The Binghamton University administration is likely being candid with the community when it says it simply does not yet know where it will scale back to meet state budget cuts, which have already cost the University $4.2 million and could tighten our belts even more in the near future.
We don’t, however, believe that the University has no plans more extensive than cutting back on energy costs and, above all, preserving academics, as stated (see Page 1). When it’s our tuition money that’s on the line, the side-stepping ambiguity is unacceptable.
Somewhere in the Couper Administration Building, at least one tentative budget has to have been drafted, likely more. That level of preparedness should be implicit in any administration worth its salt.
What we want, however, goes beyond transparency. Ultimately, even though our days as SUNY-B are long past, BU is still a state institution and the University’s expenditures are available to the public accordingly. We know this much, but we want more.
Make no mistake, we would be appreciative if the school made its budget not just available, but easily accessible. Student journalists at University of California-Irvine and Columbia University, the latter a private institution, also want to know exactly how their tuition money is being used. Binghamton’s tuition, $4,970 per year, is nowhere close to Columbia’s Ivy price tag, but times are tight — even before the recession, a recent New York Times story reported rising costs threaten “to put higher education out of reach for most Americans.”
Even if we were to grudgingly accept the absence of total transparency, the University should do the students — the ones who have to suffer from any cutbacks and have to foot tuition increases — the decency of seeking and accepting their input.
Instead of formulating plans to ax this program and that extracurricular solely on its own accord, the administration needs to consider the collective — who is better positioned to point out the superfluous and the necessary on this campus than the students themselves?
Increased tuition is difficult enough. To be kept in the dark over our money’s usage and our school’s cutbacks only adds insult to injury.