Moorhead, part of the MnSCU system, which faces a $50-million budget cut (Creative Commons photo by J. Stephen Conn via Flickr)

For Minnesota’s college administrators, the announcement of the Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s unallotment plans was a good news/bad news story. The size of the budgetary hit was not as big as they expected. But, it’s still a substantial amount. They were prepared for it, but it’s still coming.

The governor announced that the state’s two higher-education systems — which comprise 32 colleges and state universities, four University of Minnesota campuses in greater Minnesota and the Twin Cities’ U of M campuses — will each take a hit of $50 million dollars, or about a 3.6 percent drop. Many of these campuses are a couple of hundred miles away from St. Paul where the budget decisions are made.

Kurt Hanson, a provost of Northland Community and Technical College in Northwest Minnesota, said the recession hasn’t hit that part of the state too badly, because of its proximity to North Dakota, which is doing relatively well. His school primarily provides job training programs, two-year degrees and general education credits for North Dakota and Minnesota students. Several months ago the president of the Minnesota State College and University (MnSCU) system told the member schools to look for money to cut, Hanson recalls.

“What we were given was a target of about 11.7 percent reduction in our allotments,” he said. That meant a $1.5 million mark for Northland to hit for the 2010 fiscal year. “We achieved that through some efficiencies in course section deliveries. If we had a psychology course that had cap of 40 and we had two sections with about 20 students, we’d reduce it to one section.”

That’s also meant leaving some positions open if people left them. Hanson said he knows his school is the type of institution that people turn to if they lose their job and want to pick up classes or a degree that would provide people with job training. The recession can help keep enrollments for schools like this relatively high, and at Northland, the fact that tuition is holding steady for the second straight year is appealing to prospective students.

“We certainly feel that we will be an important part of retraining people for the downturn in the economy,” Hanson said in an interview.

Edna Szymanski, the new president of Minnesota State University at Moorhead, had a different situation to deal with: a deficit and a subsequent hiring freeze. Between that and the new budget, Szymanski said: “It’s my job to say, ‘No.’”

Szymanski said that she and her fellow system presidents were told to expect bad budgetary news. She said that the previous deficits combined with the new figures will probably mean about a $9 million hit. “It was our job to keep the university alive during the recession and we did.”

Szymanksi said she doesn’t see a lot of competition from other institutions including ones that are right across the river in Fargo, N.D. “[North Dakota State University] is a graduate institution that focuses on research for that state. We primarily provide undergraduate education and some graduate programs.”

The University of Minnesota system was prepared for a cut in the neighborhood of $73 million. The CFO of the system, Richard Pfutzenreuter, told the Star Tribune: “I was just telling someone, well, the front end of the car got taken off, but at least the whole car isn’t destroyed.”

Continuing the analogy, it’s the out-state campuses, like the one that serves Crookston, that are going to have drive this car.

University president Charles Casey said it’s important that people realize that the University of Minnesota includes campuses like his at Crookston, which serves some 1,200 students. Casey says that his campus tries to train students directly for work, and has been dropping two-year degrees in for newer four-year degrees, like Communication.

“Saying I feel a little bit of frustration would be an understatement,” said Casey, who noted that his school has been trying to cast a wider net in its recruitment while also addressing budget realities, like dropping extras such as hockey. Casey said the school is hoping that that scholarship and federal stimulus money will hold tuition down and enrollments steady.

“I think it’s the reality today and we have to deal with the situation we have and not make as many investments as we have in the last couple of years.”

Students, too, are worried about funding levels. Tyler Smith, president-elect of the Minnesota State College Student Association, told the Star Tribune that “we’re still disappointed about the continued cuts to higher education,” fearing big tuition increases in the future and “decreased quality today.”

Meanwhile, the states two university and college systems are looking for a way to handle whatever good news comes along and bracing for more bad news.

