Since 1994, the UW budget has expanded from $2.1 billion per year to $5.5 billion in 2011, an increase of 114% over that time. During the same time period, state aid to the UW system has increased by 27.2%, even when Walker?s “draconian” cuts are figured in. [A column by Christian Schneider, senior fellor at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.]
Easy answers are hard to find for how the University of Wisconsin System can continue offering the same quality education at an affordable cost with less state support.But a task force advising the Legislature on flexibilities that could help make campuses more efficient wrestled with several key issues during an all-day hearing Wednesday in Madison, including the role tuition should play in supporting campuses and financial aid, and how the best and brightest faculty and administrators can be attracted and retained if salaries aren?t competitive.
….This notion of a disconnect between Wisconsinites and the state’s flagship institution of higher education may surprise some within the campus community, but those sentiments are broad-based and very real, according to a study released last month by UW-Madison political scientist Kathy Cramer Walsh. The paper gives an eye-opening account of state residents’ “pervasive sense of distance from UW-Madison,” and reveals a “widespread sense that the state’s flagship university is inattentive to the concerns of members of the public at large.”
The release of Walsh’s report is especially timely today, as UW-Madison is in the midst of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Wisconsin Idea ? the principle that the teaching and research taking place at the university should be felt beyond the borders of campus. “That’s the big, sad story of the paper ? we are putting so much effort on campus into promoting the Wisconsin Idea and reviving it and aligning it with our work, and yet it’s kind of invisible to a lot of people in this state,” says Walsh.
It is the little building project that could. For more than 10 years, the UW-Madison School of Nursing building has gone through a strange and twisting odyssey as politicians and officials flip-flopped about the fate of the project. It was placed at the top of priority lists, then taken off completely; it was slipped into a state budget in the middle of the night, then pulled out just as slyly. But finally, on Saturday, school officials and Gov. Scott Walker broke ground on the $52 million building.
If you?re looking to inject some spice into a higher education conference, adding Richard Vedder to the lineup of invited speakers is never a bad idea. Vedder ? the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and a retired professor of economics at Ohio University ? doesn?t fit the stereotype of the liberal college professor. Not even close.
A commission on the UW-Madison campus is arguing faculty and staff are in dire need of a raise if the university hopes to keep its best and brightest from bolting to other institutions. Such calls are certainly nothing new. But two options being kicked around as potential ways to help pay for these raises are opening some eyes.
Unveiling deep budget cuts to schools and local governments one year ago, Gov. Scott Walker assured voters that the reductions could be more than offset by cuts to public workers? compensation.
Democrats and unions confidently countered that the Republican governor?s cuts of more than $1 billion would prove devastating to schools and local governments despite his repeal of most collective bargaining by public workers. The competing claims already are playing a role in the looming recall election against Walker.
In order for Gov. Scott Walker to balance the state budget, the University of Wisconsin has been handed $46.1 million in cuts. As of yet, no UW group is sure how to shoulder the setback, and right now, all anyone can do is plug leaks in the levy while the flood of consequences is ready to break loose.
In order for Gov. Scott Walker to balance the state budget, the University of Wisconsin has been handed $46.1 million in cuts. As of yet, no UW group is sure how to shoulder the setback, and right now, all anyone can do is plug leaks in the levy while the flood of consequences is ready to break loose.
The Joint Finance Committee allocated $123 million in state budget cuts for the coming year along party lines Wednesday, $46 million of which will come from the UW System.
Protestors marched down State Street and into the state House Tuesday as part of a Week of Action commemorating the 17-day occupation of the Capitol building that took place a year ago.
Today, the Joint Committee on Finance will hold a hearing regarding the disproportionate budget lapse to the University of Wisconsin System. It is proposed that the UW System take a $65.6 million cut, 38 percent of the total lapse. This, after the System received a $250 million cut in the current biennial budget, bringing UW funding down to 7 percent of the total state budget.
The Legislature?s budget-writing committee is set to approve about $123 million in cuts across state government, more than a third of which would fall to the University of Wisconsin System.
State union leaders are asking Democratic candidates for governor to pledge they will veto the next state budget if it doesn?t restore collective bargaining rights for public workers. The limitation of those rights is largely what motivated the petition drive to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
Associated Students of Madison Chair Allie Gardner told the student government?s Legislative Affairs Committee Monday that members of the state?s committee dedicated to studying the restructuring of the UW System have been unresponsive to students? requests to speak at its upcoming meeting, where the task force will discuss tuition. Gardner is asking students to attend the Task Force on UW Restructuring?s meeting Wednesday.
