Editor,
I have known several people who benefited greatly by the mental health program that UNM hospital now finds inefficient. I find it unconscionable that the program is being shut down.
UNM Hospital found money to suddenly hire Billy Sparks as a spin doctor and to build an elite cancer center named after the governor to tap insurance industry payouts for elite care, but it can't find money for our most vulnerable and needy? Shame.
We have seen what happens when immigrants, the poor and those unable to communicate their needs are mainstreamed into other programs, as Steve McKernan plans. More people with basic needs will be forced out on the streets with critical needs. People who could have been helped with more mental health outreach have killed innocent people and our police.
But what UNM is doing is going in the opposite direction. It is the rest of us in the community who will pay in the long run if UNM externalizes its costs and mission onto the public at large.
We have a major crisis at UNM due to the effect of the Legislature and governors - past and present - cutting public funding to higher education and forcing state universities to recast themselves as corporate-like profit centers selling degrees and inventions.
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Just like an industrial factory, we have a bunch of highly paid incompetents running the place, with lawyers fighting copyright conflicts in court and a blind eye to unethical war profiteering. People are dying here and abroad due to the lust for money, both from cuts like this one and the research on killing technologies at UNM.
I call again for the resignation of the UNM Board of Regents and for a special legislative session to take up the governance of and the slavelike pay structure at our state universities and community colleges.
Until we put our institutions of higher learning back into the business of education and create a democratically-elected Board of Regents coming from the educational community of faculty, staff and students, we will not see an end to this meltdown.
What is next?
Bob Anderson
Former UNM faculty