But now that Pawlenty has secured his second term and that no-tuition gambit is a distant memory, he’s back to his old tricks. Campaigning for John McCain in Michigan in mid-January, the governor was able to promote his “son of a milk truck driver, put myself through school” schtick to a wider audience, one that will expand further still when he delivers it on a national stage at the Republican convention this September. Meanwhile, his fiscal policies continue to put the screws to higher education. 

Continued: Click “Read more”Recommendations for capital budget funding — commonly known as the bonding bill — for this legislative session reveal a striking gulf between the governor and the Legislature over how much to allocate for construction and renovation in the MnSCU system. The House is recommending $208 million, the Senate $200 million — and the governor less than half that, at just $99 million. Indeed, capital funding for MnSCU accounts for a large majority of the $140 million disparity between the governor’s bonding bill recommendations and what the House and Senate have passed through their chambers. (A House-Senate conference committee has been chosen and will soon begin meeting — probably next week — to hammer out the minor differences in their bills so they can send the legislation to the governor.)

Along with undercutting the House and Senate on the fundamental maintenance needs for MnSCU (in a line item known as Higher Education Asset Prevention and Replacement, or HEAPR), the governor recommends funding only six of the 37 specific projects on MnSCU’s list. By contrast, the House and the Senate provide funding (albeit less than MnSCU requested) for all 37 proposals.

“There is not too much new stuff in what we requested — it’s almost all classic bricks and mortar renovation and repair of existing spaces,” says Al Johnson, MnSCU’s associate vice chancellor for facilities.

The governor’s capital budget recommendations for the U of M total $129.3 million, much closer to the Senate ($134 million) and House ($136 million) bills than he was on MnSCU. However, the governor’s recommendations omit authorization for constructing more buildings in the biological sciences complex, a project regarded by U officials as vitally important not only to their future reputation and efforts to recruit quality faculty in the field, but to the state economy as a whole.

“It is absolutely a cornerstone, for us and for the state,” says Richard Pfutzenreuter, the chief financial officer at the U. “Minnesota has a comparative advantage over other states in this area. The biomedical industry is especially strong in this state, beginning with Medtronic, and as a result we have brought other companies like Coloplast [who relocated from Marietta, Ga.] into our economy. So the complex is absolutely complementary with the Minnesota economy.”

Pfutzenreuter says that funding this ambitious project will be undertaken in a manner very similar to the U of M stadium financing — which Pawlenty supported — with little upfront money required in the first five years, and afterward anywhere from $15.5 million (if you follow the House version) to $16.5 million (Senate version) required annually for the next quarter century. “I have been in the governor’s presence when he publicly endorsed the [biological sciences] proposal,” Pfutzenreuter says. “However, we haven’t heard him speak about it for many months and he didn’t include it in his capital budget recommendations, so we don’t know what to think.”

The governor is also far less supportive of higher education than most other state lawmakers in his proposals for solving the $935 million deficit in the current biennial budget. While K-12 education is specifically excluded from the governor’s cuts, he recommends that the U of M budget be axed by $27 million this year (or $54 million for the biennium) and MnSCU’s budget be cut $26.5 million. At a press conference announcing this budget solution, Pawlenty, without prompting, called out U of M officials, saying that if they need any assistance in making those cuts, he’d be happy to meet with them and offer recommendations, beginning with whacking administrative costs.

“We take his comments seriously,” Pfutzenreuter says. “We agree that when there is a problem with the state budget that the University has to be part of the solution. But we feel 4 percent [the $27 million figure] is too much, because we are just climbing out of the situation we faced with massive cuts the last time the state was in a fiscal mess [in 2003]. We are thankful that both the House and the Senate substantially reduced the amount we would be cut in their budget proposals. For the House it is $6.2 million recurring per year and for the Senate it is $5 million recurring and $10 million in one-time money.” Both better than the recurring $27 million per year proposed by the governor.

