To illustrate how difficult it is likely to be to reduce the cost of public education in Vermont without also reducing the quality of same, please allow a local example or two.

These postings come to you from Barton, up in the Northeast Kingdom, where 153 children attend the Barton Academy and Grade School, not surprisingly referred to as BAGS by some, a standard kindergarten-through-eighth grade school.

For years, the school employed a professional, highly regarded school librarian, and the pupils had regular access to the library, where they could look up information, browse the shelves, get help selecting a book.

At the end of the last school year, she retired. To save money, the school decided not to replace her, at least for this year. Instead, the head of the computer room would do double duty at the library. By all accounts, she’s doing a great job. She’s capable, energetic, dedicated.

But she’s not a librarian. And because she has other duties, the pupils don’t have quite as much access to or guidance in the library as they did last year, and for many years before.

The decision not to replace the librarian was reasonable. That’s one less FTE (full-time equivalent) employee whose salary and benefits have to be financed by the taxpayers. In a tight economy, with school officials reluctant (as they should be) to raise taxes, leaving that position vacant is, at least debatably, the right choice.

But here is what is not debatable: A school with a fully functioning library presided over by a professional librarian is better than a school without them. It isn’t that BAGS isn’t a good school. Principal George Vanna said the library is “not boarded up” and is open almost as much as it was last year. The younger pupils still get their story hours. But Vanna also acknowledged that he’d rather have a librarian, even if only a part-timer. Maybe next year, he said.

In other words, saving money reduced educational quality. Perhaps not by much. Perhaps saving the money justified the reduction. But reduction it was.

As it almost was up the road at Lake Region High School, where the board decided to save money by cutting both the music program and the Spanish language program from full-time to half-time.

Again, a decision quite reasonable under the circumstances. But – again – a school with full-time music and Spanish instruction is better than a school with half-time music and Spanish instruction. Better enough to be worth the $68,000 needed to keep both programs fully functioning? Who knows? Either way, Lake Region would be a slightly worse school after the cuts (which were partially rescinded earlier this week after a public outcry; the board will try to keep both programs full-time).

The point here is not to express opposition to any of these cutbacks. In fact, it’s hard to see how anyone who served on a school board wouldn’t at least seriously consider approving those cost-saving steps. Whether those programs were worth the money is a legitimate question. But there is no question at all that they were worth something. So eliminating, reducing, or diluting them eliminates, reduces, or dilutes…something, a something which has value.

A lesson worth remembering as Vermont thinks about holding down school spending. In addition to Gov. Jim Douglas’s renewed call to “freeze” school budgets (not much more likely to be heeded than last year), Education Commissioner Armando Vilaseca is campaigning to reduce the number of supervisory unions and school districts, and even lots of Democrats speak openly about urging schools to consolidate. In Montpelier, at least, the established point of view seems to be that, in the current Washington health care jargon, something has to be done to “bend the curve” on school spending.

Making it all the more important to be wary of the commonly-heard claim by partisans on all sides that it is possible to cut costs without cutting quality. In theory, it may be. In practice, as the above examples demonstrate, it’s somewhere between hard and impossible.

Besides, some of the cost-cutting steps might not cut costs all that much. Vilaseca recently wrote of his supervisory union consolidation plan that, “my staff and I estimate this would save the state several million dollars a year.”

Kind of vague. Asked for elaboration, Education Department spokesperson Jill Remick supplied a Department study indicating that consolidation in Essex could save more than $600,000, or almost 25 percent, in personnel costs.

To put all this in some perspective, former Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union Superintendent Bill Mathis, who is skeptical about most of the cost-cutting proposals, pointed out (and Education Department statistics confirmed) that only 2.4 percent of the roughly $1.3 billion Vermont spends on public education (not including federal aid) goes to these central administration expenses.

“Let’s say we combined and saved one third of the money,” he said. “That’s less than one percent.”

