University Diaries has long chronicled the bad, and now much worse, universities of Nevada, a state where they don’t do personal income tax, and where gambling, sport of the mentally challenged, basically pays for everything.
Now that the roulette wheel of life has taken a turn for the worse, the state’s decided to slash higher education funding big time. Here are some earlier posts about that.
Bloomberg News updates Nevada’s situation, and interviews Chancellor James Rogers.
Taxes wrung from Las Vegas slot machines and blackjack tables haven’t kept Nevada’s state-supported colleges from “mediocrity,” says James Rogers, the man who runs them. Now, with Sin City’s casinos on a losing streak, the schools may get much worse.
The state’s universities enrolled none of the 8,486 U.S. high school seniors awarded National Merit Scholarships in 2008, said Rogers, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education. The schools, funded below the national average during the boom years, now have hundreds of teaching vacancies because of budget reductions, he said. The governor is demanding bigger cuts that would require firing faculty, Rogers said.
Public universities across the U.S. are slashing budgets as state financing dwindles. Nevada’s colleges are in greater jeopardy than most because, unlike states that tax income, they rely on sales and gambling taxes, said Jan Jones, a former mayor of Las Vegas. The state wagered that tourists would keep flocking to the desert resort, and with recession-battered gamblers now staying home, Nevada is paying the price, she said.
“Nevada has been playing a game of Russian roulette with our finances,” said Jones, now the senior vice president for government relations at Las Vegas-based Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., the largest casino company.
… The Nevada Higher Education System, with 110,000 students, had a budget — excluding research grants — of $1.1 billion in fiscal 2008, with about 70 percent coming from the state.
Rogers, 70, who takes a salary of $23,660, the minimum allowed, and donates it to scholarships, has blasted the governor and his cuts in 61 memos posted since May on the system’s Web site.
“We have had a first-class economy and a third-class culture, and eventually a third-class culture will bring down a first-class economy,” said Rogers, in his Las Vegas office decorated with life-size cardboard cutouts of the Three Stooges dressed in graduation caps and gowns.
… Gambling and sales taxes support almost 60 percent of the state’s budget. Nevada’s gambling proceeds surged 42 percent in the years 2000 to 2007, helping the higher education system’s state funding more than double in that period. The state spent $194.21 for each resident on colleges and universities in fiscal year 2007, less than the national average of $247.15, according to Nevada’s education officials.
A squeeze began in January 2008 when Governor Jim Gibbons, a Republican, slashed the department’s budget 4.5 percent, anticipating declines in tax revenue. In August, he cut a further 3.4 percent.
In response, UNLV, the biggest school in the system, has eliminated or left vacant 364 positions, including about 100 faculty jobs. Further cuts may mean salary reductions or employee furloughs as well as eliminating two unspecified athletic teams, according to a report prepared for the legislature.
… In January, Gibbons, who has refused to raise taxes, submitted a budget for fiscal years 2010 and 2011 that would slash funding the most yet: an additional 29 percent, spread unevenly across eight colleges and universities.
If passed by the state legislature, the biggest cuts will be at the four-year research institutions — the University of Nevada, Reno, and UNLV — which would lose half their state funding, and at Nevada State College, a four-year school in Henderson for training teachers and nurses. Four community colleges and a research institute would see smaller reductions.
Nevada is one of seven U.S. states that collect no personal income taxes, said William Ahearn, a spokesman for the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit group based in Washington. California, by comparison, gets more than half of its revenue from the state’s income tax.
The state could live without income taxes as long as its bet on tourism paid off, said Keith Schwer, an economist at UNLV.
“When the economy was booming, we were riding a fast horse,” said Schwer, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research, at UNLV. “Now the horse has broken a leg.”
Travel to Las Vegas fell in 2008 for the first time since 1982, according to the city’s Convention and Visitors Authority. Casino taxes from the Las Vegas Strip, the state’s largest concentration of resorts, have fallen 17 percent since July 1, according to monthly reports from the Nevada Gaming Commission.
Sales taxes in Nevada will decline an estimated 8.6 percent this fiscal year, according to a forecast by the Economic Forum, a nonpartisan panel created by the state legislature.
Under Gibbons’s overall state budget, higher education would see the biggest cuts. Spending on human services, by contrast, would drop 6.6 percent. Nevada’s general fund would be reduced 14 percent, to $3.03 billion.
… At a March 26 rally on UNLV’s campus, within sight of the Strip, more than 300 students protested the budget cuts with signs reading “Impeach Gibbons” and “Cuts in Education Never Heal.”
State Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, a Democrat, has vowed to prevent Gibbons’s full cuts. Rogers, the chancellor, said a possible solution would include an increase in business taxes, which might have to be passed over the governor’s veto, to restore education funding to its 2006 level. That would allow the state to tap $324 million in federal stimulus money, he said.
