Be Part of the Solution for Change BY ben lucero
The University of Alaska Anchorage is regarded as Alaska’s capital choice for education. In recent years the school has come under fire by the community for various reasons ranging from mismanaging money, raising tuition, to not providing students a campus-like environment to name a few. Do these comments tell the truth about our failing educational system or highlight a deeper issue inside our community?
A certain truth is that no university could pay competitive wages for the best faculty, sponsor sport led events for students, and provide a campus-like environment solely on what they earn from tuition cost alone. To provide these services universities rely on external funding. Recently state legislature has effectively cut funding to our local educational system which negatively impacted what our university could provide staff and students.
Regardless, if you think that the budget cuts were necessary or not- the picture this article intends to paint is that the University is doing what it can with the resources it has been provided. However, the peculiar thing is the body of bashful rhetoric that has come against the school for not being able to provide a better service to its students, oddly enough does not resonate from the body of alumni and body of students that attend now.
In the United States, a shift in culture has sprung up that applauds hateful speech and malicious attacks against other people and has seeped into how we talk about our local university. It happens all the time, people become unhappy about some service offered or some product that they bought for 99 cents then they valiantly take to tools like Google Review or Yelp to write some nasty reviews about their experience. The problem here is not that the University of Alaska Anchorage is mismanaging money or that the students are unhappy but that the community has stopped supporting the university and instead of coming up with a solution has begun to be part of the cancel culture that sits behind their desk and spreads negative speech.
It is always easier for someone to complain about their situation than change it. And in today’s culture people think if they cut your legs from underneath you, it makes them taller. As the dominant branch of education in our state, UAA has provided our community with an endless stream of resources for our students to utilize. The community of Alaska benefits most of all from the countless students that graduate with degrees and become doctors and nurses, and business entrepreneurs that later serve our state.
Now, the question remains, if you do not like the school or think that it is squandering its money on unnecessary projects that is fine, everyone has a right to their opinion- but what are you doing to change the situation of our school besides criticizing it when you do not contribute to the experience the students receive? The main point here is that everybody is quick to complain but who is making a difference in their community?
A constructive way to make our local university a better place for all to enjoy would be to donate any resources you might have available; volunteer your time, sponsor state-led teams, host school events so that kids can become more engaged in local activities. Countless ideas are possible to make UAA a stellar choice for students across the nation to come and be a part of, but we will not see that if we count out the various ways we can support it and make it a better place for the students we have today.
The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by Sol de Medianoche, which welcomes a broad range of community viewpoints.
