Running On Fumes And Goodwill

'Dean Dad' at Inside Higher Ed is a community college dean, happy to have found his place in the world in a role he never expected to play. He has a sense of humor and humanity, as one commenter notes.  OS enjoys his posts, because they are as likely to be about the joys of marriage and parenthood as they are about his challenges on campus, which are many.  Dean Dad doesn't whine, and he doesn't participate in that arrogant elitism that infects so many campuses.

So, his account of a recent budget meeting deserves consideration.

He concludes here:

I try to stay positive in public, since part of my job involves setting a tone, and campus morale is a real, if fuzzy, issue. So I'll use pseudonymity here to tell the truth. We simply can't keep doing what we're doing. We're running on fumes and goodwill, and you can't do that forever. The funding increases necessary just to get to 'sustainable' -- let alone 'exemplary' -- are unimaginable. Several areas of the college are still functioning only because a dwindling number of staffers are doing heroic work, and you just can't keep doing that. When heroism becomes the budgetary baseline, even getting to 'sanity' takes substantial increases. In many of the 'support' areas of the college, that's the dilemma now.

As so many, especially Mish, have noted before, the various infusions of federal cash (borrowed from the Fed or the Chinese) have only delayed the inevitable day of reckoning, and Dean Dad acknowledges that fact. The tough days yet lie ahead for his world, as the taxpayer pot has run dry. A state legislature cannot spend what does not exist, and can't print money, although California has attempted to at times.


So, in these years of running on fumes, perhaps it is time to concentrate on building good will. Last week's angry marches by undergraduates demanding non-existent money are counterproductive, because they are viewed by people with high-school or vo-tech educations paddling as hard as they can to keep their own little micro-businesses above water and their families intact, while paying taxes on everything they earn or consume. Wimmen's Studies majors smashing store windows and blocking highways don't build good will with the public. College students tutoring young kids in reading and math in every county school do.

OS is an optimist, who thinks that real solutions will be worked out by good people like Dean Dad and his team, one corner of the culture at a time. The process will be accelerated if the Federal government allows it to happen, by turning off the spigot of funny money, and by the students who see free higher education as an entitlement spending their time in the library.

Or tutoring young kids in reading and math.