EDITORIAL: Skimping on what we have, building on what we don't
The saying goes that one in the hand is worth two in the bush.
In Central Michigan University's case, its resources on hand may be old, creaky and smell of sweatsocks and moldy apples.
Brooks and Anspach halls, we're looking at you.
However, CMU is still pursuing two in the bush — the nearly complete College of Medicine extension to the Health Professions building and the biosciences building.
Another saying goes — once bitten, twice shy.
The university must have remarkable pain tolerance to keep soldiering through the double sting of potentially cut funding for the biosciences building and CMED donations that refuse to materialize.
Without donations coming in to CMED, the development of the project continues to come out of tuition money — students paying not for their education, but the education of future students.
Students are paying inflated tuition rates while going to class in subpar facilities, and that’s only when the buildings are not flooded.
University President George Ross has made great use of the state’s economy in his explanations of why tuition rates continue to rise and wages continue to flatline.
It’s a fair point, but a man so attuned to money matters in Michigan should accept that now is not a time to expand, but rather consolidate, in expenses from both employees and facilities.
It seems we have something to teach Ross. After all, students are accustomed to bitter disappointment from Michigan, no matter how much its politicians claim to value education.
The quick deaths of the Michigan Promise Scholarship and Michigan Merit Award in 2009, which would have provided thousands of dollars toward post-secondary education for students who excelled on standardized tests, are early examples of legislators speaking out of both sides of their mouths to this generation of scholars.
So why expect the state or donors suffering under a depressed economy to rescue our ill-advised new projects, while some of our most used buildings sink further into decrepitude?
As another saying goes, hope in one hand and excrete in the other, and see which fills up first.
