Writing in opposition to the separation of UW-Madison from the UW System, David Ahrens makes some good points. For instance, he explains, if the Madison campus is no longer a part of the UW System, fewer legislators will be interested in promoting its strength, instead steering money to the campuses in their districts.
After all the smoke clears from the budget battles, we may find that, other than Gov. Scott Walker?s astounding move to crush public sector unions, no proposal will have as profound an effect on the future of the state as Walker?s takeover of the UW-Madison.
Thirteen University of Wisconsin chancellors asked state lawmakers Wednesday to support a new plan that would give all their schools more autonomy but wouldn?t spin off UW-Madison from the rest of the UW System.
Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison know their school can hold its own as a first-class public research institution rivaled by only a few dozen universities across the world. But our state?s current budget debates forecast spending cuts that could slash into the core of what makes the campus great.
UW-Madison, please don?t go. That?s the gist of a letter to state legislators Wednesday, signed by all of the chancellors in the University of Wisconsin System ? except UW-Madison?s Chancellor Biddy Martin.
UW-Madison is embarking on an external study to look for areas where the university could function more cheaply, effectively and efficiently. There are no cost estimates yet for the contract that university leaders signed with Huron Consulting Group earlier this month. Instead, the company will bill the university on an hourly basis, giving the university flexibility on how much it wants to spend, said Darrell Bazzell, vice chancellor for administration.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison signed off on a deal earlier this month which asks the Huron Consulting Group to study if the university is running as efficiently and effectively as possible. There is no estimate for how much this project might cost the university at this time, said Darrell Bazzell, UW-Madison?s vice chancellor for administration. However, university administrators told faculty leaders in September that such an endeavor could cost upwards of $3 million. Taxpayer dollars will not be used to pay for the project, said Bazzell.
UW-Madison, we don?t want you to go. That?s the gist of a letter today to state legislators, signed by all the other chancellors in the University of Wisconsin System, except UW-Madison?s Chancellor Biddy Martin.
If there was any doubt remaining, it?s now gone: Biddy and Bucky are going it alone.
In an opinion piece sent to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents President Chuck Pruitt and Vice President Michael Spector said chancellors at 12 of the system?s four-year campuses, plus the head of the UW Colleges and Extension, are backing a proposal the regents announced March 10 called the Wisconsin Idea Partnership. This plan would give campuses long-sought freedoms from state oversight but would keep all of the institutions under the umbrella of the UW System.
This is the time of year when almost everyone is a sports fan. It?s hard to miss the NCAA tournament, and who would want to? It provides some of the best entertainment around. And it was hard not to come to work Monday morning without a bit of a glow after the way Wisconsin?s teams performed.
In the world of vague, anonymous Internet threats, few profiles are written. Here?s one of the rare exceptions: Dan Riehl, a writer for BigGovernment.com, says he tracked down Jim Shankman, the Madisonian who penned a threatening ultimatum for UW-Madison law professor and nationally-followed conservative blogger Ann Althouse. Big Government is a national conservative website that has covered the Wisconsin protests and was apparently worried about those threats to Althouse.
Announced to the world earlier today, a new collection of New Badger Partnership student supporters has launched a website to promote the NBP and counter the lies and deceit being spread by the TAA, and radical leftists with no real plans and hallucinations of Utopian paradises.
Thirteen University of Wisconsin System chancellors have endorsed a plan that would give the state?s public universities more autonomy but would not formally split the state?s flagship campus from the oversight board that runs the rest of the campuses.
Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen filed an appeal Monday to lift the temporary restraining order a Dane County judge placed on Gov. Scott Walker?s budget repair bill.
Wisconsin?s attorney general filed an appeal Monday against a Dane County judge?s ruling that effectively halted publication of the governor?s collective bargaining law.
The union for teaching and project assistants at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Sunday voted against a proposal from Gov. Scott Walker to separate Madison from the UW system, but members did not vote to authorize a strike, the group announced Monday.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison?s Teaching Assistants? Association voted Sunday to pass a motion opposing the university being granted public authority status and breaking away from the UW System.
The motion reads: “The TAA opposes the New Badger Partnership, especially the separation of UW-Madison from the UW System, the formation of the public authority model, and the threat to affordability and accessibility it poses to public education and the lack of protection for labor unions on campus. The TAA also objects to the non-transparent and undemocratic process by which the New Badger Partnership was designed.”
….I am certain that to make any major change in the status of the UW-Madison that brings the university under the governance of a board on which the majority of members is appointed by the current governor is irresponsible, and that if Chancellor Biddy Martin believes that Gov. Walker?s influence through such a board will be benign, she has drunk the proverbial Kool-Aid.