Not a compelling case against consolidation. Less than one percent of $1.3 billion can be several million bucks. But Mathis’s larger point has merit. Almost everyone agrees that the big driver of school costs is the number of paid employees in and around the classroom, not the central offices. For several reasons (which will be examined in subsequent posts) Vermont has a lot them – teachers, teaching aides, counselors, librarians, technologists. The quickest way – if not the only way – to “bend the curve” of school spending is to have fewer of these educators.

Raising the threat of worse schools. A little-mentioned factor in this discussion is the real question of whether that “established point of view” in Montpelier is all that established among the electorate. Last year there was no “taxpayers revolt” against school spending at town and school meetings, as relatively few school budgets were rejected. With the lingering recession, it would be no surprise if more were defeated this year even though, in response to falling enrollments, schools around the state are cutting back.

Nobody likes high property taxes, but those were not a bunch of raging liberals who pressured the Lake Region School Board (raging liberals are not plentiful in this precinct) to put back the money for Spanish and music classes. A few made clear that if it took higher taxes to preserve today’s level of educational quality, then taxes should be higher.

Quite possible a minority outlook. But nobody’s really taken a poll on the matter, and there was the comment not long ago by one man whose politics are relatively centrist and who has no children in the public schools. When someone pointed out that Vermont spends a lot of money on education, he asked, “where else should we spend a lot of money?”,

Over at the Vermont Tiger web site, University of Vermont economics professor Art Woolf had some kind words for the News Guy’s Sept 14 post about possible threats to free speech in UVM’s proposed (and subsequently altered) “solicitations policy” along with an interesting suggestion.

“UVM has some other free speech issues,” Woolf noted, citing a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) which on its green-yellow-red scale rates UVM a yellow, meaning there are some threats to free speech on campus.

But that’s better, from FIRE’s perspective, than Bennington and Middlebury Colleges, both of whom are rated red. Middlebury, in fact, won the organization’s “speech code of the month” rank last May because of its policy on political demonstrations.

As FIRE’s officials acknowledge, no one has lately complained about not being able to speak his or her piece at UVM, Middlebury, or Bennington (the only Vermont schools FIRE deals with). FIRE presents no tangible cases of alleged free speech repression at any of the Vermont campuses.

Neither, it seems, does anybody else. At the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, director Allen Gilbert said that when an anti-harassment law applying to higher education was passed in 2004, “we worried that someday there would be a case that would challenge the constitutionality were the law applied in certain ways.”

But apparently it has not been so applied, at least not so that anybody has complained.

Will Creeley, FIRE’s Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, acknowledged that the ratings are based on “the language in (a college’s) policy, not any application of the policy… (because ) the mere existence of a flawed policy chills speech on campus.”

As assertions go, this can’t be confirmed. But then it can’t be refuted, either, and it seems plausible.

Take the foundation of that May “award” FIRE bestowed on Middlebury. In its policy governing student demonstrations, the College asserts that, “student organizations bear full responsibility for arranging and financing any Department of Public Safety provisions that may be necessary in connection with controversial speakers.”

FIRE claims that this policy “allows fellow students to exercise a ‘heckler’s veto’ over unpopular speech by threatening disruptive protests, thus requiring additional security and, accordingly, additional—and possibly prohibitive—costs.”

On its face, that objection seems reasonable (and Middlebury officials chose not to respond). Suppose a left-wing student organization plans a demonstration. If the conservatives on campus make it known that they intend to be out in force, holding up their own signs and chanting their own slogans, the leftist group would have to put up the money to pay for extra police protection, money it probably does not have. So the demonstration gets called off.

There are also potential problems with the “harassment” policies of the colleges, designed to protect students against racial, ethnic, or gender-based slurs.

The UVM policy defines harassment as any behavior, including “verbal” behavior (meaning speech), “that has the purpose or effect of objectively and substantially undermining and detracting from or interfering with a student’s educational performance or access to school resources or creating an objectively intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

That leaves a lot open to interpretation, even though the last eight words are taken directly from statute and from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. But who “objectively” determines which spoken or written words might create “intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

It isn’t that FIRE objects to all college rules. Free speech does not confer the power to hold a loud demonstration all night, or outside the exam room. Colleges, Creeley said, may impose “reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.” And professors can largely set the speech rules for their own classes.

