Oregon daily emerald., May 07, 1971, Page 10, Image 9

WORK-STUDY:
the cutback means scrounging
By GIL JOHNSON
Of the Emerald
If you leam nothing else in four years of college, you
learn economics. In class, you learn the marketplace is
the great leveler. In experience, you leam who gets
leveled.
It’s you.
You buy chicken at the supermarket for 31 cents a
pound and eat it in casseroles to balance out that 20
minute call you made to your parents last month. You
find a house three miles away from campus to get away
from the high rents, and the transmission falls out on
your car. The price of meat goes down just when the
price of vegetable produce goes up. You take out a 90 day
loan to pay off a debt, then borrow from a friend to pay
off the loan. Then you take out another 90 day loan to pay
back your friend.
Work-study students think about these kinds of
things a lot. Particularly this year. Particularly th.s
spring. And most particularly, if their work-study hours
have been cut back from 15 to 10.
“I had to move from a single room costing $45 a
month to a double room costing the two of us $30 a
month,” said Karen Haeger, who lives in the Chelsea
House on 13th and Alder. Upon taking the five hour cut,
amounting to some $35 a month, she has had to cut back
by borrowing textbooks, eating cheaper food and
juggling other bills.
“I could get another loan,” she said, “but I already
have over $2000 in loans. Another one would be an ad
ditional burden. I’m graduating in June, and it looks like
it will be something just to pay back the money I already
owe.”
Another work-study student who’s had to take the
cutback in hours hasn’t bought a textbook all term. She
reads them in the Co-op. She is also living in a low rent
two bedroom apartment with four other girls, and
receiving the welfare program’s abundant foods.
Since former director of financial aids Karl Strieff
announced in March that his office had discovered an
estimated $200,000 deficit in the work-study budget due
to overcertification of students—necessitating the five
hour cut back—most students in this program have
found other ways to supplement their incomes. Some
students have received help from the departments they
work for, others have taken out loans or found other jobs.
One is writing term papers for other students.
Though these students are making ends meet this
term, their worries are not over. They are looking to the
future. The future, this summer and fall terms, looks
bleak. There won’t be any work-study jobs in the sum
mer, and certification may be down for next year.
Larry Large, the boyish, affabie new director of
financial aids, talks straight, as straight as any ad
ministrator can. After taking over the job, Large re
instated the 15 hour work load for 20 students who.simply
couldn’t stay in school without it, plus a much larger
number of work-study students in the disadvantaged
youth programs. “We have essentially borrowed this
money from next year’s budget,” he told the Emerald.
“That means cur deficit beginning July 1 will be
somewhere between $125,000 and $128,000. (
“This deficit will wipe out summer work-study,” he
added.
A large percentage of work-study students depend
on work-study jobs during the summer months, and
Large concedes that most of them will have to find jobs
in the private sector—a grim prospect considering "the
economy.
“Our first obligation is to fall term,” said Large, “in
helping students make it through the school year. It’s a
likelihood, but not yet a fact, that we may have to cut
work-study certification for next year. But we don’t
know what our federal allocation will be yet.”
Under the work-study program, the federal
government puts up 80 per cent of the money—called the
Larry Large, financial aids director
“hard money”—for the student’s wages. The University,
or off-campus employers, make up the other 20 per cent.
These tve contingencies make it impossible to tell just
how much work-study will be available, and how many
work-study students can be maintained by the
University. While the federal money is in question, many
University departments are also doing a little belt
tightening in preparation for a proposed five per cent
Governor’s Budget cut for the University.
The question about next year’s funding has work
study students more uptight than the original five hour
cut scare. “They are offering us loans, but we can’t take
loans,” said Sue Baker, an EMU janitress. “Most of us
already have large loans already. How are you going to
pay back a couple thousand dollars when Ph.D’s are
taking the jobs you would turn to as a last resort?”
Indeed, work-study students in the disadvantaged
youth programs are in a somewhat better position for
next year, as far as work-study goes. Johnny Holloway,
director of Support Services, explaines why: “We will
get the work-study money we require. We have to. Not
only is it essential to the individual student; it’s essential
to each program.”
According to Holloway, the programs are staffed
almost entirely by work-study positions. If the money
didn’t come through, the minority programs would be
unable to function. As Holloway told the Emerald, “The
DEANS, DEPARTMENT HEADS . . .
Continued from Page 9
Roy Rogers, sociology, says “Come hell or high water
we will provide them with positions.”
All the normal deadlines for notifying regular
faculty members whose contracts will not be renewed
have passed. Faculty members who have held their
positions for more than a year must be given a year’s
notice. And even those in their first year are supposed to
get three months notice if they won’t be rehired. (That
leadline was March 15.)
The state system can give shorter notice in times of
“financial exigency .’’—“another way of saying we don’t
have the dollars,” says Moyer, CLA. And, that’s the
cause for worries.
“There’s considerable anxiety among tne non
tenured staff,” Moyer says. “They’re the most apt to
go.” The anxiety “isn’t so great it affects their work,” he
adds
Deans and department heads say they don’t know
how the University could dismiss anyone so late in the
year.
One department head says, “I think it’s a serious
morale problem for the University. I can’t even talk to
my faculty. I don’t know what to tell them. I imagine a
lot of deans are reluctant to talk about the budget.”
With positions less secure at the University, some
department heads worry too that their staff will start
considering offers from other schools more seriously.
“We’re having some of that trouble now,” says
Moyer. “Some people are important to the quality of our
programs, but they’re having to consider offers from
universities of great prestige.
