Category: Opinion

Some UW System deans and chancellors are speaking out against Gov. Walker’s budget cuts and inaccurately portraying net effects on campuses.

We knew that relatively lean regional and two-year campuses would bear the brunt of Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed $300 million in cuts to the University of Wisconsin System. Now we know what it would mean for Stevens Point and the region.

My father and his two sisters graduated from UW-Madison in the mid-1920s. My two brothers and I graduated from UW schools in the ’60s. My three children graduated from UW schools in the ’80s. My three sons-in-law graduated in the ’80s. Two grandchildren attend UW schools.

MILWAUKEE — Earlier this month, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin and potential Republican presidential candidate, unveiled a proposed budget that would cut $300 million of funds to the University of Wisconsin system and shift power over tuition from the Legislature to a new public authority controlled by appointed regents. The initial draft of Mr. Walker’s budget bill also proposed to rewrite the university’s 110-year-old mission statement, known as the Wisconsin Idea, deleting “the search for truth” and replacing it with language about meeting “the state’s work-force needs.”

It’s hard to believe that Governor Scott Walker’s proposal to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin’s budget over the next two years would allow the school to maintain its quality.

I have numerous concerns regarding the governor’s budget plan, but felt it especially important to draw your immediate attention to the governor’s proposal to gut the University of Wisconsin system by slashing $300 million from its budget.

It’s hard to believe that Gov. Scott Walkers proposal to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System’s budget over the next two years would allow the system to maintain its quality. Walker would prohibit the university system from raising tuition during that period, but instead give university officials more flexibility in managing contracting and construction projects.

Gov. Walker clearly stepped in it when his administration attempted to quietly slip into the budget substantive statutory language changes to what is known as the “Wisconsin Idea.”

I really hope the state budget wraps up soon, because I don’t know how much more flippant politicking I can take from Wisconsin’s governor/presidential candidate — nor how much more righteous indignation I can take from the officials of multimillion UW-Madison and its billion-dollar parent institution, the UW System.

Among the many other non-budgetary and bad policy items in Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed biennial state budget, theres this: The governor is asking for a measure that could be used to hide certain research in the University of Wisconsin System. Two previous efforts in the last two years to thwart public access to such research failed, one rejected by the Joint Finance Committee and one by an Assembly committee.

It’s probably only fair to point out, though, that UW-Madison profs might also be suffering from comparatively low wages because so darn many have been promoted to the highest pay category, but there’s only so much money to go around.

[T]he proposal by the Walker administration to strike statutory language directing the UW to focus on “public service” and “the search for truth” has turned out to be a healthy development for the state.

For starters, lawmakers should ease the university cut. The governor pitched his historic reduction to the 26-campus System as a trade. UW would lose state aid in exchange for more autonomy from state rules.

McWilliams is a former chair of the Associated Students of Madison.

Guess the source of this quote: “There is no profession in the world, anywhere in the world, where if you work for seven years you get a lifetime guarantee of a job. Except at a university…If you have tenure at a university, by the time you are 35 you never have to prove yourself again.”

I admit to being agnostic when it comes to whether Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin system are a good idea.  I want the university to thrive, as I suspect most Wisconsinites do.

On the dumb scale, dissing “The Wisconsin Idea” while youre governor of Wisconsin is somewhere just to the south of suggesting that the Green Bay Packers are such a suck on the states resources that they should move to the U.P. Now, of course, that notion might gain purchase if Mike McCarthy settles for a few more field goals from the one-yard line but thats another column.

In the past few weeks, there has been much discussion regarding the University of Wisconsin System, its budget and access to higher education. But this discussion has missed some important points:

During his tenure as Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker has gotten a lot of ink for things he has done. But far less attention has been paid to the things he hasn’t been able to accomplish.

On the one hand, the Wisconsin Idea is a relic of Progressive-Era gasbaggery. The idea that the Wisconsin public university system could reach its fingers into every corner of the state was cooked up by university leaders like Charles Van Hise when he wasn’t trying to rid the state of “defectives” through the practice of eugenics. In the past 100 years, anyone who rightly criticized any wasteful practices at the UW were met by howls of “but the Wisconsin Idea!,” as if the mere invocation of the term constituted the last word.