Profs travel, but at what expense?

BY JESSICA PECK CORRY

During the ongoing debate over Colorado’s budget woes, universities have been the perfect poster children for why voters should raise taxes on themselves. But as families struggle with rising tuition costs, professors enjoy millions of dollars in trips around the world-all in the name of research and all on the taxpayer dime.

While paid consultants construct a plan to ask taxpayers to sacrifice more than $3 billion in tax refunds over the next five years, an investigative report detailing opportunities for real fiscal reform has largely gone unnoticed.

The well-researched report, released by Denver’s Fox 31 TV late last month, found that higher education consumed 75 percent of the state’s travel budget in 2004. In a single year, professors and staff at Colorado’s colleges and universities gobbled up more than $36 million to trek the globe. Of this, CU professors spent $11 million. CSU trailed close behind with $10 million. This is real money that if directed elsewhere could take a serious dent out of projected budget shortfalls.

Among the 4,000 taxpayer-funded trips that Fox 31 researched: $7,300 for Honolulu, more than $26,000 for Australia, $13,000 for Brazil, a trip to Costa Rica for more than $6,000, nearly $7,000 for travel to the Island of Saipan, and $39,000 for at least two trips to Canada.

The universities respond to the report in typical fashion. Students benefit from the travel experiences of faculty, they say. Trips overseas produce valuable research - a key element for any university aspiring to be a leading voice in science, business, or international affairs, they add. And finally, they point out that none of the money - much of it coming from the federal government in the form of research grants - comes out of funds established to cover tuition costs. Tell that to students working second or third jobs to cover the cost of attending one of Colorado’s colleges.

The reality is that students rarely benefit from such trips. Currently, at the University of Colorado, the average professor steps foot in the classroom less than six hours a week, down significantly from a generation ago, according to incoming CU President Hank Brown. Meanwhile, as professors pontificate to eager audiences abroad, the instructors left behind - graduate students struggling to pay their own rising tuition costs - teach Colorado’s students.

If professors are in demand and the research they conduct is so valuable, taxpayers should not be forced to fund their travel - whether through their federal or state income tax or through funds appropriated for research grants. Professors, like other visible figureheads in our society, should be able to convince supporters, the international community, and the institutions they are visiting to foot the bill for their expeditions. In fact, CU has multiple funds of its own dedicated solely to bringing top-notch speakers to campus.

If our universities believe strongly that not all valuable research travel has a market value or interest, they should at least construct a sound fiscal plan for how to fund trips - if at all - during years of financial hardship. In-state students attending CU this fall will pay $966 more in tuition than they did last year, a 28 percent increase, under a desperate plan approved by CU’s Board of Regents. Saying the upsurge is too much, Governor Bill Owens and Colorado Commission on Higher Education Director Rick O’Donnell are now calling on the legislature to cut $13.8 million from the amount CU can collect in tuition revenue. Lawmakers should also consider cutting the $2.5 million that CU will get this year in direct appropriations to fund travel. If students are forced to face the burden of economic realities, professors should as well.

This fall, Coloradans will vote on Referendums C & D, tax-increase proposals that will ask residents to give up their tax refunds for five years. Proponents say the plan amounts to just a couple grand lost for the average family. For a professor, that may just be a plane ticket or a few nights in a five-star hotel, but to a family struggling to pay for college, getting to keep this hard earned money could make all the difference.

To view transcripts from Fox 31’s report, visit www.fox31news.com. This editorial originally appeared in the Colorado Daily on June 30, 2005

Join Jessica this Wednesday, June 29th for a televised debate on the Supreme Court’s recent eminent domain decision. Here are the details: KBDI Channel 12’s “Drawing the Line” with host Reggie Rivers. The debate will air at 8 p.m. and viewers are encouraged to call in.

Jessica will represent home owners and small business owners–too often the victims of eminent domain abuse . Representing local governments will be Sam Mamet, associate director of the Colorado Muncipal League.

The topic is complicated but simple: do we trust the people–or government bureaucrats–to determine the best use of private property? The bottom line: the Supreme Court was wrong in last week’s ruling that the government can take someone’s home and transfer it to another private buyer without the owner’s consent. For more information on this important case, visit www.castlecoalition.org.

