Editorial: Retirement option incentive for disaster

09/17/08 - A little more than a month ago, Vice President of Administration Robert Weygand said that University of Rhode Island students should not expect a smaller number of classes being offered at URI.But according to URI Provost Donald DeHayes in an interview yesterday, URI could see a reduced number of sections for each class, which could be just as disastrous.

Either hundreds of students will be crammed into courses that were only meant for half of its class size, or there will be less available sections all together.

In addition to that, not all professors have been replaced by young and lively instructors - what's happening to the quality of education in those classes?

When times get tough, the last component of education to go out the window should be classes and quality of education.

In addition to that, advising, research and outreach programs are facing the chopping block, or at least a cutback. But without those essential tools, the academic infrastructure of the university will no longer have the support system it needs to function as a proper state institution of higher education. It's the advising, research, outreach and service programs that attract many students to the university, and keep them there.

It's pointless to create state-of-the-art classrooms and train instructors for a technologically-advanced age when there aren't enough instructors or too many students to take advantage of those things.

Students come to this university, not just to sit in a lecture hall filled with 500 students and learn about the Revolutionary War, but to create their own fulfilling college experience. The tests take place in the classroom, but it doesn't exclude the sometimes life-long mentors that are students' advisers, a research program that threw everything they thought they knew out the window, and the professors with years of experience to guide them in their most crucial years.

These are the years where students become citizens of the world, and if URI hopes to be a part of that event, it's time the university to get itself together.