Governor’s Budget Taxes Students and Workers, not the 1%
The Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (www.phenomonline.org) recognizes the painful cuts in many areas of Governor Patrick’s budget proposal and thanks the Governor for mostly holding the line on higher education after several years of catastrophic cuts. At the same time, we urge the state to make the real long term investments in public higher education that the Governor stressed, and to have an adult conversation about adequate and fair revenues to pay for them.
“In presenting his budget, the Governor said that we need a ‘growth strategy’ to get out of the recession,” says PHENOM organizer Alex Kulenovic. “Investment in public higher education is the best of all growth strategies. Unfortunately, this budget still falls far short of basic needs, let alone investment in the future. While we applaud this strategy where investments have been made, such as K-12 education, that effort is undercut as long as higher education barely scrapes by and becomes less affordable to those same high school graduates.”
Ryan Manita, student at Middlesex Community College says, “Public higher education is not only important to me, it is important to the thousands of students across this state who have the highest of hopes in climbing the ladder of social mobility, being citizens who contribute to their communities socially and economically, and living a life with meaning”
Max Page, PHENOM Vice-President, said the organization was disappointed by the absence of any progressive tax proposals in the Governor’s budget. “Despite President Obama’s fervent calls for greater fairness in our tax system in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday,” said Page, “Governor Patrick failed to provide leadership on this issue in Massachusetts. He has proposed a series of regressive taxes – those that hit the working classes the hardest. For the sixth year in a row, the Governor proposes not a dime of increased taxes on wealthy corporations and individuals in this state so that they pay their fair share for our common public needs. PHENOM believes it is time, now, to pass the Act to Invest in Our Communities (www.ourcommunities.org), a progressive income tax proposal.”
UMass undergraduate student Nicole Mitchell expressed the frustration many students are feeling. “Six straight years of cuts to public higher education, including $128 million since FY2010 alone, have led to skyrocketing fees at UMass, adding to the burden of students. Governor Patrick once told us he believed in two years of free higher education. What happened to that kind of vision? Why do students and families have to keep paying more while 1%-ers like Mitt Romney pay lower tax rates than most of us?”
PHENOM and its allies will be launching a campaign to educate the public and the legislature about the Top Ten Reasons for Massachusetts to Invest in Public Higher Education (see attachment) and will work with students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni from all three sectors of public higher education to come to an advocacy day at the State House on March 8 to make the case for greater investment in public higher education to the legislature.
This might be of interested to PHENOM members:
Steven J. Tepper
“Creative Work and the Work of Creativity
How Colleges and Universities Can Prepare Graduates
to Reinvent Our World”
Lecture by Steven J. Tepper
Associate Professor of Sociology and
Associate Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy
Vanderbilt University
Friday, 3 February
4:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Gamble Auditorium, Art Building
Mount Holyoke College
Reception to follow
In conjunction with the opening of the special exhibition
Artists and the Noble Profession:
The 2012 Mount Holyoke College Studio Art Faculty Exhibition
3 February—27 May 2012
The governor is proposing a major change in the community college system, which has three components:
· A small carrot of more money, $10 million for the system as a whole, about a 5% increase
· A re-structuring of the system to make it controlled from the top and reduce campus autonomy
· A shift toward serving the interests of business and preparing students for the jobs business says it wants. Reading the message it’s not clear whether community colleges will any longer prepare students to go on to four year degrees; certainly there is no mention of that.
Some quick reactions:
Mess of pottage: Sure, it’s nice to get a bit more money, but $10 million for the entire state is pathetic. Basically we are talking about restoring the cuts made in the last year or two; it won’t get the system back to the budget it had in 2000 and it sure as hell won’t provide the quality system students and Massachusetts residents deserve.
The real issues: The proposal is a big step toward the “how can we better serve the 1%” model of higher education. Shortly after Deval Patrick came into office he called for creating free community college. That would do students and the Commonwealth a world more good than a “training for business, under the guidance and direction of business” model. Also invisible and unmentioned is the need to hire full time tenure system faculty with benefits, instead of as-cheap-as-you-can-get-them adjuncts, which has been the direction for a decade.
Centralization: The Massachusetts higher education system is fragmented and without central planning. In place of an overall vision we have a set of legislative deals; which school-district gets money is determined by who has a powerful legislator. That’s a crazy system, but on the other hand a main way the system gets money is by having each of those legislators support higher education so they can claim credit for a quasi-earmark. I expect centralization to be the major battle and for it to be fiercely resisted. If it wins, I expect legislative support for higher education to drop. We need sensible central direction, but only if there is a vision AND a high level of public support. Being lap dogs to business is a vision, I guess, but it’s not my vision.
Will be supported: Some businesses will support the plan, in hopes of solving their workforce bottlenecks. Some students will be enthusiastic in hopes of finally getting a job. I worry the students will end up in the same place as those who respond to the “college” television ads for “learn to drive a big truck.”
When did you stop beating your wife? If we don’t have a plan and a vision, if we aren’t pro-active promoting our own vision, then we spend all our time responding to this kind of question. We get caught by surprise, and spend several months with people offering a variety of answers: “Two years ago; I haven’t beaten her in two years.” “We have a new plan which we are just rolling out; that will solve the problem.” “Despite what it looks like, I don’t really beat her.” After six months, maybe a year, we develop a much better response and show how ludicrous and unfair the question was, that there is no truth to the accusation, that the real issues are entirely different. Of course, by that time the issue is decided and our opponents have moved on to a new charge/proposal.
Dan Clawson, UMass Amherst, clawson.dan@gmail.com
