Budget Cuts Backlash

By Nadine Navarro

Why UF’s award-winning Documentary Institute is relocating to Wake Forest

The notorious UF budget cuts have brought opportunity to another institution.
While the cuts have affected every college in the university in some way – some more than others – they’ve had a particularly interesting effect on UF’s award-winning Documentary Institute, which will permanently close its doors at the end of the spring semester and move to Wake Forest University.
Among the long list of accolades for the Institute are five documentaries aired nationally by PBS, as well as multiple Student Emmy and Student Academy Award nominations and wins.
“They were an excellent program,” said John W. Wright, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at UF. “[But] we had to make a choice.”

The $250,000 a year that was allocated to the Institute accounted for 48 percent of the total available “expense” (or non-salary) budget for the entire college, Wright said, which was distributed by the state in the amount of approximately $525,000 before the budget cuts in public education. When the college lost this money as a result of statewide cuts, according to information received in an e-mail from Wright, it included the $250,000 allocated to the documentary program.
The department had several meetings with the program representatives to make a decision that was best for the college, he said. Every possible solution was considered, but in the end, everyone agreed that the decision to cut the Institute was the best one.

“Documentary programs are wonderful. They are essential, but they are expensive,” Wright said. “If the college still had funds, it would still have the Documentary Institute.”
But many of the Institute’s 20 students weren’t very supportive of the decision.
“The kind of administration we have doesn’t put much emphasis on the arts, and for me, that’s unfortunate,” said Jon Bougher, a graduate student in the Institute. “Obviously there was a recession countrywide, but people were looking at the recession as a cover to make cuts they wanted to make for a while.”

Bougher said that the documentary is crucial in the world of media, and by losing the program, the college will be losing something essential.
“How much do people really get from interviews?” he said. “Documentaries cover all different shades of gray that journalism doesn’t cover.”
But it is not only students who have protested against the closure of the Institute. Professors agree with the students that this was a bad choice for the college to make.
“I think it was not a good decision; this was a nationally ranked program,” said Sandra Dickson, co-director of the Institute who has joined the Wake Forest documentary program. “Anytime you eliminate a nationally ranked program, I think you lose something. It was not a popular decision, and I think people around the country were shocked.”

Dickson is not alone in her opinion. Churchill Roberts, a UF professor and co-director of the Institute, expressed similar thoughts.
“Another person once told me that really good universities protect their best programs,” Roberts said. “They would never get rid of them.”
While UF Institute students and professors seem upset, the professors at Wake Forest are thrilled to have the UF documentary program join their team. Professor Mary Dalton explained how grateful she is for having “the opportunity to take one of the top 10 programs.”
The UF program had a tremendous track record, Dalton said. She said the opportunity to bring a program of that caliber to Wake Forest was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I’m happy that the program has found a new home and will continue to produce important work,” she said.

The documentary program at UF was a nationally known program, and any college that is looking to expand its reputation might be interested in it, Bougher said.
“Wake Forest was interested in making a mark for themselves, and they made a great choice,” he said.

When asked how Wake Forest acquired the documentary program, Wright responded by e-mail: “There was no auction or anything of the sort. The truth is that I don’t know any of the details of how the program landed at Wake Forest. I’m just delighted that they found a new home!”
Wake Forest is offering UF students a tuition deal that is hard to beat, Roberts said. They will only have to pay about $5,000 for tuition, rather than the $30,000 regular students have to pay.
“Looking back, it would have been better if the documentary program had been in a different college,” Roberts said. “I don’t think the new dean really understood documentary, and that’s unfortunate.”