College courses should not fall victim to budget cuts
The Office of the Dean of Undergraduates has announced that college course budgets will be cut in accordance with next school year's university-wide 5 percent budget cuts (see story, page 1). In what was once a budget flush with $5,000 allotted per college, the college course funds were hacked to $3,000 this year, and will plummet to a proposed $250 next year. It is the university's expectation that students will come to the courses' rescue by opting to fund college courses from their general college budgets. While we understand the need to cut costs in an economy as tepid as this, we are perplexed by the current trend of dumping intellectually invigorating Rice traditions in lieu of other means. For instance, it was just a year ago that we had local and national newspapers scattered on our commons' tables. But due to budget constraints, they are no more. And it now appears that college courses, student-taught or otherwise, are on a similar path, which is both disturbing and disappointing.
In years past some colleges have not needed to spend all of the money set aside for college courses, but others, such as Lovett College, which traditionally offers an Introduction to Law course - arguably the only pre-law course offered at Rice and always at capacity - exhaust their college course funds and sometimes even take additional funds from their general budgets to pay for courses. The university is under the impression that all of the colleges will take Lovett's lead and fund courses from their general budgets. But the same argument was applied with the cutting of newspaper budgets, with poor results. Some colleges were willing to set aside funds to purchase newspapers, but others were not, making newspaper delivery to a select few colleges nearly impossible.
After the recent success of college courses - the total number offered has jumped from around 20 in years past to more than 40 this year, with an estimated one-fourth of Rice's student body either teaching or taking a college course - it is worrisome that the university is cutting the legs out from a program that is both highly successful and wildly popular. We should be encouraging intellectual growth, not undermining it. Punk rock may not be examined at the Shepherd School of Music and Batman may not be taught in upper-level English courses, but their presence within college courses expands the heady intellectualism Rice already harbors. For them to disappear due to a lack of funding would destroy an utterly unique and spectacularly interesting facet of the educational opportunities Rice purports to espouse.
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