The Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked educators, policymakers and advocates to share what they deem the most important priorities for the upcoming 2024 General Assembly. Today, Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, urges lawmakers to recognize the vital role that higher education plays in the state’s economy and well-being. He urges the Legislature to fund it and treat it accordingly.
Boedy is conference president of the Georgia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization that represents the interests of college and university faculty members.
By Matthew Boedy
During my senior year in high school in 1997, I was invited to hear the president of the United States speak. Bill Clinton had come to Augusta to praise the most successful investment in higher education our state has ever seen — the HOPE Scholarship. As we all know since its inception in 1993, this lottery-based fund has paid for education for more than 2.1 million students to the tune of $14 billion over that time.
It was designed to keep our best and brightest students in our state. And it has worked. The University of Georgia reported when announcing its class of 2027 admissions in August that just under 85% of its undergraduate students are Georgia residents, a percentage far above many other state flagship institutions in the Southeast.
Credit: Peggy Cozart
Credit: Peggy Cozart
HOPE also was designed to put Georgia on the map in the broader higher education arena. To make our institutions world class, to invest in research, and to make faculty into leaders and innovators in the classroom.
Yet a generation later, we are seeing the slow death of those ideals. Student tuition dollars based on lottery funds alone can’t fulfill the needs of a top-notch higher education system. Our state’s 26 schools have bled from cut after cut after cut since the 2008 recession. We are doing less with less, to paraphrase our chancellor.
As a faculty member in the University System, I urge our state lawmakers to prioritize the funding of higher education. Now is the moment to expand and invest, not shrink.
To do that, we need first to fully restore the funds lost to the cuts that have gutted the University System. Such cuts have made tuition the majority funder for our schools. The governor and the University System led by its Board of Regents through the new Georgia Match program have made it a priority to attract more people to college. There is no better way to do that than putting the state’s money where its mouth is.
While our University System is constitutionally independent, lawmakers can also play a role beyond the budget. Higher education — especially its faculty — needs cheerleaders in high places. Lawmakers love national championships and new facilities, but they need to follow the Board of Regents and publicly support the principles of academic freedom and free speech.
Lawmakers also should publicly support the censure of the University System by my organization, the American Association of University Professors, the nation’s leading higher education faculty group. That censure came after the system and its regents gutted the bedrock principle of higher education — tenure. The reputation of our University System has been deeply tarnished by the changes in 2021 to the post-tenure review process. Lawmakers who support higher education should support tenure and therefore should publicly support the censure.
My final request may be hard for some lawmakers. That public opinion of higher education has fallen is mainly due to attacks from some conservatives. From false claims of indoctrination to battering “unemployable” degree programs that do actually produce skilled graduates, higher education needs fans as much as it needs money.
You have to confront the lies and myths circulating among GOP voters about higher education. You have to speak up for us as faculty and students. Tell your community groups, your town halls, and your churches about the great things happening on campuses in your district.
Tell them they should have no fear sending their child and their tax dollars to UGA, the University of North Georgia, or Valdosta State. If lawmakers go along with attacks on higher education, whether implicitly or explicitly, they undermine funding they send to campus.
We all know it’s an election year in 2024. And the easiest strike at higher education or any government service is its inefficiency. But education isn’t a business; it can’t be managed by data points and the rhetoric of small business. Faculty and staff obviously won’t countenance obvious waste. But as a professor said decades ago, an untidy system of higher education must make legitimate demands on the treasuries of the state to fill the treasuries of the mind and spirit. I’m talking about English and history and sociology and anthropology and music and the rest of the often-maligned humanities. These things matter because they keep us human.
And it doesn’t hurt to remind lawmakers that English majors are making just about the same in their first year after graduation as business majors.
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