The furor that erupted a year ago over who should control the state?s flagship University of Wisconsin campus has given way to sober realism about how best to fund and manage the state?s universities. That discussion resumes this week in Madison, and this time, with any luck, a reasonable solution will emerge that gives the state?s two largest campuses more freedom to run their own affairs as state funding dwindles.
The shame of last year?s implosion of a plan advanced secretly by former UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin was not that the plan was scotched. It deserved to be scotched. The shame was that cuts to the university system were put in place without giving the campuses the degree of flexibility they needed to manage those cuts.
There are more than 1,000 miles between this idyllic college town and Madison, Wis., but that distance must seem even greater in Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin?s rearview mirror.
The nearly yearlong roar of protesters in Madison, where Ms. Martin had a relatively short and rocky tenure as head of the state?s flagship campus, has been replaced with the calm that whispers through Amherst College like one of Emily Dickinson?s tamer verses.
UW-Madison?s School of Education is phasing out many of its popular one-credit physical education classes and suspending a master?s program for those who want to become school counselors in an effort to deal with state budget cuts. “There is this perception that the state can continue to make cuts and everything at the university will run just exactly like it was,” says UW-Madison Professor Bruce Wampold, who recently concluded his term as chair of the counseling psychology department, which houses the master?s program that?s being cut. “Well, it doesn?t work that way.”
Record numbers of government employees rushed to retire last year as Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature rolled back public employee union rights, reduced take home pay and increased medical co-pays.
In exchange for the $250 million the state Legislature cut from the University of Wisconsin System?s biennial budget last summer, lawmakers gave campuses authority to make decisions previously reserved for the Madison-based UW System.
University of Wisconsin-Parkside students should see an institution more responsive to their needs as the UW System reacts to a $250 million cut in state funding during the next two years, Chancellor Deborah Ford told a legislative task force Wednesday.
This story appeared first in the Sunday edition of the Wisconsin State Journal. UW System President Kevin Reilly said the state?s universities may need to cap enrollment if budget cuts continue, possibly jeopardizing a long-term plan to increase the number of UW graduates 30 percent by 2025.
“We don?t want to send a signal we?re going to do that and push students away from considering the university,” Reilly said. “On the other hand, if we feel we have to do that at some point to maintain the quality in the System, then I think we have to consider it.”
It was generally not a good year for public higher education in Wisconsin. In particular, 2011 was an especially frustrating period for many associated with UW-Madison. Wisconsin?s flagship institution of higher education lost its once-popular chancellor, Biddy Martin, to a highly regarded but small liberal arts college in Massachusetts following a political defeat at the state Capitol. The university, like all UW System institutions, is absorbing record-setting budget cuts as state leaders try to dig out of a budget hole without raising taxes. And UW-Madison?s highly regarded faculty and staff — again, like their counterparts across the state — not only learned they?d go another biennium without raises, but were forced to take a cut in take-home pay. Although few seem overly optimistic entering 2012, it can?t get any worse than this past year. Right?
The Walker administration delivered a lump of coal to the University of Wisconsin System just in time for the Christmas holiday, ordering the university system last Friday to shoulder more than a third of $123 million in budget cuts outlined in the state budget for next year.
Efforts by the University of Wisconsin System to have its disproportionate hit in state aid reconsidered have failed. On Friday, Gov. Scott Walker?s administration released its plan for cutting $123 million across state government by July, the Associated Press reports. This lapse — or one-time budget cut — was called for under the 2011-13 biennial budget passed earlier this year. And the UW System is absorbing the biggest hit, a whopping $46.1 million.
The University of Wisconsin System will have to cut another $46.1 million over six months, on top of a previously approved $250 million two-year reduction, under a detailed budget-balancing plan Gov. Scott Walker?s administration released Friday. The new cut to UW was part of $213.2 million in additional reductions ordered to be made across state government. The amount in cuts was approved under the budget passed in June but not specified until Friday. Walker?s Department of Administration ordered agencies to make the cuts without layoffs, if possible.
Gov. Scott Walker?s administration has released its plan for cutting $123 million across state government by July as called for under the budget passed earlier this year. The University of Wisconsin System would see the largest cut at $46.1 million.
Gov. Scott Walker?s administration is expected Friday to say where the state will slice to make $174 million in added budget cuts.
The state Building Commission approved several projects on Wednesday.
A liberal-leaning Milwaukee think tank is out with a new report blaming state budget program cuts and public worker paycheck reductions for exacerbating Wisconsin?s job struggles. The report from the Institute for Wisconsin?s Future says the reduction in take-home pay for tens of thousands of public employees is now hurting the private sector, as are the drastic state budget cuts for K-12 education. Steve Deller, an economics professor at UW-Madison, says that reducing spending during a deep recession can often make things worse, as this blog chart suggests.
