There is a parallel between the meltdown on Wall Street and the meltdown at UNM. Both have taken place at almost the same time, and both were deregulated by their public oversight bodies. Congress deregulated Wall Street; the governor and state Legislature deregulated UNM.
It's good that the students, staff and faculty are rising up to bring UNM back to its main mission, but the narrow focus on President David Schmidly, Executive Vice President of Business and Finance David Harris and Regents President Jamie Koch overlooks the real problem. Each of them have surely made statements and carried out actions indicating they are not adequate for their jobs, but the disaster at UNM began when newly elected Gov. Bill Richardson demanded the resignation of all the UNM regents. He then stacked the board and administrative ranks of the state with corporate business people.
Had there been professional educators running the Board of Regents at UNM instead of market business types, we would not see the school melting down like Wall Street. And the only bailout available at UNM is what the public decides to do about this disaster.
There is another problem at UNM that also needs to be addressed by our growing grassroots revolt. Years ago when someone spoke of research at a university, it meant a faculty member doing investigation in order to provide better instruction for students.
This model ended in the 1980s. Congress changed federal laws to allow public universities to share their nonprofit, tax-exempt status with private-sector corporations.
In time, the educational mission of higher education was changed from a public service to that of a partner in economic development.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
One result of this change in the mission and nature of the regents is that institutions of higher learning came to mirror private corporations with all their faults. The result is many poorly paid staff and part-time faculty carrying the educational mission. In addition, students often work for small pay on big research grants to a faculty member.
Another result of these changes is that our business regents do not see the harm in cutting social services and ethnic programs at UNM. To them, these programs do not turn a profit. Yet they want to spend huge sums of money on athletics. UNM's football coach makes more in one year than it would take a part-time humanities and social sciences faculty member to earn in 40 years. This is the corporate CEO model with its value system on symbolism rather than substance.
At this point, UNM is more like a colonial sweatshop with a large athletic entertainment complex than what we need for the education of our society. In the corporate model, educational products are graduation rates and students being prepared to take a place in the work force, not to be critical thinkers.
A strong, determined effort has to be made by the community to separate public education from market-driven economic development if we are to reclaim higher education as a service to the common good of society. This is the real struggle going on at UNM. The no-confidence meeting scheduled by the faculty to address the leadership problems is like our national election that rejected the past eight years in favor of change.
A good start here would be for the regents to resign and the Legislature to take away from the governor the ability to appoint regents. We should elect them all with a democratic vote. Overall, we are moving to reclaim an educational mission for UNM. We could say this movement is regulation from below, the way our society says we run the country. Let it work here.
Robert Anderson is a UNM alumnus and holds a Ph.D. in American Studies. He is a professor of political science at CNM.