On the face of it, the budget proposal that Ohio Governor John Kasich released this week looks like terrible news for state universities. Not only would Kasich?s plan slash higher education spending by 10.5 percent but it also would cap tuition increases at 3.5 percent a year.
Members of the Teaching Assistants? Association graded papers, looked over exams and passed around pizza boxes on the floor of the Bascom Hall rotunda at a protest Monday against cuts in state education funding.
The University of Wisconsin Law School will have to do more with less under Gov. Scott Walker?s state budget proposal. His 2011-13 budget includes a $250 million cut in state aid to the University of Wisconsin System that includes the state?s only public law school.
Much of the attention given to Gov. Scott Walker?s budget initiatives has been directed at the implications to K-12 education. That is understandable given the intensity that teacher?s unions have directed toward limitations on collective bargaining and cuts in state aid to schools.
The Teaching Assistants? Association announced Monday it opposes Chancellor Biddy Martin?s New Badger Partnership and the proposal to separate the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus from the UW System.
Now that a Wisconsin judge has temporarily blocked a state law that would strip public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights, it?s worth stepping back to place these events in larger historical context.
UW System leaders praised the Legislative Building Commission after it passed Gov. Scott Walker?s capital budget proposal, which included a new UW-Madison School of Nursing building.
The State Building Commission approved the governor?s capital budget recommendations las Wednesday, which detail public building construction and maintenance funding to generate economic activity and jobs.
In a move to provide all University of Wisconsin System campuses with new flexibilities to help combat extensive cuts in state funding, the Board of Regents endorsed a proposal that would retain the Madison campus as a member of the system in a meeting March 10.
After four weeks of unprecedented legislative maneuvers, protesters sleeping inside and outside the Capitol building and thousands of donated pizza slices from around the world, the bill that would limit collective bargaining rights for public employees was signed by the governor March 11, causing protests to gain momentum.
A Wisconsin judge issued a temporary restraining order Friday blocking the state?s new collective bargaining law from taking effect, raising the possibility that the Legislature may have to vote again to pass the bill.
I fully support the new nursing school on the UW-Madison campus. But I am surprised that Gov. Scott Walker has so much state money to throw around.
Though it was removed from the budget repair bill, Gov. Scott Walker?s plan to privatize Wisconsin?s state-owned power plants remains alive. The controversial plan was the focus of another dustup this week when the State Building Commission approved spending $9 million for upkeep and improvements at the plants prior to their sale ? a move slammed by Democrats. The proposal as it appeared in the budget repair bill called for selling all 37 power plants, including the Charter Street Heating and Cooling Plant on the UW-Madison campus, to private operators with no bids and with no review by the Public Service Commission.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a UW-Madison political scientist.
Quoted: UW-Madison Police Chief Susan Riseling.
Quoted: Steven Deller, a UW-Madison professor of applied economics who studied the ripple effects of Walker?s budget-repair bill and two-year budget proposal.
Quoted: Tim Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Charles Franklin, a professor of political science at UW-Madison, and Dhavan Shah, a UW-Madison professor who runs the Mass Communication Research Center.
University of Wisconsin administrators are reminding employees not to use their state e-mail accounts and computers for political purposes. A flurry of e-mails last week by UW Colleges and Extension faculty caused university relations director Teri Venker to remind employees to do their political organizing on their own time.
Quoted: James Dennis, an emeritus professor of art history at UW-Madison, who has written the book, “Robert Koehler?s ?The Strike?: The Improbable Story of an Iconic 1886 Painting of Labor Protest,
We now have a pretty good idea of what at least one judge thinks of the way Republicans handled the budget-repair bill last week: They probably handled it poorly, according to Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi.
Quoted: Dennis Dresang, a UW-Madison professor emeritus of political science and public affairs.
In 1971, the Wisconsin State Legislature narrowly passed, and Gov. Patrick Lucy signed into law, the merger of the Wisconsin State University system with the University of Wisconsin system.
Farmland will be less expensive to develop and harder for farm families to permanently protect under a series of proposals in Gov. Scott Walker?s budget. The governor?s plans to eliminate the farmland conversion fee and a farmland preservation program still in its infancy gut key components of the Working Lands Initiative. The moves hand developers a victory and deal conservationists and those who want to keep farmland in the family a blow.
….The WSJ promotes watching basketball as a means of ?pulling us together? is a case in point. A reminder that the owners (media included) are encouraging us to go back to sleep, believing in the American Dream — a euphemism for the American Nightmare. The busting of unions, the raiding (of the Employee Trust Fund) are problems we must confront — awake.
