Higher education costs a lot of money. The University of Wisconsin System, which serves 180,000 students and employs 39,000 people in Wisconsin, asks a lot. Its budget includes more than $1 billion in state money; tuitions have been rising, putting pressure on many middle-class families; the system leans on federal grants and private donations and other revenue sources. It’s expensive.
As I watch many valued colleagues leave the University of Wisconsin-Madison for other institutions, I react with dismay. Not at them, but at the lack of any substantive educational vision that now seems to pervade the governor’s officer and the Legislature. We do a disservice to any serious understanding of the importance of education if we simply see it as a vocational path to more money and jobs. When the governor said that he didn’t need to finish college because he already had a job, he demonstrated how limited was his view of education as a self-making process.
I am writing about University of Wisconsin System Ray Cross’s response to Gov. Scott Walker’s suggestion that UW professors should teach more classes, and therefore absorb most of Walker’s proposed funding cut in that way.
Gov. Scott Walker announced details of his 2015-2017 budget proposal that would turn the University of Wisconsin System into a public authority, extend the tuition freeze and cut funding by $300 million. In anticipation of the governors biennial budget address on Tuesday, a dynamic conversation already has begun among policy-makers, members of the UW and citizens in the state.
Last weekend, news reports began to swirl about potentially massive budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin System. On Tuesday, Gov. Scott Walker confirmed the worst: UW System campuses are slated to take a combined $150 million base budget cut over two years, so $300 million total in his upcoming 2015-17 biennial budget proposal.
There is only one word for Scott Walker’s comments about the University of Wisconsin faculty: demeaning.
The Republican governor’s plan to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System is troubling. Allowing UW campuses more flexibility from state bureaucracy to save money is fine. But the governor wants the System to absorb what would amount to a 13 percent cut in state funding while maintaining a tuition freeze for two more years. No amount of efficiency, short of damaging layoffs, is going to offset that in the short run. Moreover, tuition hikes after a freeze expires could price some in-state students out of a Wisconsin school.
Critics of soon-to-be-presidential-candidate Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin have certainly noticed the message he sent this week about what’s important in his state: professional sports, specifically an NBA franchise.
It’s safe to say when we put Reinvigorating The Wisconsin Idea on our editorial agenda for the year we never dreamed it would be perhaps the most important issue facing our state in 2015.
It’s time we consider our high admission standards a positive asset, not a liability, and be proud of setting the bar high.
This proposed cut is especially draconian, given the election-year tuition freezes and the state’s recent parsimonious allocations to the System. Even without these future cuts, faculty — often the very best young faculty — have been leaving Wisconsin.
Here’s hoping the debate is an honest effort to improve the performance, accessibility and accountability of the state’s largest higher education system, not a political exercise driven by perception rather than fact.
UW is the only Big Ten school without baseball. Baseball ended at UW in 1991 because of funding and gender equity. UW cannot shake gender equity. It refused to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to update the UW Field House for a Big Ten championship women’s volleyball program.
If we are to make progress moving beyond talk to honest dialogue on racial disparities we will need to reconnect as citizens and rebuild trust in our institutions. Trust of course is that often elusive two-way street. Take the UW for example. It is, among other things, a political football. And because of that many citizens are confused about its role.
As the University of WIsconsin welcomes new football coach Paul Chryst and watches in anticipation as one of Bo Ryan’s finest teams makes another bid for the Final Four, I would like to issue the following statement.
Noted: Schmidt is a retired UW-Madison professor of psychiatry. “Conflicts persist because of universal aspects of the developmental physiology of each human brain, but our brains have also evolved to include a capacity for reason and empathy. Let’s use that capacity to move from conflict to cooperation.”
… once public universities or public university systems get the authority to increase tuition, “you get the tendency to increase tuition.”
Noted: A trio of prominent local African-Americans describes the subtle slights, how they don their racial ‘armor’ and offer advice to white Madisonians. Included: Everett Mitchell, director of community relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It was disconcerting to read that when it comes to the care of medically fragile newborns, hospital officials might be keeping an eye on factors other than their patients’ health — namely, the health of their employers’ bottom lines.
“According to UW-Madison sociology professor Pam Oliver’s research, racial disparities occur throughout the criminal justice process.”
