 "Photo: Joel Kutaka")
ASUH President Mark Ing knows about budget cuts all too well – he originally wanted to double-major in music, but the class he needed didn’t have enough sections available for him to register.
“There was only one section for Piano 2, but there were two sections for Piano 1, so half the students couldn’t go into that class,” Ing said. “I would have had to wait another year, but I wanted to graduate on time. I had to drop that major.”
Losing that class and that major to an understaffed department is part of what led Ing, a Maui native, to run last April for the ASUH presidency. He won against then-ASUH Vice President Jon Hite, despite his leading an entire slate of winning ASUH senators, but Ing and his senate are now working together toward a new goal: fighting back against the budget cuts facing the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Ing said that a lot of the students he’s spoken to feel blindsided by the effects of the budget shortfall.
“At ASUH, the first thing we did was to reach out to campus administrators, like ‘Look, students haven’t had a say in this,’ ” Ing said. “They say, ‘yeah, no decision has been finalized yet, and the process is still going on,’ but we look at the speech pathology department for some of these students and it’s been dropped. It’s a small department, yeah, but it’s a huge effect on those students in the department.
“It’s the difference between a horizontal cut where many students get affected a little and a vertical cut where a few students get affected immensely.”
Ing’s goal is to give the over-11,000 full-time undergraduate students he represents a voice in the budget decision-making process, but the progress, he said, has only come recently.
Students, Ing said, should have been involved from the ground level, and are owed an explanation about why and how the cuts will affect their departments.
“That hasn’t happened for the last six months,” Ing said.
“We did draft a reso and it was just about to pass when (Francisco) Hernandez (UH vice chancellor for student affairs) actually agreed to come down and do an ASUH meeting,” Ing said. “At that point I called up the chancellor and the vice chancellor of academic affairs and we actually got them all to (come and listen).
“They got a lot of questions answered, and we actually got that seat that we wanted on the budget process committee.”
Getting the committee to act on student input, however, is proving to be difficult.
“The administration on our campus can only do so much; the administration in our system can only do so much,” Ing said. “The state legislators and governor can only do so much with the deficit that they’re facing.”
Ing says it’s a matter of where students are willing to tackle the issue and what they want to fight for.
“Students have got to be lobbying for specific departments on campus that they feel need funding at the state level,” Ing said. “If that means (another) large rally-type event, that’s what we’re going to push for, but if it’s one-on-one sessions with legislators, that’s what we’re going to do.
“We’ll definitely be active in the state Legislature trying to earmark some funds for specific student interests. Realistically, I think we should be shooting for those small departments like speech pathology (that) have been dropped, because that’s pretty much pocket change for the Legislature but so meaningful for the students within the department.”
Ing proposes that the state find the funds required to maintain these programs through alternative means.
“We might want to push for something that will affect the entire state deficit … such as an increase in the GE tax,” Ing said. “If that can cover the deficit, they’ll have no excuse to further make cuts for the university for next year because it’s a two-year proposal.
“We’re exploring a lot of different things.”
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