About 50 students and faculty members agreed that President David Schmidly must justify his decision to spend more on a top-heavy administration while scaling back on academic programs.
The mix of graduate students, professors, associate professors and department directors met in the SUB on Monday to prepare for Schmidly's Friday forum.
Student Ilse Biel said everyone who attends Friday's meeting should demand answers from administrators instead of listening to speeches that dodge the question.
"If the people from the administration are doing the little side step, dodge step that we saw last week, then I would suggest we get up and walk out (of the forum).. If they are wasting our time, then walk out," she said. "There is a certain measure of respect I feel that we deserve."
Professor Les Field said the anthropology graduate program is now in danger of losing its status in the academic community because many of its professors are leaving. He said the administration is disregarding the department's need to fill the vacated positions.
Loyola Chastain, president of Staff Council, said the University must be held responsible for its actions and that the only way to do that is through cooperation between groups that represent the staff, faculty and students.
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"We're not just the students, just the staff, just the faculty living and working in isolation," she said. "That's no good, because we have to be a community. We are all stakeholders. This involves all of us."
GPSA President Christopher Ramirez said everyone needs to attend Friday's forum - faculty, staff and students should work together to become a major force in the discussion and demand the administration answer for its actions.
"If we're not part of the process, then it will be planned without us," he said.
Biel said administrators are counting on increased enrollment to offset the vice presidents' $3 million paychecks and thereby gambling with the University's fiscal future.
She said the administration needs to explain what the benefits are of increasing campus enrollment and ask if they can "justify the many, many thousands of dollars that are being forked out to pay the salaries of these vice presidents."
History Graduate Student Association Vice President Becky Ellis said the forum will provide a platform on which to launch a deeper investigation into the administration's lack of transparency and poor prioritization.
"Obviously, at the end of the semester, people are going to be dispersed over the course of the break, but this doesn't end at the end of the semester," Ellis said. "We have to face that our issues aren't going to be addressed between now and Friday. So, we need to continue to work in the spring toward that."
Chastain said the staff and faculty began to question the administration's decisions last semester - long before the banking system needed a $700 billion bailout and the state announced it would reevaluate its financial situation for the coming year.
"I'm very concerned about what's happening to this University," Chastain said. "I've been here 16 years and I've never, ever seen anything like this before. I know that it has to do with the financial crisis, but it goes much deeper than that, and we're in the place that we are now because of the things that have been happening and have brought us to this point."
Field said the Anthropology Department was already suffering from a shortage of staff and inadequate finances before the administration blamed the national economic crisis for its inability to provide needed resources.
"To what extent are the trends that we were already living under simply continuing, now with the justification of the crisis?" he said. "I think that pushes the terms of the debate in a direction that I'd like to see which is . thinking about where the University was going before this event."
Student Santhosh Chandrashekar said that graduate students, teaching assistants and faculty should consider taking legal action to become a united force.
"I think this is probably the right time for us to start thinking about unionizing, because nobody in their right mind thinks that all this is happening because of the economy, right? I don't," Chandrashekar said. "I think we can have probably another half a dozen town halls, and honestly, nothing is going to come out of it."
Forum
Noon, Friday, Dec. 12
The SUB
