Learning doesn’t stop once you graduate, according to State Representative Robert Latta.

Latta, a University graduate, stressed the importance of educating his colleagues about higher education issues with members from the Faculty Senate yesterday.

“We wanted to get the candidates from local districts to come talk to us about higher education and funding for higher education,” Andrew Schocket, history professor and a member of the Faculty Senate said. “This is a very important issue for us.”

Living in Bowling Green, Latta has an advantage to become familiar with the needs of the University. But for other legislators, the process of becoming educated on the objectives and happenings of the University requires much more effort.

“By being here and having been here all my life I know what’s going on in the University pretty intimately, but unfortunately for many people it’s a continuous educational process,” Latta said.

“We’ve got to keep the whole notion of why we have state schools.”

According to Latta, becoming educated about the concerns of higher education institutions should be one of the primary responsibilities of a state legislator.

“If a legislator doesn’t want to do something, then that legislator is not doing his job,” he said. “We’re invited to different things all the time, but I think that the priority has to be given to higher education for people to show them what’s happening.”

One cause of the lack of knowledge about higher educational needs is the relatively quick change of faces in state government — dubbed “terminance.”

“The Universities have to help in the education process now because everybody is a short-term now,” Latta said. “Everywhere I go I preach the Gospel that everyone has to be on the road to Columbus because [legislators] are going to be gone all the time.”

According to Latta, not all states experience such a quick turnaround.

“Ohio is one of the leaders in terminance,” Latta said. “It’s in the constitution and that’s it.”

Changing this system to allow legislators to become more familiar with higher education issues, Latta says, is not in the near future.

“The only way it’s going to be changed is by ballot issue and I don’t see that happening,” Latta said. “Everybody is out now that has been there for at least eight years.”

According to Latta, many incoming legislators are too focused on the main issue that got them elected.

“It’s getting them off of the idea that they are a one-issue legislator now,” Latta said. “Groups are coming in that say ‘I’ve got my blinders on and I can’t see down the road to do anything except this one area.'”

Latta said those who ignore higher education funding have blinders on, too.

“We could spend all this money on primary and secondary (education), but what good is it going to do us on the next level?” The budget for the fiscal year of 2002-2003 set at $45 billion is the largest budget ever to hit Ohio.

According to Latta, 39.7 percent goes toward primary and secondary education while only13.5 percent benefits higher education.

Educating legislators about the importance of higher education funding is something that can aid the country in the future.

“Education is an investment, not a cost,” Neocles Leontis, chemistry professor and the vice-chair of Faculty Senate, said. “We know that when people are better educated, they’re not as prone to get layed off, they tend to stay in a job and pay more taxes because they have higher incomes.”