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KANSAN.COM
NEWS
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University's political science department struggles to find faculty to teach electives
JAMES HOYT
@ jamesjhoyt
Lauren Arney, a senior from Stilwell, has wanted to take POLS 640: Politics of Reproductive Policy to help fulfill her public policy minor, but she won't get to before she graduates in May.
A shortage of faculty in the political science department has resulted in a dearth of public policy elective classes, and some professors worry the situation will only get worse.
"We've had lots of retirements and very few replacements," political science professor Burdett Loomis said. "We will be hard-pressed in a couple of years to teach very basic things like the Congress, political parties, stuff like that."
Don Haider-Markel, chair of the political science department, said the manpower crisis is caused mainly by retirements and budget constraints. The department has struggled to fill spots for tenured professors.
"We've gone through a period where we've had a number of senior faculty retire, and our ability to teach the courses we normally teach — we're really understaffed," Haider-Markel said. "We've gone from 24 faculty down to 17 in a really short period of time."
Next semester, two upper-level courses that can be taken for the public policy minor, POLS 629: Topics in Health Policy and Politics in America; and POLS 669: Comparative Politics: Comparative Public Policy. Both classes will
be taught by graduate teaching assistants, according to the University Registrar website. For a minor, students need four upper level elective public policy courses along with two introductory courses.
Political science isn't alone in its struggles. Other departments from around the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences have also had trouble filling their ranks.
"Virtually every department around would like to have another faculty member, or two or three or four," said Don Steeples, interim dean of the college.
Haider-Markel said that the best option for students who fear that they will not be able to finish the policy minor track is to check with the department for the possibility of
substituting a class from another political science track or elsewhere at the University.
"We'd have to get a hold of a syllabus and determine if that [course] is an appropriate substitute," Haider-Markel said.
Undergraduate adviser Emily Plotkin said it's up to the individual schools to make substitutions in a student's curriculum and advisers will pass those requests along.
"The good news is that whole idea of being able to petition things is a great thing to be able to do at KU, because it doesn't make you feel like you can't question authority, and it is possible to do," she said.
Arney, a biology major, is on track to graduate with the minor by taking one class each semester. However, she said that had a class not lined up
JAMES HOYT/KANSAN
A flyer displays classes offered for the public policy minor in Blake Hall.
with the rest of her schedule or been available for one semester, she would not receive the degree on time with the political science classes.
"There's only one offered this
semester, so I don't really get the option of choosing a class in the minor that I may be more interested in," she said.
Study: Cuts for clinics leads to fewer women seeking care
Edited by Maddie Farber
CONNER MITCHELL
@connermitchellO
A study co-authored by a University professor shows that cuts in funding directed at health clinics that provide abortion services and preventive care leads to fewer women seeking preventative care.
The research by David Slusky, assistant professor of economics at the University, and Yao Lu of the Analysis Group in Boston, was released on Oct. 6. Slusky and Lu localized their research to Texas and Wisconsin, two states that enacted early legislation cutting funding to women's health clinics that provided abortion services.
DAVID SLUSKY
Slusky said the research was conducted by a national network, which reported quarterly what clinics closed in
Texas and Wisconsin. He said those states were picked because they were two of the first to eliminate funding for the clinics that provide abortion services. The driving distance to the nearest facility from each ZIP code in the state was then calculated to compare with independent survey data
from women about the relative changes in driving distance and the relative changes in preventative care.
The research, which was partially funded through fellowships with the National Science Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, found when a facility closed and women's drives increased by 100 miles or more, the rate at which women sought preventative screenings such as breast exams, mammograms and Pap smears decreased by 11 percent, 18 percent and 14 percent, respectively.
"This result is not unique to [Texas and Wisconsin]. If access to care is reduced, emphasis of care goes down," Slusky said. "If preventive care doesn't have an immediate benefit,
then it also has opportunity costs such as taking off work, driving a whole day one way of the other to get such care, and people are going to get less of it if we close these women and health and family planning clinics."
Slusky said while there is not an explicit push from state and federal governments to cut funding for preventive care services, there is a push to cut funding for abortion services. However, he said separating the two issues is not as simple as politicians would like it to be.
"Organizations have fixed costs," he said. "They offer a wide variety of services to cover their fixed costs, and if you limit them to individual services, they may not be able to cover their fixed costs and
it might not make sense for them financially to stay in operation”
Planned Parenthood is a women's health care organization which provides preventive services including Pap smear, breast exams and screenings for cervical cancer, according to its website. The organization has been the target of much of the government reduction in funding for its offering of abortion services.
Kansas won a federal court case in 2014 which allowed the state to entirely defund the organization. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri filed the lawsuit in 2011 after Governor Sam Brownback announced that funding for organizations that provide abortion services would be revoked in the 2012 budget.
Slusky said under federal law, the Hyde Amendment stipulates government funding can not go towards abortion services.
Therefore, the calls to eliminate funding to health care clinics who provide abortion services would eliminate funding needed to provide other necessary services.
"If zero percent of the federal funding is going towards abortion services, and politicians are still calling for that money to be cut, then they seem to be willing to call for it to be cut from reimbursements to Planned Parenthood and alike for other services," Slusky said. Rachel Whitten, communications director for the Kansas
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