"Read my tusks. No new Taxes!"
As our fabled football broadcaster Larry Munson might say, "Alright, get the picture." It's 3:30 p.m. on March 2, 2010, and the University of Georgia has been closed since 2 p.m. on account of the snow, but there are still a number of faculty types around ye olde History Department, seeing students and working in their offices. There's a 5 p.m. final defense scheduled for a first-rate dissertation. It involves four faculty members who have read and critiqued this dissertation, some more than once, even though they will receive not a cent of additional monetary compensation for what is effectively a wholly voluntary expenditure of their time and energies on their part. (This, mind you, is a group that has not only had no raises in two years but will also have absorbed at least a 3 percent cut in their pay due to state-mandated furlough days by the end of the academic year.) In addition to time not spent with their families, the hours of off-the-books consulting with graduate students and reading their work outside class also cuts into the research and publication efforts they are expected to maintain in order to advance in salary and rank at an institution like the University of Georgia.
Is this group of faculty unusual? Hardly. This is the way universities are run. They are not factories where the employees simply show up to teach their assigned classes and collect their checks. There are no time cards here. If there were, the outlays for overtime would bankrupt the institution in a heartbeat. Don't bother telling that, however, to the contingent of swinish louts in the legislature who have been whipped into a grunting, gurgling frenzy by the prospect of anointing their porcine snouts with some still-warm left-wing professor blood and can't wait to proceed with a thoroughly orgiastic disembowelment of higher education in Georgia. By that I mean they want to rip an additional $300 million out of the University System budget. Here at UGA, that means $60 million more on top of the $100 million that has already been hacked away over the last two years.
Remarkably, we've been able to maintain an admittedly tenuous verticality up to now, but if these cuts or anything like them stick, we're going horizontal, Honey Child, and we'll be that way for a long time. Forget the national rankings; our new concern will be accreditation. Although few may realize it as of yet, this is a truly critical point not only for the future of this institution but for the future of the state it was created to serve. We're going to find out in the next few weeks whether over two generations' worth of pompous assertions that our state's accomplishments and vision set us apart from our Deep South neighbors were anything more than rhetorical masturbation.
As they should, if the cuts are going to happen as projected, they are going to hurt a lot of people, many well beyond those who currently fill the 1,400-plus positions here at UGA that are said to be on the line or the 1,500 or so students who will be denied admission (either as freshmen or transfers) next year. For starters, with apologies to Red Foxx, "Look out local businesses, this could be the Big One!"In addition to its traditional instructional mission, the University of Georgia's storied land-grant tradition will suddenly sink beneath the kudzu if all the 4-H Clubs and half the County Agricultural Extension offices are shut down. Then, we can say goodbye to the many other things that, by God, make a good healthy public university a state's greatest asset. One of the most prestigious university presses in the country will be utterly destroyed, and The Georgia Review, one of the nation's finest literary journals, will be knee-capped. Ditto our terrific Performing Arts Center and the Georgia Museum of Art, and they'll even have to close the damn State Botanical Gardens, for God's sake! In relative terms, the University of Georgia may well have weathered the Great Depression better than it stands to fare at the hands of the mouth-breathing Philistines now massed at our gates. There is much breast-beating over in Hotlanta about the virtues of making higher education leaner and more efficient (Like a business, ahem!), but the fat was gone long ago. Make no mistake, the next excision--although we should think backhoe, not scalpel--will be pure muscle mass and vital organs.
All the legislative handwringing over a revenue shortfall would seem a mite more convincing if it came from a body that isn't exposed annually as a haven for tax cheats in its own right. The real problem, though, is that the tax structure for the State of Georgia is inadequate even in relatively good times and utterly pathetic in the face of what we're seeing now. Loathe to raise levies even a teensy bit, many of the Republicans in the legislature currently insist, probably correctly, that their main man Sonny Perdue's revenue projections for next year are too high. This is no surprise. In fact it's SOP in Georgia to inflate revenue predictions in order to spare the "Guvnuh" the awkwardness of having to suggest a tax increase. In this case, his Sonnyness has actually gone so far as to float proposals like a hike in cigarette taxes and a hospital use tax, but our dimwitted, tight-fisted solons ain't having none of it. Word from the office of our esteemed Lt. Guvnuh is that the best way to get the state's economy "humming again" is to reject tax increases and pass "a balanced budget that creates the right environment for business to grow." Ah, there it is, the old "favorable business climate" ploy that says increased (or even continued) support for education is actually bad for the state's economic development because it probably means higher taxes. Never you mind that this argument isn't much help in explaining why the two hottest growth spots for high-tech industry in the whole country, North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle and the Austin, Texas, metro area, are also home to three of the South's finest universities.
Like many low-tax, practically no-union southern states, ours typically fares pretty well in annual business climate rankings, particularly on certain tax issues. A recent survey showed Georgia with the nation's eighth most favorable corporate tax climate. And why not? At a mere 5.6 percent of total state revenue collections, our reliance on corporate income tax as a source of funds is barely three-fourths as heavy as the average state's. On the other hand, at 34.4 percent, our dependence on the intensely regressive and notoriously unstable sales tax for revenue is nearly 10 percent above the national norm.
As a historian, I concluded some time back that most bad people make it into public office not because they are so slick at fooling the people, but because so many of those people simply want to be fooled in the first place. For example, they truly want to hear that any direct and tangible benefit they receive is entirely legit while everything the state offers to anyone else is totally bogus. Hence, in a manner of speaking, more often than not, voters get just about the kind of government they deserve. On the other hand, having spent so much of my career at universities operating on something just a butterbean or two better than a starvation diet, I believe that these schools have consistently given the people of their states far richer opportunities for higher learning than they have had any real reason to expect. However, if Georgians wish to cheer or even simply stand quietly by while a bunch of their self-serving legislative porkers fatten themselves politically by devouring higher education in this state, they're finally going to get precisely the public universities they deserve. I'd like to think the vaunted affection that the people of Georgia are supposed to hold for their state university will ultimately prove to be its salvation (and maybe ultimately theirs as well), but I have to say I'd feel a lot more confident if the Doomsday scenario that UGA officials have presented to the galoots in Atlanta included a provision that cutting courses like "Fundamentals of Hopscotch" and "Philosophy of Badminton" would quickly pose a grave threat to the football program. How long do you reckon our "financial exigency" would last after that?
