Upon reading the article about tuition increase, I was confused as to why the cost of attending UIUC is going to increase. Students can understand a tuition increase when the state cuts funding, but we have not seen the University doing anything about it except raising tuition. It confuses me that the University can afford a new indoor golf facility but one of my professors can’t give my class handouts due to cost of the copies. I also don’t understand how an Asian Culture Center is going to be built if the University doesn’t have money. The current situation doesn’t make sense.

I like how the article said that the University needs to raise tuition for faculty recruitment and retention. All the University has to do is go to www.coursefire.com to see which professors we need to keep. We could save money by firing the bad ones, and why not, because none of the students like them anyway. The University needs to get rid of the tenure system since that is a waste of money also. Garner said, “I do believe educational quality is at risk.” I wonder what he means by that. I haven’t seen any effort to make sure this “risk” is minimized or eliminated. Why isn’t the University looking at cutting costs instead of raising tuition? Look at companies; they always try to cut costs before raising the price of their product. The University seems to be only looking at the easy way out – by making it harder on students. With 40,000 people on campus, I think more than a few have some good ideas to help the University with its funding problems (I know I do). One popular idea is to fire Ron Turner. How much money would that save?

Bobby Atkinson

junior in engineering