How budgets cuts have bled students, faculty

By Charlotte Hsu

Monday, Feb. 11, 2008 | 2 a.m.

One College of Southern Nevada professor spent his own money to buy an ink cartridge for a school printer. To cut costs, another posted syllabuses online instead of printing them. A third related that a student, pressed financially, dropped a class because books were too expensive.

These were some of the stories teachers and students related to the Board of Regents during two hours of public comment at the board’s meeting Thursday.

The CSN community, like others in the Nevada System of Higher Education, is struggling with budget cuts and the student fee increases the regents discussed Thursday.

Sara Sorcini, an aspiring respiratory therapist taking classes at CSN, sobbed while giving a short speech that drew both laughs and tears from the audience.

A native Nevadan, she said, “I could have gone to so many other schools. I had scholarships elsewhere, but my dad said, ‘You’re a Nevadan. Stay here.’ ”

Asking the regents not to slash CSN’s budget, she said, “Give me a reason to stay here.”

She added, “Many of you may end up in the hospital someday, and you’re going to need me to be treated.”

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It’s too late for regrets, but a decision by the regents last month might have cost the system millions of dollars.

At a special meeting in early January, regents voted against a proposal to give $4 million, disbursed by the state public works board for health sciences buildings, back to the state.

Days later, with Nevada’s revenue shortfall growing, state officials took back the $4 million anyway. They also reclaimed an additional $3.2 million for health sciences that fell under the control of the public works board.

Had regents chosen to return the funds earlier, the money might have taken a bite out of the $57.6 million cut the governor mandated, said Dan Klaich, executive vice chancellor for the higher education system. But with state officials taking the initiative to seize the funds, the $7.2 million will not count toward the system’s quota for cuts.

“It’s disappointing,” said Regents Chairman Michael Wixom, one of four regents who voted in January to return the $4 million. Even so, he defended his colleagues on the board who voted against the reversion, saying they made the best decision they could with the information they had.

System Chancellor Jim Rogers had asked regents not to return the money, fearing such a decision would undermine efforts to persuade private donors to give money for health sciences projects.

Rogers contacted the governor last week, asking him to restore at least some of the health sciences money the system had returned. To furnish a building scheduled to open in fall 2009, the system needs $2.7 million of the money the state forced higher education officials to return.

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Adding more emotion to last week’s uncharacteristically emotional regents meeting, Rogers gave a thoughtful talk on the state of higher education in Nevada.

The chancellor, scheduled to undergo surgery for bladder cancer next week, said his illness was a “jolt” that caused him to reflect on those things that are important to him, including higher education.

Lamenting what he perceived as the public’s apathy toward funding public education, Rogers said, “We just bitch and moan about it, and then we don’t go out and support it.”

He suggested that college officials could lobby more effectively for funding if they established long-range goals instead of simply trying to keep colleges afloat each biennium.

“We don’t plan for the future,” he said. “We don’t have goals.”

He encouraged higher education leaders to focus more on competing with schools in other states.

In a memo to regents in January, Rogers laid out his vision.

Among other ambitions, he wants schools to graduate enough students to improve Nevada’s ranking among the states in the percentage of the population that holds an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. He wants to double the system’s productivity in research, measured by the numbers of grants, contracts and copyrights that the universities and the Desert Research Institute hold.

“We have no aspirations,” Rogers told regents, adding that he hopes that will change.