One reason the governor lit into the U of M and not MnSCU was that he claimed the latter has recently been more responsible about limiting the size of tuition increases. But getting dinged $26.5 million by the governor’s latest proposal may change that relative affordability. “For the coming year, we had planned on tuition going up just 3 percent for state university students and 2 percent for those in community and technical colleges, which would be the lowest percentage increase since 1998,” says MnSCU spokesperson Linda Kohl. “But last week, it was March 19, our board [of regents] postponed action on that schedule and delayed it to the May meeting so we can see what happens with the budget.” Asked specifically if that meant the regents were looking at boosting tuition if the governor’s cuts were enacted, Kohl replied, “It would be irresponsible of us not to look at all avenues if we had a cut of that magnitude. It is a large cut.”

Pfutzenreuter concurs. “No one denies tuition has gone up substantially since 2003″ — the year Pawlenty notoriously balanced a $4.5 billion deficit without raising taxes. “With help from a legislative bill that provided some scholarship money, we were able to lower the increase for graduate students who were Minnesota residents to just 1.9 percent this year. We hope to hold that to 4.8 percent in the second year of the biennium. But that was before these cuts were on the table. Raising tuition will be a last resort. But at $27 million in cuts, clearly everything is going to have to be on the table.”

Thus it appears that Pawlenty is once again “pulling up the ladder of opportunity” with his disinvestment in higher education. But more seriously, at a time when the state economy has fallen into recession even more rapidly than the nation as a whole, the governor’s policies may be exacerbating our ability to compete for jobs in the future. Consider these words from state economist Tom Stinson, in an interview I had with him earlier this year.

“I think we have to seriously think about tuition policy at our four-year institutions, as well as graduate school education tuition policies,” Stinson said. “When there is a large number of graduates available, getting quality people to come to the universities here may still be a challenge, but you have a larger pool of people to draw from. When the pool gets smaller, it becomes more and more difficult for local firms to recruit the high quality engineers and accountants and staff people they would like. It certainly is going to be easier to recruit someone off the campus in Minnesota than off the beach in California. So to the extent that we need to be competitive, we need to think about how we keep Minnesota-raised students in Minnesota and how we draw students from other states. Certainly, tuition policy would be one of the things to think about.”

He meant lowering tuition costs, Gov. Pawlenty. Not raising them. 

more insideThis claim was mocked mercilessly by House Majority Leader Rahm Emmanuel, D-Ill., who drew up a chart listing the four branches of government: executive, legislative, judicial and Dick Cheney.  Emmanuel later drew up an amendment to strip funding for Cheney’s office from the executive branch appropriations bill, saying, “The vice president has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding, he cannot ignore executive branch rules.”

The end of the week brought us a Washington Post series looking at Cheney’s outsized influence in the Bush administration, including how Cheney maneuvered around any possible objections (such as, say, the secretary of state and national security adviser) in order to secure for America the right to torture and use extraordinary rendition against anyone the president wanted to.

That Dick Cheney is a secretive, manipulative man is hardly even news at this point, of course.  Though his depravity can still shock, he is still the man who shot someone in the face, then hid out for a day, finally forcing the woman who owned the ranch he was hunting at to speak for him.  He seeks to avoid accountability wherever he can, and he sees even good Republicans like Condoleeza Rice as too ideologically impure to work with.

He will go down as the most influential vice president in American history, but it’s doubtful his influence will be viewed as anything but malign.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the man who would succeed Cheney at the Naval Observatory is working hard to prove that he is up to Cheney standards when it comes to blame-shifting and cronyism. 

Tim Pawlenty has been actively campaigning for vice president since 2004.  He will almost certainly be the No. 2 man on the ticket should John McCain get the endorsement, and even if McCain fails, Pawlenty remains a reasonably popular governor in a purple state.  He’ll be on any sane nominee’s short list.

Pawlenty worked overtime last week to show that he’s up to Dick Cheney standards.

The first hint that Pawlenty was up to the task was the news that Pawlenty’s Commissioner of Health Dianne Mandernach had surpressed information about the deaths of 35 Minnesota miners for more than a year.  Those deaths, it turns out, were caused by asbestos-related cancer.

