The New Yorker has an interesting piece on budget protests at Berkeley.  One lingering question from the article: why don't the protestors spend more time marching on Sacramento and less picketing the Chancellor's office?  It may be more convenient to walk across campus, but how much blood can a university administration wring from the stone the legislature gives them?  If the charge is that the UC leadership isn't making a good enough case in Sacramento, no one can do that better than students and parents.

The problem is that if you march on the legislature, you also have to confront the naked fact that universities are competing for dollars with other good claimants - like K-12 education.

This brings to mind two types of characters and arguments that you are all probably intimately familiar with no matter what kind of organization you work in.

First are the romantics who think that budget woes are simply a mirage or even a theater in which a battle between good and evil will play out.  Romantics don't want to hear about scarce resources and opportunity costs.  Or they will talk about how the pie can always get larger.  Most of us academics are by nature romantics.  Otherwise we never would have foregone private sector salaries for the joyless task of grading.

On the other hand. some administrators will trot out the simple "there isn't money in the budget" argument over and over again.  This obscures the fact that there is almost always some money in the budget, with the real question being how it will be allocated.

Institutions can find more money too, but that can have consequences.  Donors, even if they can be squeezed in a tight economy, may want strings -- a point the New Yorker article demonstrates.  And the last three years should have taught us all a chilling lesson that incurring debt is never a free ride.  Taxes can be raised, but no one ever wants to talk about that.  Of course, there are significant costs of higher taxes too.

Ultimately, budgets for any institution are about tough value choices.  Which sometimes makes for good political theater and sometimes not.

Economics, Finance, Financial Crisis, Politics | Bookmark

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8345157d569e2012876ac9c3c970c

Links to weblogs that reference A field guide to budgets and protests: