As a private institution, the impression that the University of Denver makes on many is often associated with money. This school has a lot of it, and with a total net asset evaluation of 1.8 billion in 2022, I would not blame you for assuming that our school is financially savvy. But unfortunately, that is not the case.
The past couple of years have shown us that people in positions of power at this school don’t care, or even at times fail to understand, what a community of care can and should look like. With an institution as wealthy as ours, there is no reason for employees with graduate school degrees to qualify for food stamps. And there is no excuse for the fact that the food pantry on this campus has been financially gutted.
Administrators can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but for some reason, we can’t afford to make sure that everyone in this community has enough food to eat at night.
As I have dug deeper and deeper into a trend that is best associated with financial mismanagement, the stories I hear are appalling. Some student organizations at this school have lost large portions of their funding, and academic departments last quarter were given budget cuts due to a lack of graduate school enrollment, resulting in staff members being laid off.
Meanwhile, tuition for all of us as students has consistently “adjusted for inflation” while merit scholarships remain fixed and don’t adjust at all. And yet, for all this discussion on inflation, I have never heard a professor talk about their wages adjusting. In fact, during the beginning of the pandemic, many of these professors and staff members had to take pay cuts and pay freezes while our Chancellor received a 240k dollar bonus.
Staff members are treated poorly as well. According to a former Daniels College of Business employee and current DU Community member, some staff members live as far as 40 minutes away from campus “because they are trying to live on the wages that the University gives them.” They noted that the business school staff makes more than other departments yet there are still “people with masters degrees, double masters degrees and PhDs that still only make 60k a year.” The community member has asked to remain anonymous due to fears of receiving backlash from the administration.
Ian Duran, one of the founders of the DU Student Union who hopes to promote a better understanding of labor rights on campus, referred to the constant lying and rhetorical deception on behalf of the administration as the thing that irks him the most.
“We’ve seen this a couple of different instances now where DU doesn’t just lie, they mislead or misconstrue evidence in order to fit their narrative,” he said.
Nothing embodies this more than the recent 4D Experience Initiative.
According to this rebranding, there are four dimensions the initiative hopes to promote: advancing intellectual growth, pursuing careers, promoting well-being and exploring character.
But how can this school advance intellectual growth if they can’t fairly compensate those who teach us? How are we supposed to pursue careers when the Burwell Center relies on student peer advisors because they can’t afford to hire enough professional career advisors? How are we to promote “well-being” when this school can’t even fund a fully functioning food pantry? And how are we to properly explore character when campus organizations see drastic budget cuts that border on bankrupting student-led communities?
These are all questions that we as students must ask because it is obvious that our administration isn’t asking them.
Instead of making sure communities where real friendships and memories are formed remain intact, they would rather promote some distant “Mountain Campus” that we as students still have to pay a fee to use. Whether it is a logo re-design or a flashy marketing scheme, the administration we currently have will fundraise millions of dollars and accept donations for specific projects as long as it doesn’t have a real and tangible impact on the students who take out loans to come here.
Part of what makes this issue so difficult to deal with is that students and employees at this school are pretty much excluded from every meeting and decision-making process. We have no say in where our money goes.
“We can’t even fight this beast because it is an invisible beast,” Duran noted.
On top of that, we have no access whatsoever to information concerning where money and resources are being used.
If you are an individual who has been affected by our school’s financial mismanagement, or if you are part of a community that has been marginalized and forgotten about by the administration, I encourage you to get involved in any way you can. The DU Student Union and Divest DU are two amazing student-led organizations that I encourage everyone to look into.
In the meantime, know that this is a developing story. I will be looking to tell the story of those who have been impacted so that these injustices are documented and publicized. Together as a collective we can pressure this institution to do the right thing, and only together can we make this school what we all know it can be.
