On thanksgiving day this year, Governer Baldacci reported that he wants to cut $13 million from the state’s public education to help cover a shortfall in the state’s Medicaid program. This was reported in the last issue of the Free Press. We won’t know if the motion makes it through the legislature until we come back from break this spring. If the motion does pass, USM students will essentially be paying for incompetence at the Department of Human Service (DHS) in the form of dropped classes, staff shortages — all the familiar austerity measures — and possibly tuition hikes later on. The same shortfall will be there next year, and Baldacci has said that he will not consider raising taxes to cover DHS’s mistakes.
All parties agree that Maine’s DHS itself is responsible for the shortfall, with bad bookkeeping and shortsightedness at Medicaid coming to a head this year. Governer Baldacci reported earlier this year that he would have to immediately repair a $113 million gap in the state’s budget due to DHS’s negligence. He managed to tap all but $22 million out of rainy-day funds and other one-shot measures. On Thanksgiving we learned that the rest is being divided among state agencies that Baldacci has chosen as best able to absorb the budget cuts. UMS and the community college system are expected to supply $13 million, or 73 percent of that money.
University leaders aren’t optimistic about the budget cuts. The president of SMCC, Jim Ortiz, has said that the cut will be like “a speeding car hitting a wall” for his school, whose $3 million cut is proportionally similar to UMS’s. Robert Caswell, executive director of Media and Community Relations at USM, said the cuts will be “absolutely devastating.”
This is a curious move from the Governor of a state struggling with an exodus of young people and an economy slouching behind the national average. He already boosted the Medicaid budget by $44 million this year while the UMaine’s funding has dwindled, despite rising enrollment rates. In the face of that fact, students are expected to provide for an inconvenient shortfall halfway through the fiscal year, when it is especially hard to meet the cutbacks. Further, he has made it a priority not to raise taxes; he prefers gutting the UMaine system to reconcile the government’s mismanagement.
Why is the governor targeting the university system in this cutback? College students are by definition motivated people who are interested in success. We are the most promising citizens of the state, having committed lots of time and money to improve ourselves before entering the job market. We are the people who are going to bring businesses to the state and eventually buoy the economy. Further, as students at a state school, we represent a section of society that pursues higher education from an underprivileged position. We are not spoiled private college students; many of us are paying our own way through college. We are not the kind of people who take our opportunities for granted. As such, we should be nurtured by the state as a driven and self-motivated source of potential rather than as a juicy target for what amounts to institutional cannibalism.
Admittedly, the UMS system must be a juicy target, considering its size and the fact that students contribute no immediate benefit to society while attending university — not to mention the fact that college-aged people are historically the most apathetic at the voting booths. In 1998, 18.5 percent of those in the 18-24 year-old age group voted in the general elections nationwide. The next-most apathetic slice of the population, (25-44 years old, or the next eldest) sent about twice as many of its population, 38.7 percent, to the polls. Overall, 45.3 percent of the eligible population voted in that election. (note that Baldacci was elected in 2002, another off-season year. Statistics aren’t available for 2002 yet.)
So, even in a nation that sends less than half its population to off-season elections, those in the traditionally college-bound age group are a voice so pitiful as to be effectively non-existent. Put another way, college students are under-represented, way out of proportion to our numbers relative to the population, because as a group we can’t be bothered with politics.
Any politician knows who not to piss off. The same people who voted Baldacci into office are the ones who will vote him out if he alienates them. We, college students, are not the people the Governor has to fear for a backlash if we are chosen as the fall guys. We have no representation in this government, and therefore by very simple logic, our needs are not being met in government. Why should they?
This budget situation reflects a national trend toward taking apart our future in the name of appeasing short-sighted voting blocks. Politicians bend over backwards to appease the richest of the nation while education and social services see their budgets consistently and quietly chipped away. USM students are holding bake sales to go to trade conferences while politicians at the state and federal level argue about what tax breaks the wealthy should and shouldn’t get.
When Ralph Nader came to Portland in 2000 he argued that the leaders of America have turned “politics” into a dirty word, and that they have therefore discouraged honest people from getting involved. That may or may not be true, but I’ve talked to a lot of people who don’t vote because they think it’s a pointless exercise. They say the Government is hopelessly out of touch with us and what we want. They say one vote is worthless. People point to the fact that the popular vote elected Gore in 2000, as if that means anything.
On the contrary, I think the 2000 election should show how important a single citizen’s vote can be. If more people had gotten off their asses, that election wouldn’t have been such a disaster. The electoral college is beside the point anyway because, as this budget shortfall shows, local politics are just as significant to your life as the presidential election. There is no excuse to stay out of this game.
I think that the apathy that has become almost fashionable in our generation has resulted in things getting a lot worse than they have to be. In the state budget, $12 million isn’t really that much money. It’s outrageous that the services we depend on are being cut out from under us without a proper struggle. As a voting bloc, the students of the UMS system (and our friends and family) should be vocal enough and numerous enough to give a mayor pause before yanking 7.5 percent of his share of our funding. Likewise, our numbers should give our leaders pause as they strip away funding for K-12 and higher education and other public services at the national level, considering the number of people — who all have the power to vote — that depend on those services.
Most frustrating, it is no mystery why this happens. Our leaders are not stupid, and they know exactly what they can and what they can’t get away with. And with an indifferent population, you can get away with a lot. Our cynical apathy, not the figures and the facts of the state’s budget, form the real tragedy of this story.