>> Ken Lawrence, senior vice president for government community
and public affairs at Temple University.
My job entails external relations for the University.
So I'm the chief lobbyist.
I'm in Harrisburg, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia,
and then we also have community relations.
So we work on programs with the community,
volunteer programs with our students and employees.
Well, Temple University is a state-related university, which means we receive
about 15 percent of our funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania each year.
So we do a lot of work with our legislators and our governor
to education them about the importance of Temple.
One out of every seven college graduates in the Greater Philadelphia area is a Temple graduate.
We're a major employer here in the city.
So a lot of it is just telling our legislators and the governor about the important things
that Temple does in the region and the state.
In the first year of the current governor's budget, he proposed a fifty percent cut
to our appropriation, which would have been very dramatic.
We were able to galvanize a lot of support from students, from alumni, and employees,
and we did take a cut because it was during a really tight fiscal time in the Commonwealth,
but it ended up being a 19 percent cut as opposed to 50 percent cut.
So that spring and summer stand out a lot.