Column: HB 265 is a moratorium on extracurriculars

The Utah State University Aggie Marching Band is a fairly common sight among fields across campus. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, they spread across the turf, diligently rehearsing formations and refining the songs they play at games. 

Just before a training session in mid-November, the shoulder strap for a drum harness snapped, leaving a bass drum in the grass. Though one might expect a spare harness to be provided while the original was under repair, no such spares existed, leaving a member of the band to march without her instrument. 

This incident echoes a growing sentiment amongst students and staff alike: Significant funding disparities among university departments allow some extracurriculars to flourish while others struggle to remain afloat. Recent changes in university funding have only widened this divide. 

Nine months ago, the Utah Legislature sent House Bill 265, the “Higher Education Strategic Reinvestment,” to the Utah Governor’s Office, kickstarting a series of sudden changes that have since dramatically altered the landscape of higher education across the state. The bill in question stripped 10% from the instructional budgets of Utah’s eight public universities and colleges, with total losses exceeding $60 million when combined. 

The legislature stated it would return these funds once it was presented with viable 3-year reinvestment plans, which universities have bent over backwards to produce. Many of these have created new programs and courses related to STEM, healthcare and AI while slashing offerings for humanities, social sciences and the arts. 

The University of Utah cut 81 programs alone, including everything from a bachelor’s program in chemistry teaching to a doctorate in theater. Since Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill into law on March 26, all eight institutions have made massive changes to their curricula, but of the plans proposed, only one has been rejected: USU’s. While the reason behind this was USU’s lack of a permanent president at the time, the university is currently not eligible for the reinvestment.  

Despite axing 14 majors, eliminating half a dozen full-time positions and more than 80 student jobs and squeezing five colleges into two, the legislature continues to withhold over $12.6 million from the budget. While this has led faculty and students in “underproductive” majors to scramble, a lesser-known effect has taken hold among the university’s various extracurriculars. 

Erica Brady, a master’s student majoring in business administration, is a bass drum player in the marching band. It was her harness that broke on Nov.13, preventing her from carrying her bass drum, which weighs more than 20 pounds. She recounted her experience in an interview with The Utah Statesman. 

“We were getting ready to warm up actually, and one of the metal pieces on my harness broke, and this has happened to several other people this semester already, and so there were no extra replacements,” Brady said. “We ran out of replacements, and I don’t know when we’re ordering more.” 

According to Brady, four or five of the band’s harnesses have broken this semester. Others have had their interiors filled by towels and duct tape, the original padding having long since worn out. When asked for his opinion on funding discrepancies, Lane Weaver, the USU director of athletic bands, declined to comment. 

“There’s some setbacks there for sure that could be alleviated at least to some degree by additional funding,” Brady said. 

Although their current financial situation is less than ideal, the marching band is among the university’s luckier extracurriculars, with new uniforms and stipends thus far unaffected by cuts. On the other side of campus, USU’s chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America saw its entire yearly index eliminated, now operating on the funds that rolled over from last year. 

Chloe Miller, the club’s president, is a senior majoring in journalism with an emphasis in PR. She expressed disdain at how the lack of funding has affected club members’ ability to take part in events that strengthen their career prospects. 

“The lack of funding this year has been very frustrating to me, particularly watching my peers pay completely out-of-pocket for a conference experience that was well over $1,000, which the department aided in years past,” Miller said. “At the conference, which took place in Washington, D.C. this year, many students from across the nation were shocked to hear that our university did not fund at least a portion of the trip.” 

Miller highlighted the seemingly paradoxical effect of the legislature’s new bill. 

“It’s my understanding that a reason USU has felt so much legislative pressure is because they are not meeting certain requirements for job placements,” Miller said. “The ICON Conference and other opportunities PRSSA provides to its members all have one goal: to get students jobs. It’s bizarre that our efforts would not be met with more support from higher-ups.” 

Various students not involved with extracurriculars also shared their emotions toward what they feel is an injustice to their peers, especially those in less prioritized fields.  

Joshua Sipe, a junior majoring in history, said he feels funding for extracurriculars already had an unfair bias towards athletics even before governmental cuts, limiting students’ self-expression. 

“Sports gets most of it, so the other groups have to rely on fundraising,” Sipe said. “When you don’t have funding, you can’t go to a lot of things. You probably also don’t get recognition.” 

Phineas Billingsley, a junior majoring in forest ecology, said that he feels the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business receives too much money, while the newly-minted College of Arts and Sciences receives too little.  

“I feel like a lot of departments are really underfunded, while others are being overfunded,” Billingsley said. “On top of that, we have other departments, like the arts department, which was so underfunded that it got cut and merged with other colleges so that they could get funding.” 

The message is clear, at least among a good deal of students: the Utah Legislature’s cuts and reinvestments have done little to safeguard majors and activities that have historically been trivialized, while giving other, more prosperous departments windfalls they may not need. Their purported overreach into higher education is at best wildly controversial amongst students, educators and the general public, and at worst, a textbook example of the failures of austerity. 

Higher education in Utah deserves more than mere scraps. If the state legislature is genuinely dedicated to the well-being of students after graduation, they might instead take a venture similar to Ireland, which established a Basic Income for the Arts three years ago, providing 2,000 eligible creatives with $1,500 every month since September of 2022. Rather than draining public resources, every euro invested into the program returned €1.39 to the Irish economy. 

Who’s to say Utah can’t do the same? Instead of snatching funds and forcing changes, legislators should amend or revise HB 265 to work with the institutions it wants to adjust rather than against them, raising the floor for underfunded programs instead of pushing the ceiling ever higher.