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St. Cloud State University
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'Byma plan' will fix tight budget
By Justin Byma
Published:
Thursday, January 23, 2003
Justin Byma -- Staff Column
The buzz is that because of the state budget shortfall, higher education is going to take a big hit. But there's an easier way than grabbing the markers and poster board and flocking to the state capital.
Budget shortfalls provide a chance to address some of the meaningless expenditures SCSU seems unable to avoid. When times are good, those who control the purse strings spend tax and tuition money on the most trivial of things.
SCSU must find $2.5 million somewhere.
Enter the Byma plan. With a little third grade math and some unscientific research methods (OK, it was the course catalog and a highlighter), I have devised a plan that will hurdle our obstacles and restore a respectable academic balance at SCSU.
At last count there are roughly 75 sections of 3-credit MGM courses offered. I propose that we cut these course offerings by two-thirds and, for the benefit of a well-rounded liberal arts education, decrease the general education requirement from three such courses to one.
The loss of 50 sections of required classes and the chunk of the establishment that runs them will save roughly $2.6 million.
Of course this is a static estimate. Those students will have to take different classes, and other departments will absorb some of the costs. But if we assume that these 2000 or so affected students are spread evenly across the spectrum of the university, the cost of adding a couple of students to existing classes is almost insignificant.
Even if the benefits aren't as high as expected, my plan is still sound. However well intentioned they may be, MGM courses are more of a political experience than a scholarly one. They contribute to the balkanization of our campus community. They encourage students to accept conventional wisdom rather than question it for fear of being sneered at by an overwhelmingly left-wing faculty.
And more often than not, Multicultural-gender-multigender classes provide little insight into different cultures. Rather, they take as a matter of faith an unbounded relativism that hinders critical thought and moral standards.
As part of the Byma plan, gone is the Ethnic Studies department. What do they do that the sociology department cannot or does not do? Gone too is the Women's Studies department. Human Relations will take a 50% cut. These departments exist almost solely because of MGM courses. They are just make-work projects, the dogma of the faculty union and cost a lot of money.
Somebody, sometime way back, decided that it would be a good idea to add some cultural education to the general curriculum. But now, SCSU has exploded into a P.C. diploma factory.
Enough is enough. I'll venture that if these classes were not required, their enrollment would be close to the number of HURL professors at a GOP convention.
