Sophie's Choice – United Faculty of Washington State

In William Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice, the main character Sophie Zawistowska is forced at gunpoint on an Auschwitz train platform to choose which of her two children will live and which will die in the gas chamber. Washington state higher education is certainly not comparable to the horrors of Auschwitz, but professors at our universities are now being asked to make a much less dire but still similar choice.

Last spring, when Washington state legislators cut state appropriations to our universities by almost thirty percent, they added language to the legislation demanding that these cuts come from the fringes of the universities and have no impact on the quality or accessibility of our students’ degrees. This will be no small trick, given that Washington’s universities are already some of the most efficient and cost-effective in the nation, but even if we do succeed in cutting in ways that don’t affect our students now, the price for Washington’s future college students will be great.

Lawmakers faced with ever-declining revenues from the most regressive tax system in the country are constantly preaching the gospel of greater efficiency and resource reallocation. Most of their time is taken up with trying to squeeze ever more blood from the stone. It’s a pretty safe bet that when the 2011 legislative session rolls around, if our students have continued to get the classes they need, have continued to graduate on time, and have been only minimally inconvenienced by the budget cuts, the legislature will be tempted to declare that the slovenly universities have finally gotten the religion of efficiency and there is no need to restore any of their lost funding.

So Washington’s universities and their faculties are now faced with a version of Sophie’s choice. We can either punish our current students or punish our future students.

In the short term, we can act heroically—we can teach extra classes, we can teach classes of 50 as though they were classes of 25, we can stay later for the students who need just those three independent study credits to graduate, we can spend our weekends doing all the extra grading, two people can do the student advising that four should do.

We can do all that and huge budget cuts will only have small effects on our current students. And doing all those things will almost guarantee that legislators and their staff will not see restoring funding to Washington’s universities as a priority in 2011. They will assume that since our students weren’t affected too badly, the universities are more or less O.K. and the draconian budget cuts of 2009 will become permanent.

Two or three years later, our students who are now in high school will pay the price for our heroic efforts, because those heroic efforts are not sustainable, even by the most dedicated faculty and staff. The students of the future will arrive on campus to overcrowded classrooms, months and years of waiting for the classes they need, less contact with their professors, more and more of those professors working part-time for low pay and no benefits, and very little advising, counseling, or career guidance. They will be paying more and taking longer to get degrees that will be worth less. And it will be because we chose to save our students now.

The folks who work in universities are accomplished people who have spent years getting graduate degrees and have chosen teaching and serving students over much more lucrative careers. We could have been lawyers and doctors like our mamas wanted us to be. Our sustained intelligence, hard work, and dedication are why Washington’s universities can spend less per student than almost any other state in the nation and yet consistently perform near the top of their categories. It will be almost impossible for university faculty and staff not to make the heroic effort to make sure that our current students do not suffer for last spring’s legislative decisions. When our students are in our offices crying because they can’t get the classes they need to graduate, our instinctive response will be to over-enroll, overwork, and overburden the already overburdened infrastructure of our universities. Those desperate students sitting in front of us will make it difficult to remember that helping them will probably punish those who come after them.

The bone deep cuts to our universities will not be fully felt by our students right away, thanks to the efforts of the incredible faculty and staff who have made Washington’s university system, pound for pound, the best in the nation. This temporary stay of execution should not be mistaken by the legislature or anyone else as a permanent solution. Saving the students we have now should not condemn the students of the future.