I have two good friends who are transferring out of UW-Madison after this semester because they can no longer afford to attend school here.
I have three friends who are currently over in Iraq in a war they never wanted to be in because they thought joining the Army was the only way they could pay their tuition bill. And I have many more friends in my hometown of Washington, D.C., who constantly faced the barriers of poverty, isolation and violence and were lucky to graduate from high school, let alone think about college.
It was with those friends in mind that I joined with other UW-Madison students in crashing a luncheon talk by UW System President Kevin Reilly entitled “Keeping the public in the public university.”