UM budget cuts

John Hitt, interim University of Maine president, has joined the university’s chancellor in a broad criticism of the Legislature for what both of these principal administrators call “draconian” budget cuts that will have “disastrous” effects upon the university system. In so doing, both have additionally charged that the university is being singled out for unfair cuts when compared with sacrifices asked of other public agencies.

Statements of this kind by these two men and by some top-most administrators at other university campuses are in sad contrast to the professionally objective judgments we should expect of them. What becomes manifest is the overreaction of emotionally charged representatives of yet another special interest group striving with too little analysis to protect an overenlarged status.

Diminishing returns from many public expenditures, including and perhaps especially from the enlarged funding of higher “education,” has been evident for some time to many both outside of and within the university system. In recent years there has often appeared written commentary to this effect.

Without repeating evidence cited in these commentaries, it is sufficient to express regret that our university leaders still feel that more money necessarily produces better education and that reduced funding necessarily, therefore, produces poorer education.

There is much evidence that a better university could emerge from a reduced budget. Such a thesis should at least be seriously debated at the highest university levels. Charles F. McCoy Presque Isle