OPINION & EDITORIAL
Don’t Cut Historical Society Funds
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by Badger Herald Editorial Board
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
It’s as if, when Gov. Doyle honed in on the University of Wisconsin to hit with massive budget cuts, he deployed a cluster bomb instead of a precision-guided attack.
As if the proposed $250 million cut to the UW system isn’t crippling enough, Doyle’s budget also singes the edges of what is considered higher education in Wisconsin, most notably by attacking the State Historical Society.
The $1.5 million proposed cut to the society is disproportionately high, to the point at which the society has determined it will be forced to cut staff, limit hours and stop collecting state records to compensate for future losses. The cut is also devastating to UW, primarily because the society is under a state mandate to maintain the university’s archives, and its ability to do so will be diminished, if not destroyed, if the budget passes as proposed.
But daily records and job hours aren’t what the average student sees of the society. The student sees its central library as one of the most beautiful buildings on Library Mall. The wide marble hallways, short-ceilinged stacks and research rooms are filled with maps, art, photographs, microfilm and volumes of text on everything from Lake Monona to Victoria Falls. The student has gotten lost in the stairwells in the walls and has felt the binding on a book that has not been opened in 40 years but is truly integral to a research paper.
When the Historical Society board met to make sense of the cuts earlier this month, it voted that 30 of its 125 staff positions would need to be eliminated under such a budget crunch. That’s a quarter of the library’s staff who won’t be there to help when the microfilm gets jammed, a quarter of the archivists who won’t be filing research, and a quarter of work-study students who won’t be earning tuition.
In such a bleak fiscal year, with cuts being shelled out to nearly every state agency, shouldn’t the powers who determine tax rates be trying to build, or at least sustain, a legacy for residents to take pride in? Stripping Wisconsin of its identity is doing the opposite: disrespecting residents and their ancestors.
In upcoming weeks as the state legislature remaps these parts of the ‘03-‘05 budget, our representatives need to consider that when the bomb falls on the historical society, the state’s identity and education system will be chained to it. The chains can’t be cut, so the state needs to correct its mistake and soften the blow on our history’s future.