The financial crisis provides an opportunity for Nevada to secure a future based on more than casinos, said Martin Dupalo, an adjunct instructor in political science who attended the rally. The state needs to invest in its universities and culture, he said.
“Without these institutions, we’re blowing in the wind,” Dupalo said. “A community can’t just be about gambling.”
April 29th, 2009 at 11:33PM
> Rogers, 70, who takes a salary of $23,660, the minimum allowed, and donates it to scholarships…
That’s certainly noteworthy. If only other presidents would follow his example.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:12AM
UD: I’m pleased that Chancellor Rogers has sufficient personal resources accumulated at his advanced age of 70 to forgo the state compensation for his office–and I do applaud his charity.
Some find reflexively groping for tax increases from increasingly burdened individual rate-payers the magic bullet to what they fancy as a "crisis of under-funding" in state colleges and universities like Nevada’s. But while I don’t live there (but then nor does UD) and am not directly involved in the Nevada funding question, I’d say a skeptical look at sports programs at every single institution in the Nevada system culd be a start. Administrative staff at most colleges and universities has over decades grown exponentially while faculty, library, and laboratory staff (who most immediately perform the college’s or university’s teaching and research missions) only arithmetically–as another possible source of economies (e.g., do we really need an "Office of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Transgender Counseling," or need to fund "sex reassignment surgeries" at the expense of affecting funding indifference to those contingent faculty who may wish to acquire luxuries like prescriptive lens or fillings for teeth? And axing whole pseudo-academic departments in the ersatz humanities, AKA social and political advocacy clubs like ethnic, gender, pop culture, and multicultural "studies" could recoup no small sums for departments pursuing real educational missions. Yes, more to come: is "Education" a viable (subjectless) professional school? Business? Social Work? Recreation and Leisure Studies (where offered–a perennial favorite with otherwise subjectless athletes)? "Journalism"? "Public Policy" (hey, this is fun! . . .). And bet they could save a bundle by cutting . . . ?
April 30th, 2009 at 3:19AM
mavprof: Well, we COULD propose a radical overhaul of higher education as we know it… But this is what UD calls “going cosmic,” and it doesn’t really get you anywhere, I think. For decades I’ve watched professors go cosmic in meetings – We can’t fix this particular problem until we fix the cosmos because everything’s connected…
I think the correct aphorism here is Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.
April 30th, 2009 at 6:15AM
I find this really sad because the current national debate champions in Parliamentary Debate are from UNR. They’re really smart students who are both kind and articulate — an uncommon pair of features in debaters.
I’m sure their program will be cut. Unlike sports, debate travel can be managed if the competitors have personal resources, but these students are not wealty.
April 30th, 2009 at 8:28AM
UD: You’re right of course, and I’ve got to avoid planting my feet so firmly in the air on these issues–but I’d say too that vis a vis the programs mentioned above, the public universities are saying to the currently aggrieved taxpayers of Nevada’s ailing desert Babylon or "infernal paradis": "qui m’aime, aime mon chien."
April 30th, 2009 at 9:50AM
Philosopher P:
If the UNR debate club were to lose funding in favour of continuing to pour scarcer and scarcer tax revenues into the gaping maw of athletics, it would be a very sad day for higher education.
Surely debate, oration, and rhetoric are as integral to the training of the mind as a rubberized tyre is to the operation of a motor. So often, what passes for rhetorical training touches not a jot on Latin and Greek, and is fobbed off in English 101 as a prerequisite, under the instruction of a poorly-trained and poorly-compensated graduate student tutor. Your best instructors should be teaching what you in the States call “rhetoric and comp,” not a starving student who works for peanuts and pats on the head. You treat rhetoric as if it is something to be gotten over with, not a habit meant to last a life-time.
The tradition of training in debate is as old as formal education itself, and we would be arrogant to presume to “know better” in our privleged position as moderns. There is a reason that oration and debate have been cornerstones of education for milennia.
They train the mind in ways that American football, basketball, or synchronized swimming cannot touch. They force the disorganized young person to order his or her thoughts, to organize their presentation of facts, evidence, and information in a way which is engaging and convincing. They provide a structure for thought, and make the cognitive processes of the mind more nuanced and supple.
Surely this is consistent with the supposed mission of every institution of higher education in the world. If so, why is such a program not given priority? Why such pandering to the supposedly sports-enthusiastic alumni with ready cash when the primary concerns of education are not being addressed, namely the architecture or edification of young minds?
I should be very disappointed indeed if UNR debate were to lose its funding, but one can continue to hope that private donors can step in and lend support where the public sector has clearly failed. It is, sadly, the only way many such worthwhile programs can continue after years of institutional neglect.