Exposed: Boldfaced lies of UNLV officials about the impact of budget cuts
From the Sun:In a June 2008 memo that Nevada's public higher education chancellor distributed to legislators, the news media and others, UNLV Executive Vice President and Provost Neal Smatresk wrote, "THE IMPACT OF A 14% CUT ON UNLV'S PROGRAMS IS FATAL."
That's right, one year ago a 14 percent cut meant death to UNLV, and now a 15.4 percent cut is something it can deal with.
The loss of classes and students "would begin a 'death spiral' of declining services and funding that could never be reversed," Smatresk wrote. "Along the way UNLV's research programs would cease, staff and faculty would leave and UNLV's graduate program would decline by at least 50%."
Now, instead of a 14 percent decrease in funding, UNLV is facing a 15.4 percent cut. And indeed, the university is suffering - administrators have reduced class offerings and eliminated or left open more than 360 jobs this year, including about 100 faculty positions.
But UNLV officials are no longer warning of a coming apocalypse. At a town-hall meeting last month, UNLV President David Ashley said in a packed auditorium that the university's budget cut was "something we can deal with, and that's the key message."
What changed in a year? A year ago, the legislature hadn't met yet to set UNLV's funding levels. Last month, at the town-hall meeting where Ashley spoke, the legislature had just reached an agreement on higher education funding.
UNLV officials lied, plain and simple. They lied to the public, to professors, to the media, to students and to you. They manipulated your emotions in order to apply public pressure to politicians so university officials could take in more state dollars. And once their funding levels were set, they had no reason to keep lying.
Unfortunately, politicians used those lies to help justify record-setting, billion-dollar, job-killing, secret tax increases. These tax increases - subsidizing the lies of UNLV officials - will be paid by Nevada's families and businesses, many of whom have had to cut back and prioritize as their incomes have declined.
There is no excuse for this kind of shameful deceit, but there is an important lesson here. When elected officials, like Speaker Buckley and Assembly Majority Leader Oceguera, or lobbyists, like the ones at UNLV, say funding cuts will lead to death or a death spiral or other dire results, the public and the media should be very suspicious and doubtful. In the case of UNLV, these individuals have a financial incentive to increase funding - not to produce results, but to increase funding - and as we've seen, they are more than willing to sacrifice their integrity in order to get a few more dollars.
Where was an irate columnist denouncing apocalyptic pronouncements when you needed one?