Restrictions against racial, ethnic, and sexual harassment are also broadly acceptable – even desirable – when it is clear that they govern only person-on-person contact. A university may discipline a student who walks up to another and insults him because of his race, abuses her for being female, or maliciously teases him for being gay.

But what about speech that might insult some students even if it is not directed at them? What about speech that offends many students simply because it expresses views the find abhorrent?

According to FIRE, some colleges are clamping down on that kind of speech, too: at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where authorities would not allow conservative students to protest affirmative action or President Obama’s economic policies; at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) where a student employee “was found guilty of racial harassment for merely reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan during his work breaks.”

“When you give administrators wide berth to punish speech merely because it is disagreeable or uncivil, that discretion will be abused,” Creeley said. “It doesn’t matter if it hasn’t happened yet.”

There have been no reports of similar occurrences in Vermont. But it isn’t difficult to envision the possibilities. Suppose that, in class, a student says that the political power of Jewish organizations restrains pubic discussion of the Mideast, or that affirmative action programs lead to accepting unqualified minority students, or that the Abenaki should not get full tribal recognition because that might lead to gambling casinos in Vermont.

Reasonable public policy statements all. But with today’s sometimes supercharged sensitivity, a Jewish, an African-American, or an Abenaki student might complain to the professor that he or she was so offended that his or her “education performance” was undermined, and that the statements established an “intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

The professor’s response to the offended student should be: “You’re offended? Then be offended. Living in a free society almost guarantees that we’re all going to be offended from time to time. Deal with it” But some professors, especially those still un-tenured, might wonder whether higher-ups would support this response.

That doesn’t happen, said Tom Gustafson, UVM’s Vice President for Student and Campus Life. The complaints that come to university authorities, he said, are more likely to occur when a professor “has been singling out a student who might be African-American, saying, ‘we need the African-American perspective,’ and after awhile the student says, ‘come on, I’m just here as a student.’”

But Creeley argued that the harassment rules can stifle student expression before it is expressed.

“When students are left to guess whether their speech is running afoul (of the rules) it’s rational for them to self-censor rather than risk punishment,” he said.

In the view of some students and faculty, the real “harassment” comes in the form of continual rule changes that seem designed to deter free expression.

“It’s not so much overt restriction as much as the passage of policies that require one to officially schedule space, indoors and outdoors, for setting up a table, holding a speak-out etc.,” wrote UVM English professor Nancy Welch in an email.

Only a “recognized organization” can schedule space, she said, so if I was part of (an unofficial) faculty group…and we wanted to have a table in the Davis Center or outside the library, we could not.”

The intricate rules and regulations imposed by Vermont’s colleges and universities to enhance civility seem to be breeding as much resentment, and perhaps stifling speech. Not to mention that they present examples of the kind of pretentious, turgid prose that (one assumes) the better teachers in the English Department strive to prevent.

Perhaps the state’s institutions of higher learning would be better off with a short, simple, statement banning overt, one-on-one incivility of all kinds, and then simply depending on the old rule that the best (and perhaps the only Constitutional) remedy for narrow-minded, hateful, and ignorant speech is…more speech.

The University of Vermont’s latest proposed re-invention of itself — what it calls its “Spires of Excellence” vision – is complicated, a bit convoluted, and, somewhat controversial.

One might think it’s hard to voice harsh opposition to a proposal that is not yet fully formed, not to mention one that so far has been described in the blandest of bureaucratese, as for example: “will build to the highest levels feasible for the area the capacity to secure external, often highly-competitive, funding for the long-term sustainability of the program, including grants for national research centers…that address critical societal issues…)

Still, the “Transdisciplinary Research Initiative” recently unveiled by UVM has aroused some opposition from the faculty, especially those who think their piece of the pie may shrink.

