Gratuitously high rates of chlamydia transmission aside, a part of me always envied my peers in the Greek system. It wasn’t the artificially fabricated social life, but the architecture. Greek organizations own and maintain some of the most stunning properties on campus. Yet the proportion of students who identify themselves with arbitrary letter combinations has remained consistently low — likely because no sensible person would trade architectural sexiness for the specter of four years consecrated to nostalgia for the era of Cro-Magnon man.
And yet, as the cranes dotting the downtown area show, two can play the beautification game. Despite a recession unprecedented in impact, construction and renovation of university buildings is proceeding at a whirlwind pace. Meanwhile, salaries for full professors at UW-Madison are at the bottom of their peer group, with an average salary of $109,512 per year. The median for UW’s peer group, which includes other large state universities such as UCLA and Illinois, is currently $127,441 per year.
Unless money is somehow shifted to professor salaries and financial aid, the university seems condemned to play the same game as the Greeks — perpetually trading intellectual content for elaborate but useless window dressing.
That said, some areas of campus do need a makeover. And as Vice Chancellor for Administration Darrell Bazzell argued, new construction is not engaged in a zero-sum game against lowering tuition or increasing professor salaries. By the time university administrators get their hands on any money, most of it has already been allocated to specific purposes by the state and federal governments, or by alumni. Additionally, a large chunk of money would not be spent at all if it were not going to buildings — some graduates straightforwardly prefer new buildings to investment in the much more conceptually difficult notion of people infrastructure.
As far as administrators are concerned, fundraising efforts can and are oriented toward realms of actual need. Departments have been aggressively targeting fundraising toward people, ensuring that the needs of professors and students come before brick and mortar breast implants that do little to improve what really matters. The Pharmacy School’s success in gathering a whopping $22.6 million is one such example. Over a six-year period, the School, in partnership with the UW Foundation, beat its original target of $18 million and directed almost all of the money to hiring new faculty and aiding students. President of the UW Foundation Sandy Wilcox made clear that his focus is generally geared toward investment in people.
However, it was depressing to learn that students do not play anything resembling a proportionate role. Instead, hosts of ambitious political science majors are busy calling Earth Day communists or throwing themselves into efforts with outcomes already decided. The work of so many idealistic students on Barack Obama’s campaign, WISPIRG’s nauseatingly pretentious battle against workplace smoking and the environmental McCarthyism of Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow are at best useless. This when, for example, the major student groups did next to nothing to fight the costly reconstruction of the two student unions, which required three votes to pass and will end up costing in excess of $147 million with more than half of this coming from students. No (serious) student advocacy group was, or is, devoted to watching the fiscal management of this university. Instead, our self-appointed change-makers rely on the legislature and administrators, preferring to impotently stomp their feet about issues they can neither influence nor fully understand.
Meanwhile, construction will go ahead on Union South.
That money could easily have gone to offset the cost of the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates, or to making professorships here more attractive from the fiscal end, but will now serve as a standard for the cost of indifference.
While competence reigns supreme in both the UW Foundation and the Office of Administration, Union South and the Memorial Union continue to serve as powerful counterexamples of the abuse that is permitted if the implicated constituency does not stick up for itself.
UW will always play an independent’s ugly duckling to Harvard’s sororstitute swan, but that shouldn’t mean we are condemned to be dumber as well. If inadequate professor salaries and struggling financial aid are any indication, the struggle for your own money is one well worth your time.
Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in economics and history.
