University Of Hard Knocks

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

UNLV President Neal Smatresk told a somber Faculty Senate on Tuesday that the administration was planning a kind of bankruptcy to deal with its budget crunch.

Under the "financial exigency" plan, tenured professors could be fired and whole departments and programs more easily closed down.

Earlier this month, the Board of Regents said it would be premature to consider such a move until the Legislature approved a final budget by June.

Smatresk told the faculty group that the cuts for UNLV would total $47.5 million and would need to be implemented by July 2012, so a plan for financial exigency would have to be prepared.

UNLV has had about $50 million in cuts over the last four years, mostly in non-academic areas and mostly avoiding large cuts for professor positions. If the cuts proposed by Gov. Brian Sandoval were approved, Smatresk said, academic cuts could not be avoided.

"We would have to declare financial exigency," Smatresk said. He added, "I believe the proposed cuts could materialize."

He and other officials would spend the next few weeks developing cutback plans with deans and faculty groups.

"It's very clear our state is approaching a state of fiscal collapse" when it comes to education, Smatresk said.

The cuts, Smatresk said, will lead to a "smaller, more expensive, more selective institution."

Universities, education and knowledge are for suckers, anyway.  Real Americans drop out of college and found multi-billion dollar companies in their garage and stuff.  Besides, clearly the answer here is to cut taxes for the wealthy more and eliminate the estate tax so that when one of them dies, they'll have extra money to endow to the school.

Tax cuts magically create more revenue than the cuts themselves cost, you know.  And you don't need one of them there fancy-pants college degrees to know that, by gum.