Which is not to say that the dissent is inspired merely by turf-protection. It is also inspired by the fact that college professors are genetically predisposed to complain.

The above is description, not condemnation. First of all, turf-protection is the default reaction everywhere – in academia, government, business, religion, and, in all probability, the Kiwanis Club. Furthermore, nobody – at least nobody who has a good gig – likes change.

Besides, scholars should be “aginners.” Like reporters, their first reaction to every new proposal should be to look at what may be wrong with it. It’s the lower-class version of what literary critic Lesley Fiedler called the novelist’s duty to shout “No, in thunder,” to respectable social norms.

Essentially, what UVM’s administration wants to do is concentrate on a few areas that transcend the customary academic subject departments in an effort to make the university a leader in selected fields. The chosen “spires” are biological science, complex systems, culture and society, environment, food systems, neurosciences, policy studies, and public health.

As Domenico Grasso, vice president for research and dean of the graduate school, put it “If we want to truly distinguish ourselves and be considered among the very best, we have to be strategic and focused in our allocation of resources. In the past, we’ve tried to be all things to all people. Identifying spires of excellence is the path we need to pursue to become truly exceptional.”

A reasonable outlook especially in the context of the realities of public higher education these days. State universities get less money from federal and state government. That means they have to get more from private grants and tuition. So they have to “market” themselves, both to students and their parents (especially upper-income parents) and to businesses.

By concentrating on the sciences, with their greater appeal to businesses, and aspiring to “excellence” in certain fields, UVM hopes to appeal to both sets of “customers.”

Makes sense. On the other hand, it also makes sense to wonder whether the realities of public higher education these days is really desirable, a question which requires a quick trip back in history.

Like most major social transformations, the growth of public higher education didn’t just happen. It came about because of government planning, a pursuit Americans sometimes try to pretend does not exist. The post-World War II G.I. Bill allowed hundreds of thousands of men to go to college. The 1947 “Truman Commission” report (“Higher Education for Democracy”) paved the way for state and federal policies dedicated to the then-radical notion that college should be available to all qualified students regardless of income.

So for the next few decades, tuition was low, faculty jobs were plentiful and secure, and millions of students were educated. As a result, the United States had more highly trained technicians, engineers, and managers than any country in the history of the world, one reason it became richer than any country in the history of the world.

About 30 years ago, government policy changed, executing a partial but substantial reversal. Government funding dropped, tuitions went up, and so did dependence on private grants. Outside of the sciences, faculty jobs became both scarcer and less secure. State Universities had to be more enterprising to thrive, making it harder for them to be “all things to all people.”

The reasonable question that some faculty members are raising now (and some public officials might raise soon) is whether, assuming it makes this “spires of excellence” transformation, UVM will still be enough things to enough Vermont students.

For example, the concentration on science, especially health-related science, enhances the likelihood that a UVM-educated physician or PhD will one day become a world class researcher, perhaps helping find a cure for a terrible disease. That researcher will, in the words of acting Provost Jane Knodell, be “making a difference in the world,” which is the goal of “Spires of Excellence.”

Great. But will the university still be a good place for a Vermont student who wants to become a family practitioner in his or her home town? That could be considered “excellence,” too, and, in its own way, “making a difference in the world.”

What some professors fear is that the fields with less glitz (and less revenue-attracting potential) — Greek and Latin, theater, English literature, even pure research science (Dennis Clougherty, chairman of the physics department, is a leading dissenter) — will suffer as more of the University’s scarce resources flow into “the spires.”

UVM insists that this will not be the case. But it is pretty much what the administration of President Daniel Mark Fogel just did with athletics – dropping the baseball and softball teams to concentrate resources on its de facto “spires of excellence: — basketball and hockey.

State universities have always been places where elitist and egalitarian values met, collided, compromised, and co-existed. This proposal to tilt UVM not just toward the elite, but toward selective elites, is in its early stages, and likely to be altered by public opinion, politics, and of course, the complaints of professors. They’re good at it.