David Michael Miller
This week, UW-Madison’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly approved a no-confidence resolution against UW System President Ray Cross and the UW Board of Regents.
Faculty senates at UW-River Falls and UW-La Crosse quickly followed suit with their own no-confidence resolutions, and it’s likely other campus faculty senates will follow suit. I encourage them to focus as much on the $250 million budget cut as they do on the tenure changes. While tenure and shared government are incredibly important to the long-term health of a research, the concepts can be inside baseball.
These resolutions are part of a public relations campaign, a way for faculty to make it into the newspaper. Focusing on the impact of the budget cuts — undergraduate students taking longer to finish school, understaffed advising offices, reductions in UW-Extension support to farmers across the state — is a much smarter way to win the PR campaign.
I don’t disagree with UW-Madison’s Faculty Senate’s action. But while I believe Cross is trying to lead the strongest UW System he can, his strategy of acquiescence and attempts at bridge-building aren’t necessarily a desirable, or even sustainable, strategy. As UW System president, Cross should be making it hard for the governor and the Legislature to further cut the UW budgets. Instead, he minimizes the funding cuts and changes to tenure in interviews and on Twitter. Without public outrage over the cuts, it makes it much easier to cut UW funding in the next budget.
Cross also lacks tact in most of his System-wide communications. He doesn’t seem to understand how much stress the students and staff who work for him are under because of instability, or how morale has deteriorated after years of budget cuts under Govs. Doyle and Walker.
While I question the tactics he has used in office, I have sympathy for Cross as a person. Has one UW System president faced challenges like this since the merger of the System in the early ’70s?
Cross inherited the fund balance controversy. The fact that the UW System had built up some reserve funds may not seem like a big deal to liberals, but it is still an open wound for conservatives. It’s fiscal Benghazi. And Cross came into his job just when conservatives finally found the smoking gun they could use to take those smug ivory tower folks down a peg.
Cross also has to deal with a governor driven by ego to reshape every public institution in his image. Diminishing tenure was meant to provide a “fiscal responsibility” talking point for a presidential campaign that was brought down by its own fiscal irresponsibility.
He also has to face the wrath resulting from a broken budgeting process. Walker and the Republican-dominated Legislature refuse to accept federal Medicaid expansion dollars or rescind unsustainable manufacturing tax credits. Combined with Wisconsin’s underperforming economy compared to our neighbors like Minnesota, the Badger State is blessed with chronic budget holes. The big areas of state funding in the budget that can be cut are K-12 schools, prisons and the UW System. While I’d argue that we should be focused on reducing our ludicrous incarceration rates, the UW System is the easiest of the three for Republicans to cut now that they’ve bled out K-12 schools.
So faced with political scorn, presidential avarice and unforgiving finances, Cross has had to spend most of his tenure at UW System kissing the feet of the Republicans who control the state. He’s added one of Walker’s top advisers to an extremely well-paid executive position. He thanked legislators for only cutting a quarter of a billion dollars from the UW’s budget.
From the outside, I initially saw Cross’ cycle of acquiescence and compromise as a strategy to bank political capital for when the UW needed support. And, to Cross’ credit, he has used that capital on occasion. He took a strong stand against Walker’s attempt to cut out the Wisconsin Idea from the UW’s mission. He joined chancellors in a strong resolution opposing concealed carry in the classroom.
The no-confidence resolutions might give Cross some extra capital. He could get a bit of respect advocating for the faculty that doesn’t support him. Ray Cross seems like a guy who turns the other cheek.
But no matter the scenario, it just doesn’t seem like he can build up that much capital with the micromanaging legislators who currently call the shots. When Cross does step out of line, legislators are quick to remind him how short a leash he is on. He got knocked by Sen. Steve Nass for agreeing to meet with students of color. Cross once let out a simple tweet debunking a cheap Marco Rubio dig on public education, and Rep. Jim Steineke badgered him for it. Cross was in the right, Rubio was in the wrong, but Cross still had to backpedal.
If Cross steps too far out of line, the Board of Regents will kick him out. Who would they replace him with? Well, one possibility is Jim Villa, a top Walker confidant who has been given a cushy executive-level position at UW System. It’s just high enough that he could be made interim president should Cross get the boot.
The no-confidence vote should truly be directed at the people in office on the other end of State Street, because the only way Cross is going to be able to do a substantially better job is to change the hostile officeholders that force him to act from a position of acquiescence.
