Budget breaking
The state of North Dakota is undergoing funding turmoil this legislative session. Lawmakers voted in the final week of April to cut North Dakota State’s budget by a total of approximately 17 percent.
The cut comes atop a 6.55 percent cut that occurred in the 2015-17 biennium.
NDSU’s budget can be broken down into three parts: 25 percent made up of tuition and student fees revenue; 47 percent from research, grants, auxiliary and other services; 28 percent from state funding, per a listserv NDSU President Dean Bresciani sent Wednesday.
Bresciani added in his listserv the blow of budget cuts should be softened due to higher education institutions being allowed a tuition increase for up to 4 percent in the next two years in conjunction with stable enrollment.
Drugs are bad
There is an epidemic of opioid drugs in the Fargo-Moorhead area.
Recently, fentanyl and carfentanil have been found in the F-M area. Carfentanil is an elephant tranquilizer, which is potent enough to kill a human in a dose the size of a few grains of salt. Doses of heroin have been laced with fentanyl, a more powerful narcotic.
Both drugs are so powerful that a dose of naloxone, a drug used to block the effects of opioids also known by its brand name Narcan, may not be strong enough to reverse the effects of an overdose.
Burgum, Bresciani, Wenzel
Three names that will commonly be covered in the news of The Spectrum are North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, NDSU President Dean Bresciani and Student Body President Mason Wenzel.
Burgum is an NDSU alumnus who completed his degree in the 1970s. He is a former NDSU student body president, winning against two other tickets in his sophomore year. He won his governorship as a Republican candidate with 76.5 percent of the total vote. Burgum is the fourth consecutive republican governor of North Dakota.
Bresciani has been NDSU’s president since 2010, the school’s 14th president. Throughout his duration at NDSU, Bresciani has come under fire for flying first class to India and creating media rules for NDSU athletics, which prohibited any media entity without exclusive NDSU media rights from covering Bison football and basketball, the latter of which led to an independent investigation.
A vote on extending his contract by the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education was postponed from June to November in 2016. The vote ultimately ended in his extension through June 2018, in line with all other NDUS presidents, save Mark Kennedy from the University of North Dakota.
Wenzel was the second-ever student body president to be elected while running unopposed, with the first coming in 2013. He will be a senior studying economics and finance in the coming school year.