This week Amherst is holding a Special Town Meeting to deal with a petition article that asks the Meeting to pass a resolution calling on the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts to rescind a fee being charged to foreign students. The petitioners call the fee discriminatory because it is only levied on foreign students studying on the University campus.
I can understand the concerns of the petitioners; sudden changes in the rules of the game are very disconcerting at the least, and often throw people's carefully-thought-through plans completely for a loop. I bet most readers of the Bulletin have had at least one such experience. Everyone who studies or works at UMass, or did until recently, certainly has. But we didn't all run out with a petition to call a Town Meeting to express its outrage.
The statements in the press in support of this article all seem to be out of context. UMass is severely strapped for money. State appropriations have declined 27% in the past three years. Since January of 2002, hundreds of employees have been laid off. Over a thousand have taken early retirements, some of them happily, others not. Everyone worked for years without getting raises promised in duly- negotiated contracts until this spring, the final months of those 3-year contracts, and the fight is not over for winning the retroactive pay due to all of us. Layoffs may not be over yet either.
Many programs have been closed or drastically reduced, or forced to try to pay their own way with fees and charging for services. It remains to be seen which ones will survive. Can they find enough customers who need their services and are somehow able to pay for those services from their own tight budgets? International Programs is just one of those programs that has had to begin charging for services as a way to keep itself in operation. As with fees for parking, or lab use, the people using the service are charged the fee. For foreign students at UMass, it's $65 a semester. For UMass students studying abroad, it's more, depending on the program involved, it can be $500 "an experience" (which could be a semester or a summer session). Even visiting scholars are being charged for services in getting a visa.
Why don't these American students travelling abroad ask Town Meeting to weigh in on their side? Some of them aren't here to collect the signatures; also, they aren't that organized. But employees are mostly in unions, and so could organize. Why didn't we have Special Town Meetings denouncing layoffs, forced retirements, and unfunded raises? I was at many union meetings about strategies and tactics during those years, and no one suggested pursuing a resolution from the Amherst Town Meeting. No one thought such a resolution would help. Our State Representative and State Senator were already doing everything they could for the University's budget; the unions decided to put their energy into lobbying the legislature, the administration, the Trustees: people who actually affect the bottom line that was driving all sorts of horrible decisions.
Resolutions attacking one small manifestation of the financial problem are not useful. There are people having serious discussions about the University and its future, but isolated resolutions and Town Meeting debates are not part of that discussion. Senator Rosenberg is Chair of a Task Force on Higher Education in the State Senate. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation recently came out with a major report on institutional barriers that make it very difficult for UMass to be an excellent research university, which is its goal. If Town Meeting really wants to advise on running UMass in addition to the Town, perhaps it should study that report (it's on the MTF website) and pass a resolution supporting (or amending) it.
The Chancellor has said he wants to increase the number of students by several thousand in the next few years. That and some other proposed changes could have significant effects on Amherst and the region some good, some bad. Where are these students going to live? How much more traffic and development pressure will these additional people generate? It's my impression that the Amherst Planning Office has a very hard time getting information from the University; maybe Town Meeting should speak up about that. According to press reports, the university administration plans to encourage students to join fraternities and sororities because alums who were in Greek organizations give more money later in life than those of us who in my day were called "independents." Perhaps so; but what about the encouragement of drinking that has historically been a major factor in those organizations throughout the country; has that problem been solved? That issue certainly affects all of us, not just UMass.
Passing a resolution against the $65 fee might give people a chance to feel good about fighting the good fight, but it isn't going to help either the foreign students or the University. Unfortunately, it is costing Amherst real money to hold the meeting. Now is not a good time for costly symbolic gestures.