….Scrub the Legislature.
Another institution we have depended on ? the most important of all our institutions ? is the University of Wisconsin. UW has educated hundreds of thousands; found solutions to problems through research; brought great minds to Wisconsin, where they could work without looking over their shoulders for Joe McCarthy. Academic freedom and Wisconsin have been synonymous for over a century.
But we are about to lose our flagship campus to the privatizers, who argue that somehow things will be better if corporations can name the Board of Regents. Nonsense.
A Wisconsin judge issued a temporary restraining order Friday blocking the law from taking effect because of a lawsuit that contends Republicans violated open-meetings laws to enact it. “This is far from over,” says Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Blogress Ann Althouse, a university of Wisconsin law professor, is half of the husband-and-wife team that has done a better job than any journalist of reporting on the skirmish in Wisconsin over government union privileges. Yesterday she posted a link to a bizarre threat against her and hubby Laurence Meade that was posted on Scirbd.com:
A Wisconsin state judge temporarily blocked a law that would strip government employee unions of most of their collective-bargaining power.
So now, Gov. Scott Walker is Tailgunner Joe McCarthy come back to life. Truly, the shamelessness of today?s Left knows no limits — or history! Yet, this is how a tenured professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison stretches logic and ignores facts to further his political agenda, by slandering Scott Walker and his supporters as McCarthyites.
UW-Madison labor scholar Joel Rogers believes that opponents of Gov. Scott Walker?s anti-union budget bill need to avoid a general strike and turn instead toward recall efforts to anticipate the upcoming redistricting.
A Dane County Judge says there is reason to believe the Legislature may have violated the state open meetings law when it convened a conference committee last week to pass an amended version of the budget repair bill. As a result, Judge Maryann Sumi on Friday morning issued a temporary restraining order stopping the collective bargaining law from being implemented until the court says otherwise.
University of Wisconsin administrators are reminding employees not to use their state e-mail accounts and computers for political purposes.
A Dane County judge issued a restraining order on Friday to block publication of the state?s collective bargaining law.
On Monday, Wisconsin?s Attorney General will take a ruling that blocks the publication of the budget repair law to the appellate court.
Two UW-Madison graduates are among four New York Times journalists missing in Libya. Reporter Anthony Shadid, photo-journalist Lynsey Addario, and the two others have not been heard from since Tuesday morning.
Executive editor Bill Keller says the Times has asked the Libyan government to help find the journalists. And he says he?s been assured that if they?re captured, they would be released unharmed.
The crowds push in against each other, jammed shoulder to shoulder. The excitement and the emotion build, as the local favorites are cheered and the opposition jeered. Now is the time to pull together, to stand strong and be counted.
Another big Saturday on the Capitol Square, with many thousands of protesters gathering, you presume? Not so, friends. This is NCAA Tournament time, and this is a different kind of emotion and excitement.
Two Democratic lawmakers boycotted a meeting chaired by Gov. Scott Walker Wednesday after they arrived to find it had been closed to roughly a dozen members of the public.
The state Building Commission has approved Republican Gov. Scott Walker?s construction and renovation projects around Wisconsin over the next two years. Projects included include the new Badger Performance Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to house a variety of programs, an education building at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and $360 million for basic repair and maintenance of state buildings statewide. The proposal also includes a new School of Nursing in Madison. That building had been left off the list when it was unveiled last week, but the governor added it on Wednesday morning, WISC-TV reported.
Projects include the new Badger Performance Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to house a variety of programs, an education building at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and $360 million for basic repair and maintenance of state buildings statewide.
Walker added plans for a new $52 million nursing school at UW-Madison and a new $63 million physical education building at UW-River Falls during the commission meeting in the governor?s conference room.
The state Building Commission on Wednesday approved Republican Gov. Scott Walker?s $1.2 billion proposal for construction and renovation projects around Wisconsin over the next two years. The spending request rings in at about 22 percent less than what was spent in the state?s previous two-year budget. Projects include the new Badger Performance Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to house a variety of programs, an education building at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and $360 million for basic repair and maintenance of state buildings statewide. Walker added plans for a new $52 million nursing school at UW-Madison and a new $63 million physical education building at UW-River Falls during the commission meeting in the governor?s conference room.
A new $52.2 million UW-Madison School of Nursing building is still alive after university officials promised to use less taxpayer-supported borrowing to fund the project. The state?s Building Commission approved it Wednesday as part of a slate of $1.2 billion in state building projects, which will now go to the state Legislature for approval with the next two-year budget.
