Students need to attend forum; budget battles affect everyone

Editor,

The first question of the day is, How many of you know President David Schmidly will address concerns about the "economic crisis" at an important forum Friday? The second question is, How many of you will show up?

As a GPSA representative for the Community and Regional Planning Program, I see it as my responsibility to inform fellow students when important events affecting their University community and academic resources will happen. It's not always an easy task. Last week, through the GPSA, I learned that the President's Office has scheduled a University-wide town hall meeting at noon Friday in the SUB Ballroom. The meeting was called to address University budgetary issues created by state revenue shortages. The GPSA staff told me when and where the proposed meeting was to take place, but when I asked about the agenda, the format and for more-specific details, I was directed to the President's Office. I called the President's Office. The same questions were met with confusion and vague responses. The president's secretary didn't know what I was talking about. I was beginning to think that maybe I had imagined hearing about the event. After asking several more questions, I got an "Oh, that town hall.." response and was told that when an agenda was determined, information about the meeting would be released. However, she could not tell me when the agenda would be determined or when notice of the event would be released.

Not knowing the agenda of the forum - or any meeting - makes it difficult to prepare a list of questions or pull together research on the proposed topics. Whether a specific agenda has been determined is no excuse to withhold meeting notification from stakeholders. Short notice robs stakeholders of their chance to get pertinent information about budget changes that will directly affect students, faculty and staff. Lack of notification puts uninformed stakeholders in a disadvantaged position to formulate their opinion and questions.

The recent media buzzwords are "economic crisis," but we all know that budgetary battles currently being waged at UNM go much deeper and further into the past than October. Schmidly's office repeatedly touts that it will keep current faculty and staff to ensure the University can maintain robust programs. But the unofficial truth is that as retirement happens and graduate students, staff and faculty are offered better packages at other universities, UNM is losing its capacity to provide academic excellence. Furthermore, continued steep tuition increases don't seem to buy us better education. They seem to have bought us a very expensive vice-presidential administrative machine, which may or may not be bringing home the bacon needed to feed starved academic programs.

And how would we know? Where do we find out what our administration is doing, how it is structured, how do they spend our money and what are their plans to ensure quality education? I sure don't know, but I would like to. If you too are curious about where and how our education dollars are being spent, I encourage you to attend the forum Friday and to tell others about it. Unless we all demand to be notified about and involved in UNM's budgeting process, we may find ourselves a day late and a dollar short.

Sarah Wentzel-Fisher

UNM student