The proposed reductions in university funding constitute a serious, crippling attack on the research and education capabilities of the state. This would be a foolish move at any time, and particularly at a time of fiscal crisis. It is only through maintained and improved research and educational capabilities that solutions to this crisis, and to others in the future, will be achieved.

Such attacks on the university system will soon reduce Michigan to the status of Alabama, Mississippi and other states that do not adequately fund education and research; as a result, those states consistently lie at the bottom in comparisons of median income and any other measure of prosperity and public welfare.

The current crisis is the result of a temporary downturn in the economic cycle. Several indicators just last week predicted a corresponding upturn in the next few months.

Irremediable destruction of the state's educational and research capabilities should at least await the outcome of this particular cycle.

Effort should be devoted to rearranging the financial administration to accommodate these now well-established cycles of economic activity.

Private and corporate individuals and organizations, and nations as well, routinely incur temporary debts in lean times to tide them over to more prosperous times - when they can be repaid and the basic infrastructure can continue to operate uninterrupted. Is it not time to get rid of the irrational prohibition of states, and Michigan in particular, from incurring debts?

Deficit funding has its dangers, but prudently managed, as demonstrated many times on the national level and in private business, it can save the overall workings of government. Otherwise, we are doomed to operate forever at the level of the most severe poverty incurred at any time in the economic cycle.

John Irwin Johnson
radiology professor