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A check to the UW for $800 million catching on fire.
As the once great University of Wisconsin continues its decline you can no longer blame Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and the Republicans. You can blame Gov. Tony Evers and the majority of his appointments to the UW Board of Regents.
The grand compromise that Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman negotiated with Vos was a great deal for the UW. Vos has been withholding inflationary pay increases for UW employees, approval of a much needed new engineering building on the Madison campus, and $32 million in funding that Vos said was going to diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In the deal, announced Friday, Rothman got the new engineering building plus money for additional building projects, he got the $32 million restored, and he got the wage increases released, all while not having to eliminate a single DEI position. As a sweetener, the UW also would have been able to keep some revenue that comes from the reciprocity program with Minnesota that had gone to the general fund. All told, the UW would have gotten $800 million.
What Vos got was mostly window dressing. Some of the DEI positions would have been reclassified as “student success” positions, whatever that means. There would have been a three-year moratorium on creating new administrative positions, not just in DEI but everywhere. The only problem with that idea was that it was only three years and it didn’t call for the outright elimination of some of that bureaucratic overhead. One of the big drivers of the high cost of higher education, after all, is the proliferation of non-teaching positions.
There would have also been a new endowed professorship in “conservative thought.” It’s not clear what department the position would have been in or what it would have done exactly. Teach? Research? Be an advocate for conservative views in multiple departments? Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin may have thought it was a great idea as student marches and sit-ins could have been redirected there. In any event, it was symbolic and didn’t amount to much of anything. It would have been a small pill to swallow, especially when washed down with that $800 million.
But that all went up in smoke when the Board of Regents, in a stunningly foolish move on Saturday morning, rejected the deal. In doing so, they threw both Rothman and Mnookin, who was vocal in her support of the compromise, under the bus. They gave all that up, apparently, because they objected to seeing a relative handful of DEI positions renamed to something else.
This is madness because there is no evidence that I can see that current DEI programs are accomplishing much of anything. The percentage of Black students on the Madison campus has barely budged, racist incidents still happen too often, and campus climate surveys continue to show that the environment isn’t as welcoming as it should be. And this after years of these DEI efforts. The standard line will be that they’ve been underfunded. It’s more likely that the definition of insanity is to double down on the same thing and expect different results.
Look, neither cutting these positions willy nilly nor defending them to the hilt is justified. What would have made sense is a deep dive into DEI, preferably conducted by the respected, nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau. It doesn’t appear that anyone — defenders or detractors — has a very good handle on how DEI is practiced on different campuses. This could be anything from helping disabled students navigate campus to preaching the illiberal ideology of Ibram X. Kendi. We know the end results don’t show much progress, but why is that? Can DEI be improved or should the whole thing be scrapped in favor of some other effort? I don’t doubt the problems are real but I’m plenty skeptical that the solutions are in DEI as now practiced.
In any event, DEI hardly has a record that deserves falling on your sword over, and yet that’s exactly what the Regents, egged on by legislative Democrats and by Evers, did.
Aside from the good stuff for the UW, there was the big picture. What was really encouraging during those brief hours when the compromise was alive was the deal itself. It showed that Rothman and the UW could, in fact, recognize political reality and work with Republicans in the best interests of public higher education. Because, like it or not, Republicans aren’t going anywhere. Even after the new liberal Supreme Court imposes new maps, the GOP is likely to have a comfortable margin in the Assembly and at least a slim majority in the Senate.
But instead of choosing the real world, the Regents, Evers and the Democrats have chosen amorphous and inconsequential DEI ideology over real, tangible progress for students, including students of color. How does any student benefit from inadequate facilities, demoralized staff and budget cuts?
The Democrats aren’t just in the minority because of gerrymandering. With actions like this, they’ve earned it.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
