SEMO grad disagrees on cutbacks

By Jason Alexander

As a 2002 graduate of Southeast Missouri State, I was disappointed upon hearing about the recent budget cuts by the state. When I learned how the university planned to deal with the deficit, my chin hit the floor.

Most of the university employees to be affected by this restructuring will be some of the most important employees of the university. If you had a problem finding the right course, getting in a course, finding help with your studies or finding relief from your studies, you didn't go to the registrar's office or your adviser's office or even the chair's office. You went to the secretary, regardless of the department.

The secretaries knew the fine art of navigating the sea of administrative bureaucracy. They knew how to solve problems, and they all talked to each other to form a network of knowledge about university drudgery. They knew what courses to take from which faculty members, and they knew when and where you could catch faculty members on campus. They would lock you in the lab or classroom after 5 p.m. and let you in at 7:45 a.m. because only they knew how determined you were.

I can't fathom how much more difficult my life at Southeast would have been without the help of a few departmental secretaries.

The source of this loss, the restructuring of departments and combining departments, is just as unintelligible. I know that numerous departments on campus, especially the physics department, have been working very hard for the last several years to make improvements to attract new, talented students. They have been desperately trying to compete with the University of Missouri's Rolla and Columbia campuses and other state universities. How can the university have the paradoxical goals of increasing enrollment and educational quality and undermining the attempts of academic departments to improve?

Students explicitly looking for a program in engineering physics and geoscience typically know what they want in a program and may question the integrity and commitment of programs that reside in a combined department of the two programs. This is surely the case for other academic programs as well.

From my experience as a student viewing the operation of administration -- by which I mean the university at large, not departmental administration -- I'm convinced that more of the needed budget cuts can and should come from this area.

Is the university still paying a past president's salary? Do you really need a president, provost, vice provost and a vice president of enrollment? Surely these talented individuals to whom we pay so much can redistribute the workload and eliminate some of these positions that would offer far greater savings than a few department secretaries. At a minimum, could we not ask the department chairs to give up their $66,000 in administrative stipends in favor of keeping academic departments intact? I'm sure we can.

In conclusion, let me say that despite Southeast's small size, I've found during my first few weeks of graduate school that my preparation is comparable to other students who have degrees from much larger and more prestigious universities. Some students may find solace in this as they choose to stay closer to home and attend Southeast. I do not believe future graduates will make the same statement if the proposed plan in university management goes through.

I urge the university to take a second look at its prioritie. I would hope that the regents reject this proposal. Southeast can be competitive in all its academic programs if intelligent choices are made.

Jason Alexander is a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Okla.