Photo by Michael Vadon, Flickr CC
Sometimes self-respecting people with principles have no choice but to stand up against horrendous policies even at the risk of offending powerful people who are in a position to hurt them.
No, we’re certainly not talking about the mealy mouthed public statements faking party unity by Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan as Ryan continues his retreat from attempting to distance himself from the disastrous Republican nominee-to-be.
This is about the very real public rupture in the relationship between the faculties of University of Wisconsin campuses across the state and University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross.
Last week, a packed meeting of protesting UW-Milwaukee faculty voted “no confidence” in the leadership of Cross and the Board of Regents to aggressively fight the legislative assault of Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans on university funding, shared governance and academic freedom.
Milwaukee’s was the fourth faculty to take a stand against their own university’s leaders, joining Madison, La Crosse and River Falls with Green Bay following the next day and more angry academic protest votes to come around the state.
Full disclosure: I was an adjunct lecturer in community studies at UW-Milwaukee for five years. I also was a founding organizer of the Newspaper Guild at the Journal Company, so I know the risks involved in standing up to your employer.
But this is one of those important moments when anyone who cares about the survival of Wisconsin’s university system needs to decide how long to allow its destruction to continue before finally calling a halt.
Cross is caught in a conflict between his front-line educators throughout the state, who want him to passionately and publicly stand up for what’s right, and his own bureaucratic instincts of somehow working with the enemies of higher education to try to reduce further damage.
|
|
UW System Under Attack
Make no mistake about it. The funding cuts and policy changes Walker and legislative Republicans already have passed crippling higher education in Wisconsin are massive and historic.
Many people only talk about the enormous $250 million whack in the current university budget, which has resulted in deep academic cuts in every department on every campus.
But hardly anyone mentions anymore that financial assault came on top of an even greater wallop in Walker’s very first budget.
That budget, along with eliminating bargaining rights of public employees, such as those at universities, to have any say in their own wages and working conditions, was the most anti-education budget in state history. It cut a whopping $1.1 billion from education at every level, including $315 million from the UW System.
Add to that financial destruction Walker’s pure contempt for the mission of higher education itself, illustrated by his unsuccessful attempt to eliminate the university’s 100-year-old guiding principles from state law.
The Wisconsin Idea committed UW “to extend knowledge and its application” beyond the campuses, to “training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition” and, above all, to “the search for truth.”
Imagine a governor who would not want his state’s university to extend knowledge, educate people, improve the human condition or search for truth.
Politically Walker has little use for truth. Walker attacked the Milwaukee faculty’s vote with the absurd claim that UWM has an enrollment of 2.8 students for every faculty member. The ratio is actually 10 times that.
Walker also fraudulently claimed the real concern of university faculties was protecting “job-for-life tenure.” Tenure-for-life is a right-wing myth. UW has always had the power to fire tenured faculty for misconduct or financial emergencies.
What faculties want to protect is their hard-won voice in shared university governance that helps assure any academic positions and programs eliminated are for valid educational reasons, not political ones.
We should expect university faculties to carry out UW’s mission of extending knowledge by taking a strong stand against anyone trying to destroy their institution. And they have a right to demand their university president do the same.
But the access of every family in Wisconsin to high-quality higher education also is being destroyed. Where are the protests from the general public?
Too many seem oblivious to the continuing destruction of removing hundreds of millions of dollars from higher education in budget after budget. Walker’s legislative allies are now threatening even more cuts in retaliation against the faculty protests.
Apparently, the ultimate victims—students and their families—are satisfied with what little they get from Walker’s tax cuts and tuition freezes, which are the governor’s equivalent of America’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, scattering dimes to street urchins.
It’s the modern-day Rockefellers who walk away with most of the money from Walker’s massive cuts to the quality of education and other government services in Wisconsin.
With the financial devastation of our once great university already surpassing half a billion dollars, how much worse will we allow it to get before all of us stand up?
