Plans to renovate and expand the math labs in Pleasant Hall, forgotten. Plans to centralize supplemental instruction through the Center for Academic Success, thrown aside. The writing program within the English Department, cut and never reopened. A campaign to update all of LSU’s signage from the brown and white signs on the south end of campus to the purple and white signs on the north side, over.
LSU cut nearly 350 positions, both in faculty and staff since 2008, Tommy Smith, the associate vice president for the Office of Budget and Planning and vice provost for finance at LSU, said.
You can’t buy a Cadillac with the budget of a used Honda Civic. That’s the attitude state government had with LSU’s performance ratings and state funding for the past eight years.
When Gov. Bobby Jindal took office in 2008, the state funded 58 percent of the LSU’s overall budget. Today the number decreased by nearly 33 percent, a loss of $145.7 million.
To make up for the loss in state funding, the University raised tuition and fees from 42 percent of the total budget in 2008 to 74 percent of the total budget this year.
LSU survived these cuts for the past two terms of Jindal’s governorship. But that’s all we have done: survive.
You can’t see many tangible cuts to academia during that time, but that comes from the decision of the University to simply not grow. To remain at a 2008 level of higher education while our peer institutions continued to rise.
Faculty Senate President Kevin Cope said, “We have a very large number of unfunded professorships that exist, but we can’t make the match. We have constant troubles with the acquisition of equipment that is necessary for research.”
Our one-year retention rate and six year graduation rate sit at 85 percent and 65 percent, respectively. Texas A&M University’s percentages are at 90 percent and 81 percent. We’re behind the curve, and it shows.
If funding remained at its level in 2008 while tuition and fees rose to their current rates, the university would top most comparisons to peer institutions.
According to D’Ann Morris, director of the Student Health Center and director of Emergency Operations (she has been the interim director for the past eight years, if that says anything about our budget woes), LSU halted a lot of future projects when the first major budget cuts hit.
Faculty positions opened, but weren’t filled, and the student to teacher ratio reflects this. Currently, at 22 students per faculty member, Smith said the University would need to hire approximately 260 new faculty members to bring the ratio down to our peer’s average ratio of 18 to one.
“We have buildings that are still falling apart,” Morris said. “You walk over to Atkinson Hall and go into any one of those offices and the ceiling tiles are falling on you. That’s not facility’s fault. That’s a lack of funding.”
Besides the offices where our professors and administrators work, keeping and attracting faculty is a problem, with faculty salaries 30 to 40 percent behind the national average. Faculty benefits and retirement packages are far behind our peer institutions’ abilities.
We’ve staggered, to say the least, but kept afloat by LSU leadership that was able to redirect and cut funds so our education means something when we graduate.
The problem lies within the future, though. Will our state Legislature fund us in the long term? Will our next governor find solutions to the eight-year funding problem by taking on big business tax exemptions and special interest constitutional restrictions?
Cope projects it would take the University a minimum of five years to get on the same level as its peers and another four to five years to become competitive within that group of institutions.
We can’t afford the cuts to continue. Not if we want to remain competitive in the national marketplace. Not if we want our degrees to matter.
The unofficial turnout of this past Saturday’s Election Day was 38.5 percent statewide. The runoff election is in under a month. Don’t complain about your building falling apart or your class size being too big if you don’t bother to vote.
The politicians who take office in January will be the deciding factors of whether LSU can fix the ceiling tiles in Atkinson Hall and hire another professor so you aren’t just one student among 1,000.
Justin DiCharia is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Slidell, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @JDiCharia.