[Nhcoll-l] Alaska’s Governor Wipes out University Research and Museum

[Kevin Winker]

 URGENT: On Friday afternoon we learned that governor Dunleavy has proposed
to *completely* cut the state appropriation to the museum and to all of the
university’s annual investments in research. (A copy is here:
https://bit.ly/2SHnJpP) We’re asking our many supporters to email the
University of Alaska Board of Regents *now* at ua-bor at alaska.edu urging
them to reject this proposal when they meet in emergency session to
consider it on Tuesday. This single email address goes to the university
president, too: ua-bor at alaska.edu They declared financial exigency at last
week’s meeting due to the governor’s line-item veto budget cut to the
university of a staggering 41% – on top of five years of cumulative budget
cuts we’ve already undergone. In a second step, we’re hoping you will email
support for the university to Alaska’s legislators, too, as they try to
return most of the governor’s cuts to the university through a supplemental
spending bill. Personally, I am sending my comments to both at the same
time (instructions below).

As you know, education and research are integrally tied together at a
modern university. The vast majority of UA faculty have a combined
teaching-research-service appointment. Training the next generation’s
workforce requires hands-on experience with research. It’s how we teach
students to creatively and intelligently solve real-world problems. It’s
how we develop new knowledge to make the world better for all of us.

The University of Alaska Museum of the North has world-class collections in
many disciplines, documenting and safeguarding Alaska’s natural and
cultural history and making it available to students and researchers from
Alaska and worldwide. At the museum we would not be able to function
without our state appropriation, which is spent on curation and collections
management to fulfill our legal obligations as a collections repository. We
also do a lot of student training and, yes, some research, too. We are a
very lean, highly functional unit with partnerships in collections,
education, research, and exhibits throughout Alaska and the world. And no,
we can’t recover this cut through increasing fees, as the governor has
proposed (they did zero research on this). We already recover a lot, and
we’ve tweaked that pretty hard during the past five years of budget cuts.

The economic argument for rejecting these cuts is powerful, too. For every
dollar the University of Alaska Fairbanks puts into research, we get back
3-6 dollars (depending on unit), mostly from federal grants. But it’s a
partnership. If we pull out, those grants won’t come here. They will go to
faculty and students in other states. So the money the state spends on
university research is well spent for the excellent training it gives our
students and the knowledge it develops, *and* it is a superb direct
investment in the state’s economy. Here at UAF, the state’s only
PhD-granting institution, $19 million in state research spending each year
is turned into about $132 million. So cutting UAF research will have an
outsized economic impact in Alaska’s Interior, now and long into the future
(it takes decades to build this kind of expertise and competitiveness for
federal funding).

We do not understand why the governor is doing this grave damage to the
university and to the state when he promised otherwise before being elected
(Dunleavy’s lies: https://bit.ly/2Ysw02U). It is ideological, and it is
extreme. And make no mistake—it is a choice he has made; we are not in a
fiscal emergency. The legislature passed a balanced budget that *still*
gave away free money to Alaska citizens (the permanent fund dividend, or
PFD). This entitlement program and the governor’s ideology are at the
center of the problems we find ourselves in. A petition to recall the
governor starts later this week (URLs at bottom).

The majority of Alaskans and his own party oppose his outrageous budget
cuts, but he is the most powerful governor in the country, with line-item
veto authority and a 75% super-supermajority required to override those
vetoes. His mismanagement of the state thus far has us in chaos. (See some
of the details here and here: https://bit.ly/2Y9iDbV https://bit.ly/2SJlKRT).
His insertion into the regents’ job of managing the university is
unprecedented, as are these levels of budget cuts.

I hope you will write to the board of regents and urge them to reject this
proposal to cut research and the museum from the university’s future. We
are in a state of financial exigency, so things are moving very fast.
ua-bor at alaska.edu I also hope you will write our legislators, but emailing
the board of regents is the first and most time-sensitive step. The
legislators are in Juneau working to pass a supplemental spending bill that
restores most of the governor’s line-item vetoes. That will also be subject
to more line-item vetoes, and we will almost certainly need your support,
especially you Alaskans, to tell our legislators how important the
university and museum are to the state. I am sending them all (board and
legislators) the same message right now. Instructions for contacting the
legislature are also given below.

Alaskans—please do write to our legislators and consider signing the recall
petition, which begins on 1 August (more on both below).

Thanks for your support!

Kevin Winker
Professor and Curator

More information about the university is here:
https://www.uaf.edu/chancellor/initiatives-and-policies/advocacy/tool-kit.php

More information about the museum is here:
https://www.uaf.edu/museum/

Recall petition:
http://midnightsunak.com/2019/07/12/group-launches-effort-to-recall-gov-dunleavy-over-vetoes-and-broken-campaign-promises/

http://midnightsunak.com/2019/07/15/the-launch-of-the-dunleavy-recall-campaign-rescheduled-to-aug-1/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1320487238099303/

UA mission statement: "The University of Alaska inspires learning, and
advances and disseminates knowledge through teaching, research, and public
service, emphasizing the North and its diverse peoples." Regents' Policy
01.01.01

Written testimony is accepted at any time and is shared with the board and
the president. Please submit to: ua-bor at alaska.edu

To email Alaska’s legislators, go to this page
https://uaf.edu/chancellor/initiatives-and-policies/advocacy/akleg.php ,
open the bar for each respective branch (House, Senate), and there is one
button to email all the members of each branch. The easiest way I’ve found
to use it is to right click on that button, choose ‘copy email address’,
and paste that massive email grab into your email’s To: field.

-- 
Kevin Winker
Brina Kessel Curator of Birds
University of Alaska Museum
907 Yukon Drive
Fairbanks, AK 99775

Professor, Dept. Biology & Wildlife and Inst. of Arctic Biology

<kevin.winker at alaska.edu>
kevin.winker at alaska.edu
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