Current mood:	depressed
Entry tags:	home, kitty, school, wg

UW Budget cuts? Try devastation. These couldn't be worse if they used napalm.
Tonight has been a terrible night for no reason I can discern.

WG was happy and perky when I came home. The kitty was purring. I curled up with my homework on clean sheets.

But I had a lot of reading to do. WG turned petulant and needy, cuddling close and miserable, interrupting again and again in subtle ways -- until I snapped at him. My mood turned foul and frustrated ... and then guilty.

Monte kitty also resented my homework. He chewed my book, sat on it, did "walk-bys," and then threw up a hairball on the bed.

I stripped the sheets, found a snuggle position for the (now unhappy) WG and Monte kitty. Then finished my reading. I just picked up the email from the University president.

UW Budget cuts? Try devastation. These couldn't be worse if they used napalm.

For the University of Washington, the resulting budget decisions are dramatic. The bad news is that the Legislature decided to reduce statefunding to the six public four-year college and universities more than any other sector in state government. The University of Washington received the highest percentage cut in all of higher education - 26 percent. This is a stark and sobering number. Beginning July 1, one quarter of our funding from the state will no longer exist. It is unprecedented in state history, and as far as we know, it is by far the largest reduction in state support to a flagship university by any state in the nation. It takes our state funding level back to where it was more than a decade ago and drops the portion of the state budget dedicated to four-year higher education to an all-time low.

The somewhat better news, though it may not appear so to our students and their families, is that the budget authorizes our Regents to increase resident undergraduate tuition up to 14 percent for the 2009-11 biennium ... If approved by the Regents, tuition for resident undergraduates wouldincrease $875 next academic year and $1,000 the following year.

Sigh. I thought the stimulous bill had money for universities in it. I thought that was the priority.

I feel lost. Like school right now is a hopeless black hole. Sanskrit is a lost cause. I'll never be get funding to take the final year now.

I may be a tad depressed.

Of course, I've also been reading Toni Morrison tonight. She has a talent for leaving me in the dumps.