Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 28, 1993 TAG: 9312280030
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Allison Blake
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At the moment, my car's up to its headlights in snow, I can't find a frilly pink bathrobe for my niece's gift, I have to drive to D.C. and back twice in the next 10 days, and I'm not gonna have a thing to wear to all those parties up there if I don't get to the laundromat - soon. But I can't.
Gov. L. Douglas Wilder just released his final budget, and everyone in higher education is trying to figure out what's happened while cramming in those final "use or lose" vacation days they haven't had time to take all year.
Is this bad planning, or what? The budget used to come out in January, but recession-era legislators had trouble digesting all that bad news on the first day of the General Assembly session. They demanded a budget by Dec. 20, so now they presumably digest the numbers between sips of eggnog and bites of fruitcake.
One could note the moral lesson involved - the holiday timing is simple justice, a fortuitous chance for social and religious Christians to consider how Jews feel when all life's events plop in the middle of September's high holy days.
But university folks probably don't have time to muse on that right now. They're in briefings, or deciphering E-mail messages zapped to their home computers by anxious colleagues (even as they address those final, forgotten greeting cards). Some are doing double takes after adding a few figures on their calculators.
As near as anyone can tell, the story looks like this:
If you're a big university graduating tons of professionals, your budget gets cut.
Pity the out-of-state, first-year students trying to put themselves through law school at The College of William and Mary. Their tuition and fee bills will skyrocket 36 percent before they graduate in '96. Guess they won't be doing pro bono work for non-profits.
Things are better if you're a smaller school, if you're restructuring operations to save money, or if you've got a high-profile plan in the pipeline focused on two current buzz-topics: economic development or global/international linkage. In other words, you're going to create jobs, either here or abroad, for our NAFTA and GATT-driven worldwide economy.
Locally, the most visible such plan is probably Radford University's New College of Global Studies, a mighty undertaking still in the making - and $3.1 million richer thanks to Wilder's budget.
The provost, Meredith Strohm, is coming up on her one-year anniversary in February, and while she's helped secure millions for the bricks, mortar and technical equipment, it's now time to tend to the curriculum.
In a chat over lunch the other day, Strohm said she's looking at 12 possible majors within the college, disciplines like "global communications." In the coming months, faculty will start perusing those ideas, then set to work honing and whittling and adding. By the time the college is up and running in the fall of '95, the inaugural 40 or so students plucked from the Radford ranks will choose from three or four majors, programs that will be as fleshed out as possible, given their shiny new status.
So far so good on the money end of things - state higher education officials clearly are interested. But still to come are students and the programs necessary to lure them - as well as plans for internships and work programs abroad for six months or so.
If the General Assembly leaves Wilder's budget proposal intact, the real push will begin for Strohm in turning the concept of the global college into a reality.
Finally, to bring us up-do-date on the holiday du jour, Happy New Year to all you bowl-goers. Perhaps it's just as well that Virginia Tech fans will be in Shreveport. I hear hotels rooms are impossible to find in Miami, so there's justice if any Tech alumni still secretly wish they'd secured the Carquest (the quest?!) Bowl instead of the University of Virginia.
At the risk of being regionally incorrect, however, I gotta say I've always seen Virginia as a rather dignified state. When I went to school in Richmond, we heard about the Gobblers or the Cavaliers. Leave for a few years, and everything changes. What's this business with "Hokies" and " 'Hoos?"
Between the two, a girl feels like she's in the middle of a Dr. Seuss book.
by CNB