The delay suited business interests by keeping other miners who might be at risk from getting to a doctor and, more important (to business at least), from getting to a lawyer.

Mandernach, of course, got her job because she was willing to misrepresent abortion-related health risks, so it’s not surprising that she was also able to hide information about miners’ deaths.  But still, the revelation that the state was lying about those deaths for a year would seem to be a firing offense, wouldn’t it?

Of course not!  Mandernach apologized, and Pawlenty backed her up, saying that lying about health issues was not a firing offense for a health commissioner.  Accountability, schmaccountability.  Heckuva job, Dianne!

Pawlenty followed up this demonstration of his ability to avoid accountability with a demonstration that he’s perfectly willing to install partisan hacks wherever he can, whenever he can.  The Minnesota State University Student Association recommended two candidates to Pawlenty for appointment as a student MnSCU trustee.  One was a liberal, so he can be discounted straightaway, but the other was Adam Weigold, a student at Metro State, College Republican, and someone described by Hal Kimball as “highly qualified.”

Now, I don’t think anyone would begrudge Pawlenty picking a highly qualified conservative over a highly qualified liberal.  Pawlenty is, in fact, a Republican.  But it takes a certain Cheney-like genius to pass over a highly qualified Republican for an unqualified conservative zealot, and that’s exactly what Pawlenty appears ready to do.  Pawlenty is evidently planning to bypass the MSUSA-endorsed candidates for Luke Hellier, who has not, to date, set foot in a MnSCU classroom.  He has, however, served as political director for Michele Bachmann and interned with Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life.

What those have to do with serving as MnSCU trustee — a position heavy on education policy and light on abortion — is beside the point.  Hellier is a perfect, Cheneyesque pick for the office, a right-winger nonpareil.  Any additional qualifications or knowledge of the job would simply slow him down.

Most humans would not turn to Dick Cheney as an example of leadership.  But in the GOP of today, ideological purity and secrecy is more valued than competence and accountability.  Tim Pawlenty has decided what side of that balance he wants to be on.  And doubtless that will endear him to the rapidly vanishing pool of dead-enders and Bush backers all the more.

The candidate, Luke Hellier, is a graduate of St. John’s University, a private college in Collegeville.  He has not attended a MnSCU school previously, though he is enrolled part time in Minnesota State University’s master’s of public administration program starting in the fall. 

more insideHellier’s primary qualification appears to be his political connections.  According to research by local blogger and former Minnesota State University Student Association chairman Hal Kimball, Hellier served as political director for the campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., in 2006.  He also interned with Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life and served as vice chairman of the Minnesota College Republicans in 2006.

Hellier was not one of the candidates initially recommended to the position by the Minnesota State University Student Association.  The group recommended that Pawlenty appoint either Ezra Kazee, a student at Winona State University, or Adam Weigold, a student at Metropolitan State University.

Kimball described Kazee as “highly qualified for a position on the board,” and noted Weigold’s work with the College Republicans before saying, “he is a student-oriented leader and would serve our students well.”

The MSUSA declined to attack Pawlenty for considering someone outside those recommended.  In response to questions by Minnesota Monitor, MSUSA Communications Director Shannah Moore said, “At this point, the decision over whom to appoint to the position is in the governor’s hands, and we are awaiting that decision before talking further about the individual appointed.”  But a number of local bloggers took the governor to task.

“The fact that Luke never even approached MSUSA for a recommendation, I believe, raises questions about his motivation in seeking this position,” said D.J. Danielson, writing in Minnesota Campaign Report.  “Maybe he couldn’t attend that particular MSUSA conference that weekend in March?  A conference call could have been arranged, which actually did occur for another candidate.”

And blogger Spot at The Cucking Stool noted that he “thinks the guv wants to give him a platform to ‘foster conservative thought,’ so to speak. What do you bet Hellier winds up as an operative for…whomever runs against Walz?”