Sara Goldrick-Rab, UW-Madison professor and founding director of the Wisconsin Harvesting Opportunities for Postsecondary Education, or HOPE, Lab, thinks paying for college with need-based government aid is an antiquated model and supports Obama’s proposal. There is “clear evidence that most families are struggling to afford the cost of even community college today,” she said. Still, the existence of students who manage to pay for college without any government help isn’t proof that there isn’t enough help available.
It’s worth noting that President Barack Obama’s new education initiative introduced last week has its roots right here on the UW Madison campus.
Noted: Carolyn J. Heinrich is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin formerly at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has worked with Milwaukee Public Schools in an external research and evaluation capacity since 2006.
Madison has benefited greatly from its building boom Downtown and elsewhere. This includes the central city, the East Washington corridor, the UW-Madison campus, State Street and beyond.
The battle over who should lead colleges and universities has been raging since the inception of higher education. It is most often, and stereotypically, cast as a fight between administrators and faculty members. Both of those parties, supposedly interested in what students need, are alternately said to be effective governors of higher education and major impediments to effective leadership.
Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature should give UW-Madison the right to work without micro-management. Take off the shackles that bind UW’s hands.
Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature should give UW-Madison the right to work without micro-management. Take off the shackles that bind UW’s hands.
or multiple reasons I find possibly misleading either the study of economic development marketing by the University of Wisconsin’s department of agricultural and applied economics or Mike Ivey’s brief description of it, “WEDC marketing efforts a waste of money, new report suggests.”
Okay, so it wasn’t the most eloquent statement ever, but it was accurate.”Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”
Maybe the GOP has actually convinced voters that we do not need and cannot afford a world-class research university such as the one we have at UW-Madison. After all, it is GOP pols who like to say — to dodge overwhelming evidence that climate change exists — that they cannot opine on it because they are not scientists. So, not grasping the promise of stem cells and other advanced research, maybe they think Wisconsin’s flagship university should stick to training for professions they understand.
Why not cut it down to just a large stump, perhaps three feet high. It could be sealed over the top using some of the good lumber from the tree to make a monument and statement.
There were two very different hiring processes for arguably the two most important people on UW-Madison’s campus. Make up your own minds as to which ranks No. 1.
Rock County got an early Christmas present Dec. 19 when a Georgia recycling and packaging company announced plans to build a $52 million factory in Beloit that will employ 140 people. (Subscription required.)
My hope for 2015 is that Madison Mayor Paul Soglin will finally have the courage to close the hideously cruel University of Wisconsin Primate Center.
And the second most powerful state political figure, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, has joined the attack on science. Vos … threatened that he wants university research to focus exclusively on economic development and not, as he put it, “on the ancient mating habits of whatever.” University researchers will now have to worry that the guy who holds their purse strings and can cut their budget will be passing judgment on what they should research.
The post-World War II baby boom swept into American colleges in the 1960s, driving up total taxpayer costs and sending officials looking for financial answers.
UW President Ray Cross – It’s tough enough to have 17 bosses on the UW Board of Regents, but Cross seems to have picked 132 more in the Wisconsin Legislature. A stocking stuffer for Cross is a copy of “My Way or the Highway: The Micromanagement Survival Guide.”
The ASM Student Government recommended that the university divest from fossil fuel companies this past spring. However, the Faculty Senate, despite acknowledging climate change and its dire implications, recommended not divesting from the fossil fuel industry, citing other options. This is backward logic.
Humble. Appreciative. Folksy.That was Paul Chryst as the worst-kept secret in Badger Nation became official Wednesday. Chryst is the new UW football coach. (Subscription required.)
Noted: We have seen a dramatic cultural shift since 1984. Nowhere has this been more evident than at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Back then, few researchers were entrepreneurially minded, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation WARF refused to license its patents to start-ups and most students aspired to find secure career paths in large companies. We had to seek permission from the chancellor to help organize a campus seminar on entrepreneurship, a process that took more than a year. There were no buildings in the University Research Park.
The post-World War II baby boom swept into American colleges in the 1960s, driving up total taxpayer costs and sending officials looking for financial answers.
When now-former Wisconsin Badgers football coach Gary Andersen unexpectedly caught the last train for the West Coast, one of the reasons suggested by pundits was that the UW has tougher academic standards for its players than a lot of other schools. This wasn’t denied by Andersen, who was reportedly unhappy that he couldn’t recruit a promising lineman from Sun Prairie because the kid didn’t have the grades for admission at the university.
