Down in Olympia, the 2011 legislative session is firmly underway. All the new people have learned the dress code and found the bathrooms, committee hearings have begun to fill the airwaves of TVW, and bills have begun to drop like rain. We’re still a long way from the end game of the 2011-13 budget, so there’s plenty of time for various kinds of legislative mischief.

Whenever money is tight (or nonexistent, as it is now) the good folks in Olympia like to pretend that they can solve financial problems with policy changes. This is especially true when it comes to our state universities. So last week we saw the introduction of several pieces of legislation that make for very entertaining reading.

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From Senators Benton and Morton we have SB 5107, the “higher education consolidation act.” A better name might be the “higher education administration expansion act,” as the primary thing that SB 5107 does is create a new 19 member board of regents for all of Washington’s public universities. That board will then be empowered to hire a system-wide chancellor, who, as the president of presidents, will certainly have to be paid more than WSU President Elson Floyd’s current $650,000 salary. And he or she will certainly need all the other presidential perks—a big office, a bigger house, a car, at least one country club membership, a lavish entertainment budget, and of course a platoon of vice-chancellors, assistant vice chancellors, associate vice chancellors, and executive assistants, all of whom come with salaries of the six figure variety.

For all of that extra administrative expense, SB 5107 tells us that we will get an
administrative team that “will be able to reduce unnecessary program duplications,
increase the average teaching loads of faculty members, improve the average
amount of time needed to obtain a degree, reduce administrative overhead, and
advocate for the needs of the baccalaureate system.” For those acquainted with
the Olympia penchant for task forces, blue ribbon panels, and special studies, the
oxymoronic idea of creating more administration in order to “reduce administrative
overhead” will be distressingly familiar. And the charge to the new board
to “increase the average teaching loads of faculty members” is also nothing new.
Hiring expensive overseers to make sure that the people actually doing the work get
paid less and do more is a time-honored tradition at prisons and plantations, but not
necessarily the best idea for our students. Their ever-increasing tuition payments
will be going to new bosses they never see, while the people who actually teach
them will have even less time to spend on their education.

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Senator Jim Kastama and twelve of his colleagues have introduced SB 5136, “AN ACT Relating to establishing the first Washington nonprofit online university.” This mysterious bill would require the state to partner with a “nationally recognized nonprofit and independent university that is regionally and nationally accredited offering online, competency-based degrees.” This unnamed online school would “be recognized as a Washington baccalaureate degree-granting institution that is self-supporting and does not receive state funding.”

The first question that comes to mind here is So What? Just calling something a
Washington baccalaureate institution with no state funding does absolutely nothing
to provide more access to public higher education. We could pass a law anointing
Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Miss Palmer’s School of Beauty as
Washington baccalaureate degree-granting institutions. But that would do nothing
for our students who would still have to pay the tuition at those institutions.

SB 5136 would do nothing except create the very false impression that the
legislature had done something to improve access to college.

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And finally, we have SB 5287, the perennial proposal to create the Snohomish Polytechnical College. This would be a great idea if the state weren’t broke and our existing universities weren’t so desperately underfunded. This bill will fail as usual, but lurking behind it (and soon to be in the bill hopper) is Washington State University’s plan to annex the University Center in Everett and turn it into Wazzu Everett.

Here at the blog, we’re normally big fans of unabashed empire building, but
President Floyd seems to have gotten a little bit ahead of himself and everybody
else here. Lots of confusion, involving everyone from other college presidents to
mayors and legislators to Boeing, has ensued. At the end of the day, the University
Center is working pretty well and, again, as everybody from the Governor on down
keeps reminding us, there is no money. And, well, branch campuses cost money.
At a moment when everybody in the higher ed community is doing a much better
job of working together to convince the legislature of our plight, here’s hoping that
bickering over a fantasy branch campus doesn’t distract us from what’s really at
stake.

Because once the smoke clears from the silly season, all that’s really going to matter
is whether or not our state universities will have the resources to continue to
provide quality public college educations to our students.