(To Readers: Because transportation issues have fared so well in obtaining funding in Olympia, this column presents a current view of Olympia through the lens of transportation language.)

Long prior to the start of the current Legislative session, faculty and administrators met with legislators and their staffs to pave the way for our budget requests.

In the summer, and throughout Autumn Quarter, we invited legislators to campus to talk with groups of faculty and to visit departments where they could see both faculty and students at work in the engine of the academy. Seeing the transmission of knowledge firsthand and the impact of the information highway often was a revelation to our visitors. However, much of our conversation focused upon the top priority of this year’s budget request—the need for increased, competitive faculty salaries.

Hearing directly from faculty and department chairs about the potholes of competitive offers and the chokehold of restrictive state funding appears to have made an impression. Last week, in a roundtable discussion with a cross-section of higher education representatives and state senators, the discussion closed with a series of observations from legislators that salary increases are indeed necessary. The problem for them will be ascertaining how to direct funding toward salaries, as the restrictions of Initiative 601 do not allow unfettered increases to the state budget. They will need to detour from the recommendations of the Governor and to look at ways to divert funding from other programs or initiatives to salaries. Or, they may provide us with the option to increase tuition and to apply those new revenues to salaries. But we have overcome a large potential roadblock by progressing already to the acknowledgement that salaries are a problem that must be addressed, rather than a problem whose existence must be proven and justified.

You may have read elsewhere about the proposed tuition increases that have been discussed at meetings of the Board of Regents. While there are varying proposals circulating for a variety of programs, the increase that has received the greatest attention is the proposed increase for resident undergraduate students. Governor Locke proposes to steer us in a new direction by giving institutions, rather than the Legislature, authority to increase tuition up to 5 percent per year, allowing each institution to decide what would be feasible and necessary. The University of Washington has been discussing a gradual ramping-up of tuition for resident undergraduates of $50 each quarter for the next biennium, which would generate funds for increased financial aid and for salary increases as well. In the 1997-99 biennium, tuition increases were used to fund half of the salary increases authorized by the state (3 percent from the state, 3 percent from tuition and other internal funds).

Our per-student level of funding is approximately $2000 per student below that of our peer institutions. Other peer universities may have a higher portion of state subsidy (such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) or higher tuition (the University of Michigan). No one to whom I have spoken wants to restrict opportunities for access to higher education by pricing tuition at a level that would preclude attendance at the University of Washington, so all discussions of this issue have examined the use of any new revenues for financial aid as well as salaries. Other states have also increased their proportion of out-of-state students, and although we have a bumper crop of out-of-state applicants each year, so far we have resisted increasing revenue by admitting more of them.

What has become clear to faculty, to our administration, and to legislators is that without some significant funding increases, we will not have the same type of University of Washington the state enjoys today. A point that President McCormick, Sherry Burkey (Associate Vice President of Government Relations) and I have made in testimony to legislative committees in the past week is that the state must make a commitment to having a flagship research institution, or its best and brightest students will end up paying substantially more at out-of-state universities to obtain the opportunities available today at the University of Washington. Will the Legislature make some hard decisions to maintain our quality, or nudge us on a path to mediocrity? The next few months will provide the answer, and we have by no means exhausted our innumerable stories about the situation at the UW. ¶

JoAnn Taricani, Faculty Senate Legislative Representative, olympia@u.washington.edu