These cuts were a long time coming—higher education is facing anenrollment cliff, even as it continues to spend on administration and student services like there’s no tomorrow. Pandemic-era emergency funding could only hold off the reckoning for so long. As university administrators rush to blame their state governments for providing insufficient funds, state legislators should remain staunch in enforcing fiscal discipline on universities. There’s still a long way to go to make higher education cost-effective.
Though university administrators and faculty consider these budget cuts to be nothing short of catastrophic for university operations, some of the cuts appear quite reasonable. For instance, Penn State plans to scale back branch campus operations and cut duplicate programs. This is a necessary step in the right direction—Pennsylvania is known as the “state with too many campuses,” and steep enrollment declines at branch campuses justify reducing their operations.
But even when making the right decisions, universities are too trepidatious. UNH, for example, will cut certain programs at its Aulbani J. Beauregard Center for Equity, Justice, and Freedom. Yet they have not indicated whether only staff or the entire department would be cut. This is not nearly far enough: Not only are diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) administrative units like the Beauregard Center unnecessary and expensive, but they are also harmful to the campus environment. DEI initiatives have led universities to monitor what students and faculty say through bias reporting systems and filtered faculty hiring based on race and political views. Budget cuts should not be needed to cut down on these departments—they should never have been created in the first place.