David Michael Miller
The biggest problem facing America right now isn’t income inequality. It’s not climate change or gun violence or drug addiction. The biggest problem, I would argue, is social isolation, because it underlies all the others.
In recent decades we’ve sorted ourselves out into ever more refined categories of income and education. In the neighborhoods where we live, in our jobs, where we shop and in our social networks, we meet people who are mostly like us. We don’t walk a mile in anyone else’s shoes because we live 10 miles away.
We can’t muster the political will to solve the yawning gap between top earners and the rest because too many people of influence never see those who live on minimum wage. We can’t make anything happen on gun control because guns have become a weapon in the culture wars between mostly rural and mostly urban tribes that don’t understand one another. Even climate change isn’t an issue we can come together on because the one or two percent of scientists who don’t agree that it is caused by humans have inordinate sway in a narrow media and cultural echo chamber of misinformation that is impenetrable to what the rest of us would call reason.
So, now comes the idea that we should move the downtown campus of Madison College (Madison Area Technical College to those who want to call it what it is) to the south side. The district board will vote on the proposal May 4. There has been a campus in the Villager Mall for some time, but the proposal is to expand it with resources gained from closing down the venerable old school downtown.
To the idea’s proponents it makes a lot of sense: go where the students are and go where the institution can do the most good.
Fair enough, but there’s another way to look at it. What makes a city cosmopolitan is the mixing of people of all kinds of backgrounds. That’s why Madison College is valuable to the downtown. If the downtown were just a bunch of lawyers, government workers and legislators, it would be a pretty dull place. (Well, okay, so somebody would occasionally dump a beer on a legislator’s head, but still.)
And for the students, college should be about getting out of your comfort zone. Instead, this proposal might only serve to further increase the social isolation that is damaging society in such a profound way.
Having said all that, if an expanded south Madison campus is what the community wants, it could be achieved without closing down the downtown campus entirely. Keeping both would be more expensive, meaning that it would probably cost enough to trip a state-mandated referendum.
Madison College understandably wants to avoid that, but if it were explained well enough it would likely pass. This is a community that deeply values education, and getting an opportunity to tell that to a Legislature and governor that cut $250 million from the UW System might provide an added impetus for a “yes” vote.
It might even be possible for Madison College to sell or lease the downtown property, realize an income stream and rent or buy back a portion of the new development, reducing the overall cost to taxpayers. That move would probably require a change in state law because current law prohibits technical colleges from buying or leasing back property they dispose of.
Still, if there’s enough political will, the south-side campus can be expanded and some foothold can remain downtown. It’s politically more difficult and at least somewhat more expensive, but the costs of further social isolation are even higher.
