Schaff: How making records public can help Pitt stay public

When you place a governor in a ring with a family of hungry panthers, you typically don’t bet… When you place a governor in a ring with a family of hungry panthers, you typically don’t bet on the politician. After all, the ability to shake votes out of a state caucus doesn’t seem like adequate preparation for a close-quarters encounter with a creature that can shake the life out of a grown deer using monstrous fangs and superior musculature.

But unfortunately for Pitt students, faculty and staff, our fangs haven’t grown in yet. And more to our misfortune, unlike most solitary panthers, our livelihood appears to rely on the altruistic caprices of the governor against whom we face off — an eaten Tom Corbett doesn’t exactly make for sufficient state appropriations and painlessly balanced University finances.

That’s why Pitt and other state and state-related universities are currently on high alert. After sustaining two rounds of deep appropriation cuts over the past eight months, Pitt could face further blows when Gov. Tom Corbett unveils his 2012-13 state budget proposal tomorrow. And as Corbett’s office has repeatedly lamented smaller-than-predicted tax revenues in the recent past, it’s hard to believe Pitt’s going to find itself with a larger pile of state cash next year — let alone the 11 percent increase we, in a bout of wishful thinking, requested last October.

If this frenzy of higher education fund-slashing is to continue, tomorrow and beyond, there must be some point where Pitt makes an important, game-changing decision: going private. But turning our backs on our treasured 50-year legacy of providing public school higher education access might not have to happen, at least until Harrisburg definitively decides to twist the budgetary knife. Considering what the University stands to lose by completely privatizing, administrators should jump at any method that helps Pitt retain quasi-public status — even if that method, on different grounds, sounds tough to swallow. That is, Pitt should open its books, once and for all.

Hypothetically, if state appropriations dwindle to effectively zero, Pitt’s tuition could experience dramatic jolts upward, conceivably reaching the $40,000 per-year mark similarly sized private institutions often charge. From the educational idealist’s perspective, such a result would be disastrous. For many years, Pitt has refined its reputation as a “Best Value” university, which means it has grown to deliver the quality education of an expensive private school at a fraction of the price. According to a 2011 press release from Chancellor Nordenberg, Pitt has been able to provide Pennsylvanians with valuable, affordable higher education in large part because of state support.

Without it, Pitt could relinquish its meritorious function of bringing opportunity to students with emptier pockets, as studies show that tuition increases can disproportionately affect the college decisions of low-income students. Unless Pitt magically ties rising tuition with rising instructional quality, an incoming price barrier to a Pitt education should not be taken lightly — it will either exclude students we want to serve or force them into untenable debt contracts. Thus, we may not like where this drift toward privatism, driven by appropriation cuts, takes us.

If Pitt prefers to guard our “Best Value” reputation — and Nordenberg has made this preference clear — then it must not let go of state dollars. And if Gov. Corbett continues to de-prioritize higher education tomorrow, Pitt needs to do something more proactive. Here’s an idea — offering to abide by the Right-to-Know Law.

Now Pitt’s secrecy-to-transparency ratio might strike you as irrelevant to state funding decisions, but as of recently, it’s completely relevant. After the Sandusky investigation at Penn State, in which administrative secrecy allegedly allowed a child abuse incident to go unreported, Gov. Corbett said that state-related universities’ funding might someday be tied to their compliance with the state’s Right-to-Know Law (currently, they’re legally noncompliant). For state universities like Kutztown and Slippery Rock, Right-to-Know requires public access to not only officer salary information (which state-related schools provide), but also officers’ emails, university financial documents and contracts. The law was built around a simple principle: Institutions that receive substantial taxpayer funds should be held accountable for what they do with the money. As of this moment, given the exemptions it exercises, Pitt is not so accountable.

Sure, it would feel nicer to attend a school that didn’t aggressively protect its information. But Pitt’s case for becoming transparent transcends the merely subjective. Administrators should recognize the bargaining chip they (might) have on their hands.

If expanding Right-to-Know is indeed valuable to Corbett, as the idea seems popular across General Assembly party lines, Pitt could preempt the inevitable legislation with an early offer to open its books, potentially affording itself a more powerful negotiating position. Granted, complexity defines Harrisburg budget battles, but such a move could be one tool that helps sustain the Pitt ideal: high-quality, low-cost and accessible college education.

And hey, finally providing a more open place for us panthers to roam isn’t so bad either.

Write Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com