Whipped Cream Difficulties

The University of Texas, in a cost-saving move, has announced plans to close the Cactus Cafe, and end the “informal class” program.

I’m pretty indifferent to the Cactus Cafe shutdown, not being much of a fan of live music (and thinking there’s no shortage of live music venues in Austin), but the end of the informal class program saddens me. I’ve taken probably a half-dozen of the informal classes over the years, in things like wine tasting, kendo, and photography. That program was one of the things that I thought made Austin, and the city’s relationship with UT, special. I also would have thought the program was self-supporting; apparently not.

The cuts will save about $122,000 a year, Smith said. The programs had an operating cost of about $1.3 million, he said. UT officials said the Cactus Cafe and informal classes generally draw people who are not full-time students; about 10,000 people attended informal classes last year.

In recent years, both programs have required additional money from the university’s budget, even though they were intended to be self-sufficient, said Juan Gonzalez, vice president of student affairs. “They haven’t been for a number of years,” he said.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Clippings, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.