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In Wisconsin, we’re seeing another horrific consequence of a state electing a college dropout as its governor.
So far the national media hasn’t questioned Gov. Scott Walker being taken seriously as a presidential candidate, despite the fact he would be the first president in two-thirds of a century—since Harry Truman in 1945—to reach our nation’s highest office with only a high school diploma.
But political pundits always go out of their way to describe what works and what doesn’t work in political campaigns without ever bothering to report what really matters—whether the consequences are good or bad.
The media’s political judgment so far is that Walker’s lack of any college degree simply makes him seem like an ordinary guy with whom voters can identify, since most of them don’t have fancy-schmancy degrees either.
But in Wisconsin, we’re seeing close up the real damage resulting from Walker’s hostility toward higher education as the governor continues his financial gutting of the University of Wisconsin System, once one of the nation’s top universities.
Walker’s latest budget proposal would cut another whopping $300 million from the UW System over the next two years while extending a two-year tuition freeze for two more years to prohibit the university from making up any of that lost revenue.
Nearly as much was slashed from UW in Walker’s very first budget as part of a $1.1 billion dollar cut in educational funding at every level, the largest such reduction in state history.
Pandering to Primary Voters
In addition to his historic, massive cuts in university funding, Walker’s proposal also includes an underhanded mechanism to try to avoid responsibility for the resulting devastation.
After the next two years of reduced funding, Walker says he would set UW “free” from state oversight to allow it to independently control its own campuses, tuition, hiring and pay.
First of all, that’ll be the day when right-wing, blowhard legislators give up the opportunity to pompously scold people a lot smarter than they are about how state universities should be run.
Second, Walker’s drastic funding cuts and tuition freezes would almost surely force the university into raising tuition whenever it got its “freedom.” Walker could then pretend he wasn’t responsible and attack the university for acting to repair all his wreckage.
Third, Walker’s idea of independence for the university seems to be to make campuses independent of fair pay practices and “shared governance,” giving faculty a voice in how their institutions are run.
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Walker calls his proposal Act 10 for UW, comparing it to his extraordinarily damaging legislation that destroyed collective bargaining for teachers and other public employees and forced layoffs and wage cuts for workers throughout Wisconsin, crippling his own state’s economic recovery.
(Full Disclosure: I’m on the adjunct faculty of the UW-Milwaukee School of Education teaching courses in urban history and community problems. I have always been biased in favor of education.)
Like everything else Walker does these days, his assault on the university system serves a dual purpose. One is to close a $2 billion budget gap, which he can no longer blame on anyone other than himself. The other is to please right-wing Republican presidential primary voters around the country.
That latter is really bad news for Wisconsin, since Republican primaries attract voters who are even more extreme than those dumb-as-a-post, tea party congressmen who keep publicly embarrassing the party by saying what they think.
Walker is not dumb, but he has shown he is willing to do plenty of dumb things to pander to the dumbest of voters. That includes trashing the state’s excellent universities financially as well as verbally.
Right-wing radio talk shows (whose hosts are actually college educated) rile up the uneducated with simple-minded clichés about universities as left-wing bastions removed from the real world where snooty, stuffed-shirt academics proselytize impressionable young people to hate America. Being well educated is considered elitist.
In fact, the sins of the modern university are much more likely to be right-wing corporate than left-wing radical. As anti-education politicians like Walker keep slashing government support, universities are scrambling to replace the money by pleasing those who have most of it.
That doesn’t stop Walker from pretending all UW has to do to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts—the equivalent of totally eliminating three or four colleges on every campus—is to make professors work harder and teach more classes.
The truth is this is the worst possible time in history to sabotage higher education. Walker knows it. That’s why he’s sending his own sons to college.
The reason students today are piling up unsustainable student debt reaching into six figures is that they know the possibility of supporting a family with only a high school diploma has never been more difficult.
Few college dropouts can be so lucky as Scott Walker to have a big-time career subsidized by billionaires.
