These days the news is full of stories about the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, nicknamed the Super Committee, and whether it can come up with a politically acceptable way to reduce the ballooning federal deficit.
This is illustrated by some recent headlines:
Super Committee Holds More Closed-Door Meetings (Huffington Post); Democrats Gloomy, Republicans More Optimistic on Prospects for Super Committee (National Journal); Supercommittee: Go big, go bold, go smart (Salt Lake Tribune).
On Oct. 3, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University and the President of University of Tennessee, Nicholas Zeppos and Joseph A. DiPietro, sent a joint letter to the select committee to urge members to “carefully consider the impact that future cuts to federal spending would have on the ability of our economy to educate and innovate.”
The leaders of Tennessee’s two research universities pointed out that the nation’s budgetary woes are not driven by the discretionary portion of the federal government, which includes support for education and scientific research.
“… we believe that we must find ways to rein in the mounting costs of our entitlement programs; however, we urge you to recognize that controlling those costs should not come at the expense of our ability to train future doctors and health care providers,” they said. “We encourage you to craft an agreement that is equitable, sustainable and does not starve critical programs that lead to long-term economic growth.”
“As you prioritize scarce federal dollars in order to reduce our deficit, we hope that you will direct those resources to programs that provide long-term benefits, such as scientific research and education. Indiscriminate, across-the-board cuts in government spending might reduce the deficit in the short term, but they would limit our ability to set our economy on a firmer foundation for future growth and economic prosperity,” they urged.
The letter disclosed that Vanderbilt received $585 million in federal research funding in the past year that has led to advances in fields as varied as personalized medicine, nanotechnology and effective teaching practices. Similarly, UT’s federal research programs, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, added more than $4 billion to Tennessee’s state gross domestic product and supported more than 45,000 full-time jobs.
The letter is the latest in a series of activities that the two universities have undertaken in Washington D.C. to deliver the message to our Congressional representatives during this period of extreme budget cutting that federal investments in university education and research are essential to the nation’s future.