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Advocacy for Good Times and Bad

by Anthony J. DiGiorgio

Early in my presidency at Winthrop University, I asked my leadership team to think beyond our extended campus community to identify groups who always would have a stake in Winthrop’s continuing progress.

In short order, we had list of more than 30 stakeholders, ranging from businesses that hire our graduates, to businesses that sell us supplies, to charities that benefit from our volunteer service, to families that attend concerts and athletics events, to local governments that benefit from the taxes we pay. But it was the newest member of the leadership team who identified the most important of stakeholders for Winthrop and, indeed, for all of public higher education, by asking this question:

Isn’t the future a stakeholder, too?

Indeed, the future remains arguably our most important stakeholder—the one shared by all the others.

Fast-forward to 2009, when that particular higher education stakeholder—the future— has more at risk than ever before, all across America, but particularly in South Carolina. The global economic crisis has hit public higher education with three simultaneous roundhouse blows: state appropriations are continuing in free fall, endowments have been deflated by plummeting stock values, and many families have been caught up in personal crises that mean tapping kids’ college funds to meet day-to-day expenses.

Yet concurrently, higher education in 2009 is universally recognized as one of the essential drivers for America’s economic recovery. Accordingly, the U.S. Congress, with encouragement from AASCU, responded quickly to the economic meltdown, fast-tracking approval of an emergency economic stimulus bill. Most states already are seeing that assistance arrive to help to stabilize state budgets and payrolls through aid to education. Most states, that is, except South Carolina, though our state already has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation.

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