Hank Brown brings solid track record to its presidency

By JESSICA PECK CORRY

Hank Brown will be CU’s next president - a gift to all those who care about fiscal sanity, educational access and racial equality. In a place like Boulder, this means he’ll have to watch his back.

The news comes in the aftermath of a mean-spirited attack by Peter Groff, a Democrat and state senator from Denver, who last month off-handedly questioned Brown’s “commitment to diversity.” Groff offered no proof for his accusation. Despite plenty of opportunities, he could not come up with a single example, telling a reporter, “I mean, I’d have to go back and look at some votes or comments while he was in office.”

Colorado has the CU Board of Regents to thank for not allowing Sen. Groff’s attack to permanently sideline Brown’s candidacy.

Brown, a CU graduate and former U.S. senator, is rightly heralded as a miracle worker for all he did to turn around the University of Northern Colorado while serving as its president during the 1990s. At Greeley, he put more money into the classroom by privatizing - and ultimately improving - such campus services as the book store and the much-loved student radio station. He asked serious questions about why college freshmen cannot write basic essays and undertook important dialogues with community members about ways to improve primary and secondary education.

What he did next is what scares people like Groff the most. At UNC, he cut 100 administrative positions, two vice presidents, and seven associate vice presidents - freeing up $7 million annually for better classroom instruction and higher faculty salaries.

With the higher salaries came higher expectations. UNC professors improved their productivity and time in the classroom tremendously, raising their average time teaching per week to 10 hours. CU’s average today stands at fewer than six hours.

CU is ripe for the kind of cuts that have improved UNC so tremendously. The most obvious place to look is CU’s bloated diversity administration, filled with “diversocrats” subscribing to few obtainable goals other than to make students and community members understand the value of diversity.

Except for intellectual diversity, which is seen as a terrible threat.

Search the CU-Boulder homepage for diversity-related information and you’ll find more than 6,000 links. Once on campus, you’re welcomed with a newsletter espousing “diversity” as a “core value.”

CU’s Office of Diversity and Equity, led by CU’s associate vice chancellor for Diversity and Equity, has a staff of at least four administrators. Of course, the president’s office - not to be outdone - has its own fund for diversity programming. All CU students are today required to pay fees for student-led programs geared toward the same objectives. One of these student groups, Stop Hate on Campus, deeply confused about the meaning of diversity, even used student-fee fundsto host a series of racially segregated workshops in 2003.

CU’s Cultural Unity Center, the pride and joy of CU’s diversity administration, is a bloated bureaucracy consisting of a director, associate director and several counselors who target students on the basis of race for counseling services that include learning the arts of “test taking, speed reading, time/stress management, concentration skills, etc.”

Are taxpayers really funding a misnamed “unity center” which racially segregates students for the purpose of teaching them how to concentrate?

The sad answer is “yes.”

Students can “celebrate diversity” from the first day of their college experiences by choosing to live in the Ethnic Living and Learning Community, housed in a residential hall that “provides students with an intentional multicultural living and learning experience and the opportunity to study leadership from a multicultural and global perspective.”

This program - in which students are encouraged to view every element of their education through the lens of race - should not to be confused with other staffed and funded “diversity” programs housed at several of CU’s other residential halls.

Is there such a thing as “diversity saturation?” In Boulder, race-mongering is an entire industry. Meanwhile, valuable programs suffer. CU’s Pre-collegiate Development Program, an effort geared toward helping Colorado’s disadvantaged high school students earn high school diplomas and go on to college, has genuinely helped students who would otherwise have little hope of attending a top-tier research institution like CU.

From 1988 to 2002, the program helped 96 percent of participants graduate from high school, with 100 percent of these students going on to some type of post-secondary education.

The Development Program, both valuable and effective, is forced to compete for limited funds with racist programs that have few measurable goals or successes. Over the past few years, the Independence Institute has sought information about budgets, including salaries, from many departments under CU’s diversity administration, including CU’s Cultural Unity Center. But CU won’t disclose the data. What are they scared of?

Supporters of “diversity” programs will often agree that they are ineffective, but claim they could be successful if only there were more money to fund them. If Brown’s days at UNC are any indication, he will take a different approach.

While at UNC, Brown not only saved taxpayers millions of dollars, he personally launched dialogues with poor and minority communities, making personal visits to those high schools across Colorado housing substantial minority and disadvantaged populations.

