Tennessee Higher Ed dodges a bullet until 2011

In his budget address last night, Governor Bredesen announced that the Federal stimulus plan may give Tennessee public higher ed a reprieve from the big cuts they are looking at. "More than most other areas, higher education has dodged a bullet and bought some time." He says that the stimulus money even restores $100M in cuts taken this year. But he points out that this money only goes on for 2 years, at which point Tennessee higher ed will find itself short $180M in State funding.

Now everyone will be looking to see how the campuses and the systems respond. MTSU and TSU have both been talking about serious cuts, and the MTSU proposal has generated protests and a lot of organizing (not sure if there's been similar activity at TSU). One of the points the organizers made about MTSU's proposal to cut $11M (with the ultimate target being $19M) was that other campuses were waiting to see what would happen with the stimulus program (APSU for one seemed to take this approach, as did Memphis). It turns out they were right, but it will be interesting to see what President McPhee does next. It sounds like it will be hard (impossible?) to avoid the big drop-off in 2011, which argues for making some cuts as soon as you can. Then again, higher education has a long history of dodging a continuing stream of bullets.