It’s a tough spring for the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State.
The announcement last week that the college will lose at least 40 jobs this year — most through attrition — cuts straight to core of the university’s historic mission.
And the warning that 160 more agriculture jobs could be lost in the next few years is more troubling still.
Penn State says that this year’s losses, in agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, are the fault of the state. Those two units rely heavily on state funding, a traditional arrangement going back decades.
But the state has failed to keep pace with the units’ growing expenses, Penn State says. Their state funding level has been flat at roughly $56 million a year since 2007, even as operating costs and pension expenses have increased substantially, the university has noted.
The argument holds truth. Still, there’s more to this politically charged story — more than what’s been repeated in much of the mainstream news media over the past week.
First, the backstory:
Traditionally, Penn State’s annual appropriation from the state had been split into categories: X amount for, say, medical uses; Y amount for agricultural research and Cooperative Extension; Z amount for general-education functions; and so on.
Since last year, though, under state budgets advanced by Gov. Ed Rendell, those funding categories have disappeared. Penn State no longer receives designated state funding for medical uses, agricultural research and so forth.
Instead, it receives a single, non-categorized state appropriation that it can split among its various needs as it sees fit.
The overall amount of state money flowing into Penn State hasn’t really changed; it’s still in the range of $300 million a year. The university just has more options in how it can move those dollars around internally.
Susan Hooper, a spokeswoman for Rendell’s budget office, said the new flexibility was put into place not only for Penn State, but also for the three other state-related universities in Pennsylvania: Temple, Pitt and Lincoln.
‘The reason was to give the universities more flexibility in spending the state funds they receive,’ Hooper wrote in an e-mail message last week.
She underscored that ‘these are very difficult times’ and that ‘higher education was at least level-funded’ in Rendell’s proposed budget for 2010-2011, whereas ‘many areas … were cut.’
This all begged the question: Can’t Penn State just move some state money around to prevent the job cuts in agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, at least this year?
I asked Lisa Powers, the university’s chief spokeswoman.
Simple answer: No, it won’t happen, she said.
Powers explained it this way:
Overall state funding for Penn State isn’t climbing. So if the university were to move some extra state dollars into agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, it would have to take those dollars away from general-education uses — that is, undergraduate education.
And that, Powers said, would force an even heavier tuition expense onto students’ shoulders. Penn Staters already pay among the highest — if not the highest — tuition rates among public universities in the U.S.
Powers said the situation presents ‘a direct trade-off.’
‘It’s a decision that we decided a long time ago that we’re not going to make,’ she said. Plowing more state money into agricultural research and Cooperative Extension, and taking it away from undergraduates, would be ‘like having students pay a tuition increase to pay for mushroom research in Chester County.
‘Our greater obligation is to the students,’ Powers said.
Beyond that, she explained, ‘it’s been a longstanding, obvious agreement that we rely on state, federal and county-partnership resources’ to finance agricultural research and Cooperative Extension in Pennsylvania.
It’s not my place to take a side in this debate, but I will say this:
For an institution that was established as an agrarian organization, these developments mark an incredible moment in history.
There’s a tragic irony here, too: Just as the masses are turning more and more to farmers’ markets, local produce and organic goods, our own rich traditions in agricultural education are suffering.
If we — we the masses — could mobilize to support those traditions as eagerly as we advocate farmers’ markets and organic tofu, perhaps we could effect some change.
