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Gainesville is a place of doom and gloom these days. The university budget has been cut by 6 per cent. More than 400 faculty and staff positions have been lost. Several departments have been eliminated. Restaurants are going to get less business. A lot of apartments will go vacant.

But maybe, just maybe, there is a bright side to this dark coin. Maybe during the seven fat years when we grew and grew and grew, we should have been spending a little timer preparing for seven lean years.

I want to pose, seriously, a few questions that perhaps we should have asked before.
Do we have to be a university of 54,000 students? Weren’t we a pretty good university when we had only 35,000 students? Wouldn’t traffic be a little better in Gainesville if we had, say, only 44,000 students today?

Do we have too many majors? Do we need to offer language majors in Vietnamese and Korean? Amid all the hubbub about killing this and that department, have we taken a good look at the student-faculty ratio historically in some of our departments? UF started as an Ag school, right? But in the year 2008, how many Ag departments do we really need? Wouldn’t it be better to farm some of them out to other universities that are closer to major farm crops?

And how about administration itself? I would love to see a listing of the number of people it takes to run the various administrative units at the University of Florida, starting at the top, and compare that number to the number employed at the beginning of each decade, starting 50 years ago. And to be fair I would figure in the comparative number of students and faculty who need to be administered in each decade.

There was a time at the University of Florida when faculty actually advised students. Really, it was part of their jobs. Now we have a whole unit of state employees who do that for faculty. I don’t imagine we asked faculty to teach an extra course in return for giving up that particular part of their jobs.

And take a look at our students. Eliminating need-based criteria from Bright Futures Scholarships was one of the dumber things the Legislature has ever done, and that’s saying a mouthful. If the Legislature took this little entitlement away from students whose parents could afford to pay for their college educations, perhaps the Legislature would not have had to cut the university budgets so drastically.

All I’m saying is that the headlines do not tell the whole story. My heart goes out to those who will lose their jobs. But perhaps if money were not spent in the wrong places, they would still have jobs.

This is Radio Ralph with a comment at midweek for AM850.