“Economic modeling shows that the extreme cuts to state and local programs cost thousands of jobs and put Wisconsin in a weak position to create jobs,” says Deller, who appeared at the Capitol on Tuesday with Norman and Rep. Brett Hulsey, D-Madison, to introduce the IWF report.
University of Wisconsin System campuses may have fewer instructors and course offerings under a proposed one-time state budget cut of $65.8 million over two years, according to UW System President Kevin Reilly. Reilly wrote a letter last week to Brian Hayes, state budget director, outlining how the University of Wisconsin System would manage the cuts that Gov. Scott Walker?s administration unveiled in October.
I am a retired UW-Madison academic department manager, having worked for 36 years with the state and managed budgets for over 20 years. This is not an opinion regarding Gov. Scott Walker, but information on how the state budget works. People who say Walker has balanced the budget are stating an untruth.
UW System President Kevin Reilly remains hopeful the state will decrease funding cuts to the system, he told the Board of Regents Friday.
I am confused about Gov. Scott Walker?s inspiration for taking money from UW-Madison, one of the premier educational institutions in the world working on advancing human knowledge in breakthrough subjects you can?t even pronounce, then letting Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation give $4 million to a group of overpaid “experts” at Spectrum Brands who can?t make batteries or waffle irons without going bankrupt and losing the stockholders? money.
The social compact of the last century that promised students a high quality education at a low cost is gone, said UW-Madison Interim Chancellor David Ward in a presentation before the UW Board of Regents Thursday.He said university leaders need to be “extremely prudent” about raising tuition to offset declining state funds.
The UW-Madison Faculty Senate passed a second resolution officially addressing the decline in state budget support for higher education Monday.
While the governor suggests his ?reforms are working,? education officials report otherwise. Budget cuts impact every level of education. Local schools, technical colleges and UW campuses are all coping with changes required by deep budget cuts.
Members of the student governing board of UW System schools proposed legislation that would support a student strike if the state makes additional budget cuts to the system.
In the face of more budget cuts, leaders of the UW System sent a report detailing the benefits of $1.4 million in-state funding for research grants to a legislative committee Wednesday. Facing a $65.7 million budget lapse that has left the UW System with less money to fund grant programs, University representatives from around the state have stressed the connection between higher education and a prosperous economy.
In light of recent budget cuts to the university, campus officials announced Tuesday they plan to use flexibility granted to UW-Madison in the state?s 2011-13 budget to restructure human resources at the university. UW-Madison director of human resources Bob Lavigna said the project aims to better incorporate and manage talent at the university.
UW System leaders spoke against additional system-wide funding cuts at a Senate committee meeting Tuesday. The one-time cuts, meant to address lapses in the current state budget, will increase existing gaps in higher education funding by an additional $65.8 million over the next two years, cutting $18 million from UW-Madison alone.
The UW-Madison Academic Staff Assembly passed a resolution Monday calling recent budget cuts to the UW System too large. In October state legislators announced $65.7 million in cuts to the UW System to make up for a lapse of expected state revenue. The UW System accounts for 38 percent of total cuts included in the state?s lapse. About $25 million of these cuts will go to UW-Madison over the next two years.
The UW-Madison Faculty Senate passed a resolution officially addressing recent budget cuts to the UW System Monday. The legislation asks the governor and the Wisconsin State Legislature to reduce the UW System?s portion of budget cuts to a more proportional level and ?renew the state?s investment in education.?
To make up a more than $700,000 loss in support, the University of Wisconsin-Superior is making some difficult decisions.
New cuts to the UW System place an unfair burden on higher education in the state, and Gov. Scott Walker?s administration should distribute it more proportionally among agencies.
Dear Editor: Why are the GOP politicians so set on destroying the University of Wisconsin when they benefited so much from it? The current plan imposes a 38 percent cut on a state asset that consumes only 7 percent of resources. Nobody seriously disputes that the UW System should share the impacts in revenue shortfalls for the coming biennium. Yet why impose so grotesque a burden? The UW System has been attacked by the governor and other GOP stalwarts with the attempt to strip away the flagship campus.
The year-in-review stories are nearly two months away, but I think we can already recap state politics in 2011 as Wisconsin?s “annus horribilis,” which translates to “horrible year.” The Latin isn’t mine. Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, used “Wisconsin’s annus horribilis” as his title to put the state budget in context in a recent lecture to retired UW-Madison employees.
