"Our colleges and universities ...will be in competition with Third World countries"

Higher Ed Chancellor Dan Klaich asks "Are We Building or Destroying" our state's future with a refusal to invest in public higher education?

We are, he says,
1. Using hatchets to achieve short-sighted and short-term planning
2. Reducing Faculty and Staff
3. Taxing Students
4. Denying Students access to education
5. Creating disincentive to businesses to relocate to Nevada
6. Driving Nevada businesses out of state

Nevadans need to step up to the plate and pay for what we value, and we must hold our elected leaders accountable for their actions and stand by them when they do what is right. Now, it is time to do what is right for Nevada's future and not what is right to get re-elected in a sound-bite society.

This morning, NFA's Shari Lyman, made many similar points, with great passion, on KNPR's state of Nevada program. In response, the Chamber of Commerce representative kept repeating that we are in a new reality and the public sector needs to join the private sector.

Given that the private sector is what has pushed us into this recession -- we already had the smallest state government in the Union prior to the last few years of cutting -- and that the private sector is the one in which corporate executives are getting bonuses on top of bailouts, and in which major out of state corporations make healthy profits in Nevada but pay next to no taxes, we feel its high time that the private sector join the public sector in the new reality :

our state is on the brink of falling to a Third-World level of higher education funding.

Write and call the governor and your legislators.

Demand a reasonable and balanced response to this crisis that not only allows us to balance our budget, but saves our future.