Both devastating and shocking, last month’s budget cuts could have been handled by the University with a measure of class and tact. With solemn vows to keep the programs that UMass needs, with solemn vows to find the money, with solemn vows to tighten the belt, Chancellor Marcie Williams, Vice-Chancellor for Student Affairs Javier Cevallos and the rest of University leadership could have led us all into a new era of damaging fiscal constraint.

Instead, they decided to save money, excising almost the entire child-care program from the budget, effective June. Where once there was daycare, now there is a void.

If UMass is recognized nationally for nothing else, it can still consider itself the nation’s leader at poorly made administrative decisions. Where some institutions would put thought and careful consideration into the cuts they make, UMass finds the program that will bring the University the worst possible press while negatively affecting the most helpless group in the United States, children.

What, were the elderly not available? Couldn’t find any physically/mentally challenged funding to eliminate? (Note that while some people are offended at even the accusation that UMass would deprive the elderly or the handicapped, members of our administration are slapping their heads in disgust that they forgot to cut the money-costing programs that benefit both…)

How galling is the elimination?

Student parents of children are being asked to pay $495 more per semester (a fee that came out of leftfield) for an education that is fundamentally under-funded by the state while having their child-care eliminated, thus making it almost impossible for them to take classes. Employees are being asked to find child-care in a community that, quite frankly, isn’t large enough to justify a wide-scale childcare industry (the newest Yellow Pages lists nine daycares in Amherst, some who report extensive waiting lists for care).

Marcie Williams and Javier Cevallos have stabbed the University community in the back, apparently more willing to gut a program for families than legitimately challenge any of this institution’s excessive largesse.

Where, for instance, is the elimination of funding for the Isenberg School of Management’s new, and totally undeserved, addition?

Where, for instance, are the pay cuts for the UMass professors who make more than $100,000 per year for teaching a single class?

Where, for instance, are the budget cuts for an Athletic Department that rarely creates winning teams (as of this writing, our basketball team is a unsturdy 7-8 and our football team finished 3-8) and never creates profitable teams?

Never even considered.

The Isenberg’s funding won’t ever be challenged because it comes from one of the University’s flagship programs; asking them to give a little is just an unconscionable act around here. As for them voluntarily sacrificing for the good of the community? Please.

Does anyone really expect the University’s richest professors to voluntarily give their unearned money back? Considering that our University is dumb enough to dangle hundreds of thousands of dollars before professors without requiring them to do any substantive teaching in classrooms, there is no way they’d ever ask for, or take, the money back. Instead, we’re left with the bloated contracts of John Edgar Wideman (a great writer, no doubt, but one that makes more than $140,000 to teach one class, once per week, for graduate students only).

As galling as the first two are, the continued funding of our sports teams is questionable en extremis, especially considering our current financial constrictions. As if the extra $495 (money that won’t be paying for the child-care center) for student-parents wasn’t bad enough, some of that money is going to prop up a failing Athletic Department. Already engaged in a financially risky business – most athletic departments around the country lose money – UMass can hardly justify paying for a football team that can’t beat Richmond and a basketball team that can’t beat Holy Cross.

Rather than challenge the inherent inequality of funding that plagues our University, rather than find a creative approach to the shock of our new budget, the UMass administration simply began a focused and specific excision. Targeting the weakest links, the ones least like to fight back – what resources do local struggling families really have? – the above joke about the physically/mentally challenged and the elderly don’t seem so unreasonable.

In the last few years, we’ve seen Apparel Marketing eliminated (a major available at approximately zero other New England public schools), Spanish classes cut, the dental clinic closed and now, the University’s childcare program is getting the axe.

Few convincing arguments could be made for the elimination of those programs then and few can be made now – that hasn’t stopped the University. Instead of promoting learning, even through a budgetary crisis, UMass mismanagement has prompted a paranoid perspective: who’s next?

Who knows.