SAMHI C.
Features Editor
skc5908@psu.edu

When I first volunteered to write this article, I suppose I expected it to be some exposé on how terribly University Park’s previous administration had been managing their finances and about how now, we, Behrend and the rest of the Commonwealth Campuses as well as the current UPark personnel and student body, have to quite literally pay the price. President Neeli Bendapudi has officially approved budget cuts across the campuses for the 2024-2025 academic year. The general funds are being cut nearly in half. We are talking about 94 million dollars being stripped away from us. 

And then, I realized that most people already know about this. Friends in the Student Government Association were given a heads up by their faculty and student board. Supervisors in several departments were already being pulled into meetings to start the conversation about what would be next. And we at the Beacon, already in financial trouble, have been discussing next steps in the wake of having to deal with further financial strife as opposed to being given some help from our parent campus. 

To add to this latest burden, I have been made aware of the tax that the Commonwealth Campuses unnecessarily owe University Park every semester and that on top of the money I already had my private loan servicer pay to the Bursar’s office, I personally owe an extra eight-thousand dollars before I graduate because of the stupid tuition surcharge. 

We are f*cked. 

This is the consensus. 

The day I first found out about the budget cuts, two Sundays ago, only a few days after I realized I owed those eight-thousand dollars, I wanted to scream and throw my phone against a wall. I spend the whole day and maybe most of the week complaining to and with anyone I could find that would share in my misery, call out Bendapudi and UPark for being unfair, and ruminate about how we could fix things. I think I even pitched that the Commonwealth Campuses secede from UPark. 

Last year, sitting with my thesis advisor / favorite professor, during his office hours, I had made a comment about how I would be in this office again in ten years except I would be in his chair. I have no idea if he remembers or if he even heard me. But that dream, the dream of coming back to Behrend as a professor is now being tested, forcing me to give up on a dream that I may not be able to, cannot and should not want to have.

There is talk about professors across the campuses either losing their jobs due to the university being unable to pay their salaries or deciding to leave because they are not being adequately compensated for inflation like they are supposed to be. Smaller campuses whose enrollment has already taken a hit during COVID might end up closing. The number of extracurricular events will slowly decline and student organizations are going to crumble. The amount of services will decrease. Or they will start to become paid services. And eventually, our enrollment rates will crash and burn while our drop-out rates increase because people cannot afford to go here and for what they are paying, they deserve better. 

Maybe. 

But there is an alternative future. 

One in which our faculty choose to stay because they did not make that much to begin with and very few people become professors outside of Ivy Leagues and private institutions unless they treasure the chance to teach; in which our students push through the extra money they have to pay and take solace in each other’s company, an incomparable commodity that no amount of money can buy; and most importantly, in which these budget cuts actually help in the long run instead of hurt and people stop resenting Bendapudi and UPark. One in which I will most definitely come back one way or another, even if I have to work for nearly nothing, as a Creative Writing, and maybe Criminology, Philosophy, and Algebra professor for the Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College. 

Thomas Acquinas stated in response to the Problem of Evil, that an ultimate benevolent being might allow bad things to happen if they can derive some good from those bad things. I have no clue if god exists. I have no clue if Acquinas is right about this being a proof for why god might exist even as evil does. But: I do know that human beings are capable of making the best of any situation. 

I know that things seem bleak right now. But I promise you this: we have been and will be through much worse. Covid, political turmoil, inflation… must I go on? Compared to all that, this, in the long run, will be just another learning experience, a moment in which our patience was tested and we made it through. Because we are resilient, we are clever, we are capable of making the best of every bad moment; WE ARE Penn State and WE WILL be okay.