Here’s what Gov. Scott Walker said in a statement after UW-Milwaukee professors voted unanimously to join Madison, La Crosse and River Falls faculty in a no-confidence vote directed at the regents and System President Ray Cross:
"The university should not be about protecting the interests of the faculty, but about delivering value and excellence to Wisconsin."
Who can disagree with that sentiment? But what the governor wants to ignore is the connection between tenure and the tireless pursuit of knowledge, wherever it leads, and the quality of an education. After all, even if you want to look at a college degree as a simple investment (a mistake, in my view), that investment is based to a very large extent on the reputation of the institution you attended.
If professors leave for greener pastures where pay is higher, tenure is stronger and the state government is investing in, rather than cutting, university budgets, then won’t the quality of the education and the reputation of the university suffer? And won’t that mean that, looking at this from a straightforward transactional standpoint, we’re not “delivering value”?
The faculty votes were the right thing to do. Attacks on the university from the governor or legislators won’t get any worse because of it. The reason is that this is all part of a much larger, concerted, ideological attack on public higher education. For evidence, see the excellent documentary Starving the Beast, which played at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival. You can be as nice to these guys as you want, and they’ll still stick to you. The worst thing to do is to be silent. The best thing to do is to call it out for what it is.
But Walker and his allies are nothing if not message-disciplined. So they’ve cast this as professors simply wanting a “job for life.” The best way to counter that is for the students — the alleged beneficiaries of these attacks — to join their professors in going on the offensive.
When they return in the fall let’s hope that students on campuses all over the system will take their own no-confidence votes. That would make it clear that these attacks on faculty are attacks on the very quality of the education that students are paying for, and it would stop the governor from hiding behind the ruse that he’s doing all this for them.
