Nevada's budget crisis threatens higher education

Governor Jim Gibbons' current budget proposal would gut higher education in Nevada:

Gibbons has left us with the false choice of avoiding severe layoffs or making serious budget cuts. Incapable of vision or leading the state in this time of economic crisis, Gibbons instead chooses a political stunt over a sound public policy. We would decry his budget at length if we thought it actually stood any chance of approval. What kind of leader supports killing his state’s higher education system and bankrupting K-12 of its most valuable resource – its teachers.

There is no way Nevada’s higher education system can exist if the type of cuts Gibbons proposed were enacted. There is no way Nevada’s school children could ever improve achievement as the lowest-in-the-nation funding is slashed again. The governor’s State of the State showed him to be in altered states. He defended his 50 percent cut to our universities by suggesting he values education more because it is a larger percentage of the state’s budget. Well, we learned enough in math to know that two percent of nothing is still nothing.

You can weigh in against his disastrous proposals by signing a petition here.