Right now, the state is already at that level — and they aren’t concerned with the repercussions of cutting more, Crow said.
We understand that the Legislature has to get revenue from somewhere, but it made a commitment upon receive stimulus funds, and reneging on that agreement is unacceptable.
All options for amending the budget crisis are on the table, but the Legislature is focusing on making more cuts instead of supporting revenue-generating options.
When that means the Legislature is considering possibilities like sweeping funds from the money you pay for tuition away from ASU, it’s time to rally a pitchfork-wielding Sun Devil crowd. The Arizona House of Representatives has already passed a bill to put a tax increase on the state’s ballot — and sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures. But for red-state voters, it won’t get through without a fight.
Easy as it is to blame the man behind the Fulton Center glass for hiking your tuition, it is a lack of adequate funding from the state Legislature that is largely responsible for your big tuition bill. No one within the staff, faculty or student body has escaped without a burden — not even Crow himself.
“I’m not a big believer in the everyone-for-themself model,” Crow said.
In his view, the state is facing a “crisis of confidence,” acting “selfishly” by refusing to invest in Arizona’s future.
“If you have confidence in the future you invest in your young people. You invest in the new ideas, you invest in the new energy, you invest in the people that have all the energy to drive things forward,” he said. “They’re not willing to make those investments.”
State leaders seem to have the wrong mentality — they think all the revenue in Arizona belongs to them. The Legislature sees higher education as sucking resources dry, but it’s forgetting that the nearly-68,000 students at ASU are helping to bring some of the biggest returns to a state budget that is circling the drain.
