On Shared Sacrifice and the “Student Experience”

In this morning’s Post, the VP of Student Affairs chimes in on the topic of the general fee. This should not surprise anyone and it is appropriate for him to defend and advocate for his area of responsibility. Not surprisingly, he applauds the resolution passed by the Student Senate last Wednesday and, implicitly, responds to the piece I published in Friday’s Post, citing the significant budget cuts that his area of the University has experienced in the last several years. One can understand and even agree that is vital to fund student affairs if Ohio University is going to maintain its identity as a residential campus.

Nonetheless, next year’s General Fee must be reduced in order to buffer the academic schools, departments, and colleges from devastating cuts.

Certainly, one should sympathize with Dr. Smith and our colleagues in Student Affairs. As Steve Hays points out in his comment on the Post story, Dr. Smith, like the rest of us, rightly assumes that if the University were to shift funds from the general fee to tuition, the brunt of the cut, if not the entire cut, would likely be absorbed by Student Affairs (student programming, student health, Counseling & Psychological services, career services, Baker Center, Campus Recreation, etc.). The only other place the University could reduce its spending, if it were to cut the general fee, would be Intercollegiate Athletics. We’ve seen enough over the past six years to know that’s not going to happen. Dr. Smith and the students who value the activities he oversees are caught between a rock (the first floor of Cutler Hall) and a hard place (the faculty, many students, most staff and administrators, and academic quality).

Over the past several years, Student Affairs has undeniably suffered from budget cuts, like most of the rest of us, that have resulted in less for students. The reason for re-allocating monies from the general fee to tuition are two-fold. One reason is to protect the academic units and lessen the reduction in educational quality that we will experience next year and beyond. That’s about the long-term health of the institution. A second reason involves shared sacrifice. Due to the perverse consequences (one hopes they are not intended) of the new budgeting methodology (RCM), it is unclear whether general fee funded areas will participate in the coming budget reductions at all. As I wrote previously, those cuts should be at least equivalent to those taken by academic departments and colleges. Academics is our core activity. The students would not be around to have their “experience” without it.

As a final note today, I think it is high time we had a conversation about this notion of the “student experience” that we hear so often. In the press coverage of last Wednesday’s Senate meeting, we learned from a former student trustee (and former employee of the Division of Student Affairs) that it was the “primary responsibility” of Student Senate “to protect the student experience”. I would have thought the student senate would be at least as worried about their education and its value. We hear in open forums, the rhetoric of administrators, and budget justifications that it’s necessary to protect and enhance the “student experience.” However important that sounds, I’m not exactly sure what it means. However, I do know that it’s used to justify any possible expenditure that’s not related to academic study and research. In a future posting, I want to further examine this term or concept and its function in clouding discourse and obfuscating our sense of what we should be all about.