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Show The faster we go, the behinder we get-soon get-soon we'll be nowhere ,he old dart-nd-swrny-nisht nick .gain. E.ped e take nothing for granted. Monday the Institutional Council adopts, in t item budget for the University. Like so many th, ng th Counc this is only going to be a formality a meescS0es have recognition of a foregone conclusion. The ans of the Co leges had their budgets for some time now, and have been pioui g tnmming and apportioning supposedly with great 1ud,clousness and wisdom, doling out to departments their due. Now, we all have to understand what we are in for the next few weeks. As parts of this budget become pubhc so will many of the complaints and gripes become public. Now that s ,no to say these gripes and complaints are or aren't justified. We II decide that later. For now, this is just a warning that a lot of people may be hard to get along with in the near future. Consider the example of the Department of Music "budget squeeze" and the subsequent de-emphasizing of the Jazz division anc I the subsequent friction and bad feelings. Consider the health services budget and staff cuts and all the resulting complaints and charges. That's going to be happening more and more frequently, we re atraia. New priorities have been set, and they're apparently (if we understand un-derstand President Emery's remarks to the University Senate correctly) a set of priorities which could be interpreted any number of different ways. Many department heads whose departments "get the axe" are going to feel that their's is the department which should have been the exception. Many faculty and administrators are going to feel that justice hasn't been done. A lot of people are going to feel that their hard work has gone for nothing. And indeed, it has gone for nothing. The elitist University has become the victim of the masses; of mass attitudes, of mass culture, of mass fears. But that's not entirely for the bad. Perhaps, as in Hesse's "The Class Bead Came," we were getting into a big-headed rut and deserved a good swift kick in the butt (to indulge in a little mass jargon). Still, the opinion will always exist up here that it wasn't deserved. But at this point that's entirely an academic question (literally). For the time being it's our baby and we should tolerate it as best we can, carving out a little niche in our idealism to let some realism rest there. |