….And Walker has taken a meat cleaver to the University of Wisconsin System, most recently by imposing, without explanation, a disproportionate share of “lapse” budget reductions to the campuses. He also socked it to cities on shared-revenue payments and has proposed major reductions in health care coverage.
A proposal made by the governor would freeze the wages of public workers in the state for the next two years.
Gov. Scott Walker is proposing a two-year pay freeze for all public employees as part of the first compensation plan put forward after a law was enacted that no longer requires the state to negotiate wages with unions.
There is no end to the mean spiritedness of the people in charge of Wisconsin government these days. Late last week when the University of Wisconsin System got the news that it was going to suffer another nearly $66 million cut on top of the already $250 million taken away by the GOP?s budget last summer, the Democratic members of the Assembly Colleges and Universities Committee asked that a meeting be convened to examine the cut.
For over 100 years the Wisconsin promise has been guided by the Wisconsin Idea. The recent announcement of $66 million in additional cuts to the University of Wisconsin System will have a devastating impact on higher education and replace the Wisconsin Idea with the Walker nightmare. The University makes up 7 percent of the state budget yet will be required to take 38 percent of the cuts. These cuts will reduce Wisconsin UW budget to the level we spent in 1999 and are irrational, unfair and harmful to our next generation. It is apparent that the Walker Administration simply does not understand the importance of higher education to Wisconsin?s economy and future.
UW System chancellors say they?re dismayed by what they call a disproportionate amount of budget lapse cuts called for by the Walker Administration. UW schools have till November 7 to figure out how to cut millions from their budgets. In a memo, Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch states agencies were told to plan for $174 million in cuts from a lapse in the current state budget. Of that, $65 million or around 38-percent of that would come from the University of Wisconsin System.
The Republican chairman of the Assembly Colleges and Universities Committee said he doesn?t plan to hold a hearing on a $65.8 million cut to the UW System, despite a request from Democratic members of the committee. A spokesman for Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, said he “doesn?t see a need for a hearing” because the state budget included the potential for one-time cuts.
OSHKOSH – University of Wisconsin system leaders said Wednesday they?ve been blindsided by additional budget changes.
University of Wisconsin System leaders appear to be scrambling after learning their cut in state taxpayer support over the 2011-13 biennium will be significantly deeper than anticipated. Gov. Scott Walker?s 2011-13 biennial budget, which was signed into law over the summer, reduces state support for the UW System by $250 million. While that blow was significant ? tying the record cut of $250 million to the UW System by former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle over the 2003-05 biennium ? it now appears the hit will jump by at least another $65.7 million over the next two years.
University of Wisconsin System officials were surprised to learn they have to make additional budget cuts.
“The question will be for the average person in Wisconsin?s hinterlands, did the things that Scott Walker did offer more good than bad?” asks Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of political science and an expert in campaigns and elections. “Nobody will like everything that happened, but are you happier that your taxes didn?t go up and that we managed to balance the budget than you are unhappy about cuts to K through 12 education, the UW System and health care, and changes to collective bargaining?” Burden says “I think that is going to be the litmus test for the recall.”
In his first State of the University address in more than a decade, David Ward sounded the alarm about the funding crisis in public higher education. It?s a safe bet no one in Bascom Hall listening to UW-Madison?s interim chancellor speak to the Faculty Senate on Oct. 3 was surprised to hear the university is facing some significant budgetary challenges. Most are keenly aware the university is being asked to absorb $94 million in state cuts over the next two years. What might have caught some off guard was Ward?s message that the university can no longer afford to simply hunker down and attempt to weather the economic storm until better days return.
* State leaders have named all but one of a 17-member committee charged with reviewing the University of Wisconsin System’s governance structure. Gov. Scott Walker on Monday announced his two appointments: Dave Olien, senior vice president emeritus of the UW System, and Darrell Bazzell, vice chancellor for administration at UW-Madison.
* UW-Madison is rising through the ranks of higher education social media influence, according to Klout.com.The website recently ranked UW-Madison as the second most influential behind Texas A&M. That?s up from fourth in January. Marquette University ranks 10th, making Wisconsin the only state with two universities in the top 10.
The roster for the state-appointed “Special Task Force on UW Restructuring and Operational Flexibilities” is finally set. Gov. Scott Walker announced his two appointments on Monday, completing the 17-member panel. One of Walker?s selections was Darrell Bazzell, UW-Madison?s vice chancellor for administration. Bazzell is the only person currently working on the UW-Madison campus on the panel. Walker?s other appointment went to Dave Olien, senior vice president emeritus of the UW System.
