Age of irresponsibility

Once upon a time, there was a school called IU.

It was a good college — not the best one — but a good public university that one could be proud to have graduated from.

It served its students in good times and bad with a quiet humility and a certain Midwestern charm.

But of course, as is apt to happen on occasion, out of the ever-changing environment of college came a new atmosphere of irresponsibility that would grow and infect everyone connected to the University. This is a story about that irresponsibility.

It’s a story that begins with a state legislature — one that has forgotten the value of investing in education. Two decades ago, the state provided almost 50 percent of IU’s funding. Today, that is down to 18 percent and is expected to fall to 10 percent by the end of the decade.

This is unsustainable.

Even as legislators continue to pay lip service to the promise of affordable education, they have betrayed this in their proposals of tuition caps.

Combined with funding cuts and an opposition to letting universities become private, they have set the stage for the university funding model to crumble and higher education in Indiana to collapse.

With their cronies at the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, they have pushed “performance-based funding” as a way to set universities against each other in a brutal “Hunger Games” style rather than encourage collaborative self-improvement. But they are not the only guilty parties.

This is also a story about the Board of Trustees, the legal governing body of IU.
They knew all of this and did nothing in response, failing to try to bend the cost curve at all.

Their best proposal so far has been a laughable student summer tuition discount that in present form will do little to offset rising student costs.

This is, in fact, a distraction because their real response has been to squeeze students for more tuition money, to quietly ax things and people without regard to their value to the University and to cross their fingers, hoping that in the long term everything will magically resolve itself. As this is actually not a fairy tale, it’s unlikely this will happen.

In addition, the trustees have let themselves be reduced to spectators and lobbyists in the University they legally own. Long ago, they ceded day-to-day authority to the administration and in doing so dissolved an important system of checks and balances between themselves and the administration, a dereliction of duty.      
                                                                               
This, too, is a story of an administration that simply doesn’t give a shit about students.

Despite some good people in positions, the administration is led by a man, Michael McRobbie, whose aloofness and utter inaccessibility to students is baffling at best and criminal at worst, and this sets a tone that reverberates through every corridor of power.

It’s a story of a faculty who once were brave and powerful but have become complacent even as their very vocation erodes around them.

They have let their students down and let their voice diminish, obsessing about the minutiae of mass email policy rather than sending mass emails to make a difference.

And, most importantly, this is the story of a student body that refuses to use its voice for change. Tuition is set to rise 5.5 percent this year again, marking a 45 percent rise in the past five years. Residential Programs and Services fees are set to rise 8 percent for certain dorms, and some of these are the dorms that still don’t have air conditioning.

We are losing the battle for the right to affordable education right here, right now.

Where are the people who know or care? Where is the mass outrage? Where are the student leaders to declare this unacceptable? It’s unclear. We’re still waiting.

This story is like that scene in “Harry Potter” in which Harry sees his father cast the Patronus spell to save his life.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. To save our education, we must reject irresponsibility and seize upon our own rights as students.

We must protest.

­— sidfletc@indiana.edu