[NHCOLL-L:1961] Fwd: Re: Ironic Quotes from Bioscience

[Doug Yanega]

Rich White wrote:

>Tim is spot on with his comments.

I don't know about that. You see, Tim said:

Rarely in our impassioned defense of our particular area do we 
suggest the elsewhere for administrators to make those cuts or ways 
that additional monies can be raised.  We are reduced to only 
promoting the importance of our positions and our collections.  And 
taxonomy and natural history collections are important, make no 
mistake about that.  However, we are competing for very limited 
resources with other agencies, fields and positions which are also 
important in their own right.

At least here in California, the budget crisis has pretty much ONLY 
affected research. Within the UC system, and even at places like the 
Los Angeles County Museum, dozens upon dozens of researchers have 
been either fired or lost up to 100%  (as here at UCR) of their 
salaries, yet not *one* administrator - not even a secretary or 
janitor - has lost their job or even had a 1% salary cut, to my 
knowledge. It would be a different matter if the cuts were across the 
board, but they're not. We ARE being targeted, singled out, from 
among all the myriad possible places money could be cut.
I just heard this weekend - though I haven't confirmed it - that a 
vice-president at one of the UCs was just given a $300,000 raise, as 
part of a counter-offer to get them to stay instead of taking a job 
elsewhere, and that this pay raise has prompted negotiations on the 
behalf of the remaining administrators to give them *equivalent* pay 
raises to bring their salaries back into line. If they have enough 
money to give administrators such huge raises, at the same time 
researchers are being fired, then clearly there is something very, 
very wrong with how budgetary priorities are set.
We can *suggest* that the administrators cut their own budgets, or 
that they cut other programs or services within the university, but 
do you honestly believe that such a thing will ever happen? The 
budget for light bulbs in campus light fixtures, or for sports 
scholarships, or for cleaning toilets, or for landscape crews to 
spray herbicides, or for office stationery, is unaffected, but dozens 
of researchers have lost their salaries. We're not competing with 
Police, Fire Departments, and hospitals as much as we're competing 
with the administrators of our own institutions, as they're the ones 
who make the bottom-line decisions, and they are, without exception, 
making targeted cuts, rather than simply asking every division, 
program, or department to cut a certain standardized portion of their 
budgets. So, when Tim says

Neither the science of taxonomy nor natural history collections in 
general are under attack.

this only needs to be rephrased slightly (to read "the practice of 
scientific research, including natural history collections") to be 
completely false. Even the new Smithsonian Institution administration 
- which oversees our *national* natural history collection - is 
apparently contending that the Smithsonian should not support 
research (evidently, they believe that NSF will be happy to pay the 
full salary of every taxonomist in the US). That *IS* an attack, and 
rather explicitly so. Collections serve for *more* than just public 
education and entertainment, but it seems that more and more 
administrators are either forgetting this, or simply denying it. 
Ultimately, then, I feel strongly, and have said repeatedly and 
publicly, what Tim went on to state:

We should have been, and need to start, looking for ways to get off 
of government welfare (a harsh term but an accurate one for our 
situation) and begin looking for ways to become self-supporting. 
Private donations, grants, endowments, corporate sponsorships and 
affiliations, naming rights (we already do this for buildings, why 
not collections and research projects...the Pfizer 
Mycology Collection?), merchandising, etc.

Note that it's not because I feel that government (state and/or 
federal) should not support collections, but because it's becoming 
evident that we cannot count on such support much longer - at least 
given the present economic and political climate. If we don't find 
alternative support soon, the damage to our taxonomic infrastructure 
could be severe, and in some cases irreparable. What Tim does not go 
on to say, but I feel must also happen, is that all the collections 
and associated taxonomists need to be completely and formally 
unified, so no one gets orphaned simply because they, individually, 
don't have the marketing skills or contacts necessary to attract 
sufficient support on their own. We need an umbrella support 
organization that aggressively seeks out, obtains, and then 
distributes large amounts of money - *TO* its members - and perhaps 
even takes over the administration of natural history collections 
*directly*, so they are no longer subject to the whims of people who 
don't even have a clue about the value of a collection.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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