OPINION: How Commuter Students Can Keep The University Honest

 

(Driving by Simon Collison via Flickr)

Have you noticed how much UT-Tyler has changed? 

Over the last five years, specifically with President Kirk Calhoun’s arrival, the university has exploded in the size of its administration and oversight of student life. For example, the institution is now hiring its first diversity officer, has pushed again for a higher athletics fees and has vowed to provide more traditions and social programming for student life, expanding its administrative reach ever farther. That’s a lot of administrative growth! 

However, it’s not always for the better. This kind expansion leads to a larger bureaucracy that is ultimately more expensive to operate and eventually more costly for students through higher tuition and fees.

However, if there is any group of students who can put a check on this expansion, then it is the commuter students at UT-Tyler. By opposing the next athletics fee increase, UT-Tyler’s commuter students can rein-in Big Education’s excessive expansion at UT-Tyler.

Now, before we discuss why this is true, let’s take a look at the different constituency groups on campus. I break them up into two main groups: students who live on-campus and those who commute. 

Residential Students vs. Commuter Students

On that note, have you ever noticed the different mindsets between on-campus students and commuters? I notice that students who live on campus generally attend university not just for an education, but for a special type of life experience. That is, they want the “traditional college experience” complete with school spirit, clubs, and the like. In reality, it’s more like they want a sense of belonging more than the want anything else. I hold that what these students really want is not firstly an education, but preeminently an identity that they can carry with them for the rest of their life—and they believe the university experience can give it to them. That’s on-campus students in a nutshell.

On the other hand, not so the commuter students. These Patriots live off-campus and generally already have their own life embedded in their own communities. They have a family, a church, a spouse or a job that gives them a sense of meaning. They don’t need to look to a university for this. Many look to UT-Tyler, not to help define them in life, but to help enhance them in their professional or artistic or educational qualifications. What commuter students want from university is generally a quality education at an affordable price, and that’s about it. 

Administrators, Too.

However, before we conclude this part, it is important to also recognize the opinion-shaping role university administrators play as well that influences campus politics. This group shapes how students see the university’s actions and it usually through collectivist goals. That is, administrators generally tend to have a “team player” mindset and typically believe that what is good for the institution is good for the whole. In practice, this means they typically accept if students must pay more to fund the university’s goals. Administrators shape opinion and are another important group in campus politics. 

On-Campus Students and Administrators

So how do these three groups interact? It is important to note that university administrators and on-campus students values overlap and are the most compatible with each other. Both groups want a greater sense of campus community, and therefore, both are willing to accept a cost—either a greater financial cost in case of the students or a greater administrative expansion in case of the administrators—in order to obtain this. So it does, and this is because these two groups’ desires align.

Fuels To Administrative Growth

Of all the players in campus politics, its these two groups desires that fuel the growth of the administrative wing of the university at UT-Tyler and the rising cost to pay for the props and programs to usher in a sense of university community. This leads to greater degrees of the bloated and expansive bureaucracy, which I call “big education”. At present, UT-Tyler expansion of administrative power and centralization of oversight comes from the influence these two constituencies on campus politics.

Commuters: A Check On Big Education

However, commuter students can check the expansion of big education at UT-Tyler. Since commuters compose over 60 percent of the student body population, their vote far exceed on-campus students’ votes in a campus election. This means that if commuter students would participate in campus decisions, their values would dominate campus priorities.  

Should commuter values find more representation in campus decision-making, then I believe the university would see a shift in priorities from social programming and administrative intervention into student life to more practical concerns about education, such as in students’ specialized college program, in student advising or other education-related aspects.

I believe commuter students would put a hard stop to athletic fee increases, thereby putting an insurmountable political obstacle before administrators. It would require campus leaders to abandon the pursuit to pump up athletics to be a marketing strategy in order to find another way to market the university that is more financially agreeable to commuter students. 

Commuters: A Sobering Effect On Spending

With commuters’ aversions to higher costs of education and the simplicity of what they expect from the university, their influence would have a sobering effect upon excessive spending and bureaucratic bloat by leadership. It would bring the administration back down to earth. The university would have to think in terms of what is possible, rather than just in terms of what other students say they want. 

This opposition to the next student athletics fee increase would put such an obstacle in the way of current leadership’s goals that it will make have to think twice about the viability of this route for university promotion. 

This would cause leadership to seriously consider other ways to market the university that are more financially agreeable to commuter students who don’t want to pay more for education. In the end, it would check Big Education’s excessive growth at UT-Tyler and restore the university to more sobriety about its proper role in students’ lives. 

Commuter students already are a powerful voting block. If they will show up, they will bring UT-Tyler back from its distractions. 

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Twitter: @jhescock12