Mues Misrepresents the Data on Wheatland Bus
Nils Peterson
In your article on the UI Fireside Chat (2/14), your reporter quotes Vice
President Lloyd Mues saying "he couldn¹t justify using funds from the UI¹s
general budget to pay for something that had UI students among the lowest
percentage of riders."
That statement is patently false. Mues continues to make it in the face of
data collected as riders board that shows UI students are the SINGLE LARGEST
group of riders: Oct 06- UI students 34%; Nov 06- 32%; Dec 06- 25% (school
was out for 2 weeks) and Jan 07- 29% (tied with WSU staff; school was not in
session the full month) (Data from Wheatland).
Mues has repeatedly made statements like "The groups that use the service,
like students, faculty and area residents, need to find an alternative
funding stream," to suggest that somehow area residents are major riders of
the service and are freeloading. Again the data are consistent; pay-per-ride
accounts for 2-3% of Wheatland rides.
The UI registrar's office provided a list of courses in the UI catalog
described as "WSU CO-OP" that UI students could register for during the
06-07 academic year. There are 172 courses, 194 offerings. 45% of these
courses are 500-level, 26% are 400-level. Courses taught by WSU for UI
include: Food Science and Toxicology (FST), 24 courses; Plant Science (PLSC)
15; Chinese (CHIN) 10; Philosophy (PHIL) 10; Statistics (STAT) 10; Civil
Engineering (CE) 9; Russian (RUSS) 9; Geology (GEOL) 8.
The questions your reporter should be asking are: Can UI sustain the loss of
current students if access to these courses becomes impractical? How would
the cost of teaching these 194 courses at UI compare to the $100K for the
bus? How much indirect costs from grant activities can be attributed to
these close collaborations between UI and WSU?
Nils Peterson
Moscow