Year after year, the Wyoming Legislature gives less and less to the funding that sustains the University of Wyoming, which in turn, has made the Board of Trustees continue to cut and slash parts of the university’s budget for every fiscal year.
Despite Art. 7,§ 16 of the Constitution of the State of Wyoming which requires that tuition be as low cost as possible, the 2022 Budget Session of the Wyoming Legislature slashed the University of Wyoming’s appropriated budget by 50 million dollars.
It has been impossible for students to escape from rising tuition and other costs. All because the Trustees must look for other sources of revenue, mainly out of students’ pockets to make up for the growing and severe gap that is being created from increased budget cuts by the legislature.
In addition to this vulnerability of depending on the state for funding, there were a number of amendments and separate pieces of legislation that clearly interfered with the University’s ability to remain independent of the political influences in Cheyenne. Students have seen proposed amendments and legislation such as an attempt to gut the Women and Gender Studies program at the University by prohibiting any university source of funding from being used.
SF#0051 was another piece of failed legislation which in part would prohibit transgender woman, though curiously left out transmen, from being able to compete in university women sports teams. All this being rather vain attempts to combat non-existent issues which have been invented to allow certain legislators’ to win political points in their home districts and to win the “culture war” which has so far only been fought nationally but has not affected Wyoming until the last two years.
Though it is only natural by the circumstances for the legislature to have an intense focus on the university, as UW is the only university in this state, it ought to be known that there is a massive difference between obligatory and prudent oversight of the funding of the university and then strong-arming the university to implement or cut certain policies, programs, etc.
If legislators want to do oversight, why not ensure that administrators and university officials are called to testify in committee hearings? If there is a concern about the budget, why not discuss it with university representatives instead of legislating away a department?
Universities cannot and will not thrive with constant legislative influence that interferes with the fundamental working processes that this institution operates on and the University of Wyoming is a clear example of how things start to break down when this occurs.
The administrators of UW have been forced to deal with this hostile anti-academia climate by trying to make nice with legislators and Trustees including dinners, tours of the university and across Wyoming, making pleas in the halls of the Wyoming State Capitol, and to try and measure their words and actions to ensure that legislators are not offended.
Administrators should not be blamed for doing what is pragmatic to ensure that the university does not get funding cuts or to minimize damages from these budget cuts. It is telling to all students, faculty, and staff, of how far administrators have to go to achieve those ends, including being forced to have to change methods to ensure that they do not, in the words of one anonymous faculty member, “piss off the people in Cheyenne”.
Furthermore, faculty and staff are demoralized and worried about the future when legislators and trustees even breathe a word of another round of budget cuts or being required to do something legislatively. It comes to such a point that many faculty and staff members would rather leave than risk the chance of being laid off, fired, forced into retirement, or face drastic salary cuts.
The implications of these legislative decisions have and can be seen as a higher turnover rate of valuable employees. Graduate students are unsure about ramifications for future opportunities especially in the job field and would rather transfer elsewhere than be at risk to be in a program or department subject to budget cuts or legislative interference. Wyoming undergraduate students would rather go out of state then come to UW or stay at UW till they get their degree and then go elsewhere because of the political climate.
We suffer a massive brain drain in Wyoming because we cannot retain or attract talented young people because a significant number of legislators would rather focus on issues like gender and “liberal bias” instead of giving more money to the university to retain and hire talented faculty and staff members that attract both in-state and out of state students, not to mention diversifying the state’s economy so that Wyoming not only retains its population, but adds value to our communities as a whole.
If UW is to grow and thrive, it necessitates the belief of administrators, legislators, and trustee members alike to recall the words of the Official Code of Ethics of Wyoming, the Cowboy Code of Ethics, 9. “Remember that some things are not for sale”.
University autonomy cannot and should not be leveraged to achieve a political agenda and that requires the legislature to be more cautious of its influence for the sake of all UW students, present and future.