“Almost all our best people have these op
portunities. If the better faculty get the idea that higher
1 education will not be supported well in Oregon they will
start responding to other opportunities,” he says.
Morrison, head of the School of Librarianship, says
his staff lost one person last year, and adds he thinks two
factors were “the low salary and uncertainty about the
future here.”
Cuthbert, AAA, says he’s worried staff members on
leave won’t return. “The competition is keen for top
notch people. We have attracted some good people. But
ths salary here is not so good that offers elsewhere can’t
be pretty attractive.”
Impressed with the “esprit de corp” of his faculty,
Cuthbert says they’ve been willing to go without a lot of
equipment and supplies. “The faculty are disappointed
but for the most part are making due. But this can’t go
on too long if they have the opportunities to go where
they would have the equipment they need to perform at
the levels they’re capable of performing at.”
Several department heads suggested that it would
help if the legislature gave the state system a minimum
budget fugure to work with until final decisions are
made.
“Hie legislature guarantees a certain amount to
primary and secondary schools. I don’t see why they
can’t guarantee the University a certain amount so we
have something to work with,” says Miss Weise.
Leistner, speech, says he’s talked with several
department heads and they all agree that the University
should set up a contingency fund for operating during the
first year of the biennium, and then absorb losses, if any,
in the second year.
“At least that way we’d be able to plan. The in
dividual cases of staff inconvenience because of the
University had made a commitment to educating
minorities. Thus it must maintain the programs on a
sufficient level, and that means work-study must be
maintained
“In addition, each student coming into the programs
is guaranteed in his packet a certain amount of work
study funds,” Holloway said. “These students come in
economically disadvantaged. In their financial packet,
they receive a loan, grants-in-aid and work-study. They
need this money not only to pay tuition, but also to pay
for living expenses ”
Holloway and the various program directors have
been working with Larry Large since the beginning of
the term to resolve this term’s cuts. “While we have
dealt individually with the students outside the
programs,” Large said, “we have asked the program
directors to work for us, because there are so many
minority students on work-study. Then the directors
come to me and show me their needs.”
Large explained that, like other cases, some
minority students have been helped out by the depart
ments they work for. But those who work directly for
their programs have been supplemented directly by the
Office of Financial Aids, since the programs themselves
do not have the funds to make up the five-hour cutback.
That money, of course, was borrowed against next
year.
Meanwhile, other departments employing work
study students are finding it difficult getting through this
term. Dean Fred Cuthbert of the School of Architecture
and Allied Arts, said, “The work-study cuts hit us very
hard.”
Law School Dean Eugene Scoles felt the same way.
“We have a substantial number of students on work
study, and like everyone else, we were hard hit—
especially in library assistants,” he said.
Dick Thompson, Administrative Officer in the
department of Community Service and Public Affairs,
found the problem complex. “We get a person and he or
she can only work so many hours, as prescribed by the
financial aids office,” he said. “We just get them trained
so they’re no longer a liability but an asset to us and then
we find they can’t work for us any longer.
Students working in the College of Liberal Arts have
not been cut back. Burton Moyer, Dean of the College,
said the liberal arts departments have provided monies
to make up the cuts, drawing from equipments and
materials budgets. “The students who needed to remain
on 15 hours will be kept on,” he said.
Of the 850 to 1000 students on work-study at the
University, those working in the minority programs, the
Library and 20 others have been retained at 15 hours if
they needed it, a total of approximately 350 students.
Another 200 or so were certified for 15 hours fall or
winter terms, but did not need more than 10 hours this
term. Approximately 150 students have been helped out
by the departments in which they work. That leaves
around 150 students who have taken loans, found other
jobs, tightened their personal budgets, or left school.
That’s not an overwhelming number of students
suffering individual hardships. But try brushing off the
work-study cuts when talking with one of those 150
students who, because of faulty bookkeeping on the
University’s part, have gone from bare subsistence
incomes to something considerably less than that. The
bitterness of these students was summarized by one
students, who remarked after the cuts were announced
in March: “We see $25,000 I.D. cards, $200,000-plus
tennis courts, $200,000 tunnels and a $2.5 million addition
to the EMU, and we are worrying about food and shelter,
scrounging for basic needs.”
uncertainty are bad, and yet the institution cannot easily
alter the situation,” he says.
Eugene Scoles, Dean of the Law SchooL says bis
school would have to make adjustments in the later part
of this year and next year. “It’s impossible to make
a number of different decisions between June and Sep-'
tember without breaking the faith of a lot of people,” he
says. Yet, he adds with a rare note of optimism, “I don’t
think the Oregon legislature will break the faith that way
... I’m confident a strong educational program will be
maintained.”
While the uncertainty of budget matters breeds a
certain amount of tension, others wonder if tensions will
disappear once the budget figures are in. Will an
tagonism between departments grow once ad
ministrators start slicing up the funds?
Klonoski, political science, says “there’ll be stress
and tension.” Miss Weise, home economics, says
“Everyone keeps looking at the smaller departments
and wondering if they’re worth the extra expense.”
But, few deans or department heads had much to
say about such feelings. Right now, says Fagot, “I don’t
think departments are getting enough information,
about what other departments are doing to know if
they’re getting a fair share of the pie or not.”
Moyer, who’s been meeting with department heads
repeatedly over the last few months, listening to their
needs, says, “So far, I’ve seen no antagonism at all.
Thsre’s great understanding among the departments
that we’re all in this together.”
And together the deans and department heads wait
for the final verdict on how much money they’ll have to
run their departments next year. When the Legislature’s
work is done, their work begins. The more severe the
cut, the tougher their job.