Instead of using race as a litmus test for promotions at UNC, he cultivated personal relationships with minority leaders, promoting several of them to the university’s board of trustees and other leadership positions.

Ultimately, there are two camps seeking reform in higher education today. First, there are those who believe that all of our problems are black and white, and second, there are those who believe that many problems come down to the color green - namely, money.

Those in the first camp believe, like Peter Groff, that we will improve educational quality, including minority graduation rates, race relations, and classroom instruction by funding racist “diversity” programming at levels far above today’s already-enormous spending.

Those in the second camp, which includes Hank Brown, are realists. They realize that we have no choice but to trim the bureaucracies if we want to spend our tax money on improving educational access for students of all races and all backgrounds. Better education for disadvantaged students only comes when we make tough cuts and acknowledge even tougher realities about how CU got to its current dismal situation.

Once Hank Brown takes CU’s reins in August, he will likely face protests from all of those threatened by his commitment to running a frugal university dedicated to education. Bring them on.

Jessica Peck Corry is the director of the Campus Accountability Project at the Independence Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Colorado think tank. Its public policy research focuses on economic growth, education reform, local government effectiveness, and constitutional rights.

This editorial appeared in the Pueblo Chieftain on Sunday, May 15, 2005.

American Dream Alive & Dirty

You just don’t get it,” the young activist told me. “You’ve got that whole ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality,’ when so many people don’t even have boots.” My response: “If you don’t have boots, you’ve got to walk barefoot until you can buy some.”

This has been the reality for my family, like so many in America. Had I more time, I would have told the woman the story of my grandfather, a man born without boots.

As a teenager orphaned by the toughest of life’s realities, he joined the Marines in an effort to create a better life - or any life at all - for himself. He did his patriotic duty in World War II, where he won a Purple Heart. Upon returning home broke but not broken, he sold magazine subscriptions door-to-door before attending college on the GI Bill.

Before long, he wasn’t just peddling magazines, but was publishing his own late at night out of his basement. Nearly five decades later he passed away, leaving behind a legacy of what can be achieved with hard work and humility.

The problem with the American Dream in today’s society is that too many believe it should arrive instantly on a silver platter. And when it doesn’t, the Dream is seen as something that happens to other people - those with connections. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. It happens to those who believe it in it, and behind this belief, put the blood, sweat, and tears that have defined the success of those like my grandfather.

I have shared proudly in his legacy. I realized early that nothing would be handed to me. To put myself through school, I waited tables, cleaned toilets, assembled plastics, made copies, baby-sat, worked cash registers and the most valuable, put boxes together in a factory.

It was in the factory that I saw firsthand the death of the American Dream in the eyes of too many of my co-workers. While my employment was temporary - a way to make cash between semesters - it was a way of life for most of the people there. Many were dropouts, and almost all had given up hope that they’d ever leave this factory for anything more promising than a different factory with different boxes.

More depressing was that the mentality of my factory co-workers was not all that different than that of my college peers, largely affluent and well-educated, who in droves bought into the Left’s idea that America’s wealthy did not deserve their successes.

Despite having the luxury of time, my classmates rarely asked the most important questions about capitalism. If they had, they would have learned that class mobility is alive and well in America. It’s an undeniable fact born out in statistics. In America, the more you work, the harder you work, and the more education you obtain all lead to higher incomes and more successful careers.

According to the U.S. Census, the median income for households with two-full time workers was more than five times greater than households where no one worked. America’s richest 20 percent represent 30 percent of the total hours worked in the U.S. economy every year, while the poorest 20 percent represent less than eight percent of the hours worked.

And a college education is only becoming more valuable - those with four or more years of college earn three times as much as high school dropouts.

America as a dream dissolves when we stop believing in the power of our own bootstraps. Too many want their boots handed to them, and once they get them, they want the government to lace them up. And polish them. And show them how to walk in them.

Americans, throughout history, have succeeded because they swallowed their pride and walked barefoot, washed toilets, worked as door-to-door salesman, and made boxes in a factory. The rules are harsh but fair. The American Dream is alive and well for those willing to get a little dirty.

This editorial originally appeared in the Colorado Daily on June 8, 2005.