UNM's spending shows it values entertainment over education

Editor,

With much interest, I read the article in Friday's Daily Lobo reporting on the decision of the regents to divert money from a cogeneration project to Pit renovations but not to move forward on the GPSA-supported expansion of the UNM child care facility.

The regents and finance administrators enthusiastically touted The Pit renovation as a revenue producer for UNM with the motto "When you build it, they will come." Why, then, is the same logic not applied to the child facility, whose expansion was abandoned with the justification that there might not be enough paying parents to make it self-sustaining?

The reality is that the waiting list for the UNM Children's Campus is extremely long, and the facility's size is inadequate for UNM. My daughter, for instance, has been on UNM's waiting list since before she was born - she is four now - and I still have not been offered the spot I seek. I have talked to scores of students, faculty and staff that are in the same boat. Quality and affordable child care is especially important to student success and graduation rates. Even if one understands that money for UNM projects comes from different, sometimes mutually exclusive, pots, it seems especially demoralizing in these fiscally dire times that money is found and funneled to renovate The Pit, while academic departments and programs that enable students to graduate have to do without essential staff and faculty.

There is a hiring freeze on most staff and faculty lines, and that money has been diverted to a potential mid-year budget rescission pool. Just once I would like to have a University administration make the decision that the vacant head football coach line, for instance, would not be filled for a year, that the money from that would be saved for the UNM rescission fund instead, and that the football program be asked to limp along with its assistant coaching staff the way academic programs have been forced to. Alas, that is a missed opportunity now. GPSA had it right, and the regents and finance administrators have it all wrong. They would come, if you expand the Children's Campus. At UNM, however, entertainment obviously trumps education any day.

Anita Obermeier

Director of the Feminist Research Institute