Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few weeks, you know about the school cutting personnel and consolidating colleges.

Naturally, many students are upset and confused by the cuts, especially the underclassmen who will either have to transfer schools or pick a new major. Even if your major survived, you may be losing a good teacher. Or maybe your major was already understaffed, so losing a teacher of any quality is baffling.

However, there seems to be some confusion about why some majors were cut and not others. The majors were assessed based on how many people graduated from that program and the amount of students in that program.

In other words, President Nick Bruno didn’t sit down and say, “Hmmm, you know medical lab science isn’t that important, let’s close up that program. And geology? Who cares about rocks? CUT!”

Still, a school can only survive so many budget cuts. It’s like a scene from a cartoon where the character is trying to plug up leaks in a dam with his fingers. You only have so many fingers and more importantly, it’s not a long-term solution.

One long-term solution is for the state to increase its higher education funding.

Which is exactly what some of the faculty at ULM had in mind when they went to a Northern & Central Interfaith meeting on Thursday.

Interfaith is a non-government funded program that is a collection of people from various Christian denominations. They have been seeking to improve education, although until recently they had not been focusing on higher education.

Interfaith presented facts about the devastating effects that resulted from Gov. Bobby Jindal’s gutting of higher education. Many ULM personnel joined the presentation, stressing the effects of the cuts. You can read more about their recent meeting on page 9.

Although bringing awareness to the effects of the drastic cuts is important, the fact still remains…there’s only so much we can do without the help of the state.