I’m sure former Wisconsin football coach Gary Andersen longed to return to his roots in the West. but if a few little things that were important to him had been better in Madison, I can’t help but think he would have stayed longer.
For Paul Chryst to follow in the footsteps of Bret Bielema and Gary Andersen and leave UW for allegedly greener pastures, he would have to overcome a lifetime of indoctrination. Assuming he is successful on the field once Alvarez wades through the formalities and officially hires him, Chryst won’t be going anywhere soon.
Shared government is something that is essential to the functionality of this campus. It allows for faculty, staff and students to participate in significant decisions that concern the way that this institution is operated. Here at this university, Chancellor Rebecca Blank is showing a lack of shared governance.
MADISON, Wis. — Maybe it really was as simple as a necessary lifestyle change for Gary Andersen when he bolted Wisconsin to coach Oregon State’s football program on Wednesday. Perhaps, as Badgers athletic director Barry Alvarez relayed, leaving was a family decision to return to his West Coast roots, that Andersen realized he was, in fact, not the right fit here in Madison.
Editorial cartoon.
Dissent is a constitutionally protected right, and often is a high form of actual patriotism. My hat is off to the people who stood silently in protest the other night.
Wisconsin has the 17th best college football team in the nation, according to the latest Associated Press poll.
It’s not like University of Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez to get blindsided by anything, especially when it comes to the football program he built, but it happened again Wednesday.
Imagine, for a moment, that Wisconsin had a wholly uncontroversial program that allowed low-income students to use a state voucher to attend the private, religious school of their choice. And imagine this program wasnt constantly under attack by public school employees; instead, it is recognized as simply another option allowing flexibility for students and their families.
Vulgar chanting turned Wisconsin’s nationally televised basketball game against Duke last week into an R-rated event. Then after the game, outside the Kohl Center, some fans targeted a peaceful demonstration with insults. Wisconsin deserves better.
My point is that, in all probability, there is a ceiling on how far these two most visible UW programs can go, that actually winning a national title in either football or basketball in the knowable future is unlikely.
Rolling Stone magazine last week acknowledged that there were “mistakes” in an article it published describing the gang rape of a freshman named Jackie during a fraternity party in 2012 at the University of Virginia. It is not yet clear whether the discrepancies between Jackie’s account and reporting by The Washington Post, among other news outlets, mean that the story was only superficially inaccurate or substantially false.
Noted: If you’ve watched many of the talking heads on cable television try to discuss the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, you know what we’re talking about. Unfortunately, sometimes comments on newspaper stories and columns have a similar effect.In fact, it has a name: “The nasty effect. ”That’s what University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele dubbed the negative effect certain comments can have on a reader’s understanding.
Wisconsin yet again faces mounting budget deficit projections. The danger is that Gov. Scott Walker will now sell off the publics property to fill the fiscal potholes created by his tax policies. Chanting the GOP refrain of “lower tax rates good, higher tax rates bad” as if it were a magic incantation, he seemed to believe Arthur Laffers infamous cocktail napkin “Laffer Curve” depicting lower tax rates delivering higher tax revenues.
The upper deck of the Field House, currently not in use, needs a couple hundred thousand dollars in investment to open. Why not fill the Field House for a championship UW program? Why not have the optional capacity to fill the Field House for any sports event?
Although he served as a student member of the UW Board of Regents back in 1989, he has had the UW-Madison in the cross hairs because some in the administration crossed him. His latest threat is to have the Republican-led Legislature micromanage how many hours professors spend in the classroom — and worse, make sure the UW’s huge research function is geared to helping the state’s economy, rather than focusing on “ancient mating habits of whatever.” It shows how ignorant Vos and all too many of his colleagues are about the UW-Madison and its internationally renowned research, which has found cures for diseases, revolutionized farming and the production of food, educated students who have gone out to lead the business world, is on the cutting edge of stem cell development and is a leader in countless other scientific and technology areas — benefits for not only Wisconsin’s economy, but the world.
A recurring phrase from candidates in the fall 2014 elections, especially those hoping to deflect questions about climate change, the Keystone pipeline or labeling of genetically modified foods, was “I’m not a scientist…”
Stanley Kutler has written “Nixon’s the One” with Harry Shearer, now on YouTube, and the play, “I, Nixon.” He has written widely on Vietnam and is a UW-Madison professor emeritus.
