Three NMSU-Dona Ana Community College professors made the trip to Albuquerque Thursday to attend “The ‘Crisis’ in Higher Education” forum.

Olga Viramontes, arts and humanities professor, said they wanted to see what UNM faculty is doing to organize and how they can do the same.

About 40 people filled the SUB Acoma A and B rooms to listen to the presentation sponsored by UNM’s American Association of University Professors Interim Council. According to an AAUP flier handed out at the meeting, the chapter addresses faculty concerns coming from the academic workplace.

Stephen DeGuilio, college assistant professor at NMSU-DACC, said DACC’s president, Margie Huerta, announced to the Faculty Council on Feb. 23 they were going to eliminate 50 faculty and 55 staff members.

“She announced the present situation at NMSU and qualified it by saying that the budget wasn’t finalized yet, but it could be worse,” he said. “There was no mention of shortage of funds.”

Steve Ludington, English and communication professor at NMSU-DACC, said this problem seems to be nationwide.

Les Field, UNM anthropology professor, said the meeting was intended to reorganize the AAUP chapter, which fizzled about three years ago. He said 50 people met last spring to restart the chapter.

“We have an interim council, and we need to move to the next stage, which is to elect officers,” he said. “We need to have participation and organization responding to the crisis.”

Thursday’s forum took place on the National Day of Action to Defend Education, which is a national day of protest initiated by the University of California in an effort to protect public education in K-12 and higher education, said Alex Lubin, American studies associate professor.

“Crisis can refer to a budget cut, but it can also refer to a plan to restructure education in the public sector as a whole,” he said. “Our concern is both the ways that the financial crisis impacts all of us in higher education … and also how the crisis can be used to reimagine and re-engineer the public university in ways that we think often harm students.”

Beverly Burris, chairwoman of UNM’s sociology department, said at the forum that throughout her research in higher education, universities transitioning to a corporate structure haven’t worked.

“I don’t think universities function very well as corporate, capitalist institutions,” she said. “I think it has not been a very easy relationship with the corporatization that comes into conflict with the traditional academic model.”
Burris said higher education has been damaged by several factors.

“Higher education has already been weakened by decades of reduced funding, by the fact that more than two-thirds of teaching faculty are now contingent faculty and that we have large and expensive administrations, high tuition and so on,” she said.
Burris said it’s interesting to see the faculty is bearing the brunt of all of these measures.

“Academia was in a poor position to respond to the current economic recession,” she said. “There have been state cut backs and declines in corporate and private giving. They’ve done a lot of layoffs, furloughs, hiring and salary freezes, tuition increases, etc., increased teaching loads, deferred retirements.”

Burris said it’s encouraging to see faculty waking up to defend the teaching and research missions of a university.
Michael Mauer, director of AAUP organizing and services, said the state’s contribution to UNM’s revenue is less than 1 percent. However, enrollment figures increased by 6.7 percent totaling more than $8 million.

“Where is that money going? Faculty salaries from 1995-6 to 2005-6 show a 5 percent increase in the U.S., but the University president has a 35 percent increase in salary,” he said.

Mauer said that from 1976 to 2005, there has been an increase in full-time tenure nationally by 17 percent, but a 101 percent increase in administration.

“The core mission of a university is teaching students, and that has to be the first thing protected and the last thing cut,” he said.

Lissa Knudsen, Graduate and Professional Student Association president, said she is looking toward the faculty to organize.
“If the faculty are weak, if you guys aren’t organized, that affects us. We look to you,” she said. “If faculty can take those kinds of risks and show that you can’t get picked off, we will become more empowered.”

Elisha Allen, Staff Council president, said the University is in dire need of moving forward from the things that separate faculty and administration.

“Lack of engagement or inability to fully participate by any one of these groups has visible and measurable impacts on outcomes,” he said. “From a staff perspective, I fear the crisis in education is limiting the ability of staff to engage at the level needed for their university to be most successful.”