Last week, I had the distinction of sharing the Herald’s opinion page with Gov. Scott McCallum, and this week I was planning to take issue with the governor’s piece. I was going to question why he didn’t even make mention of his draconian proposal for the elimination of shared revenue to municipalities. Does he really believe, I was planning to ask, that we students are concerned only with the size of our tuition check, not with the viability of the city that we live in and of those that we come from?

Just as importantly, I was going to question the governor’s assertion that we’d better support his plan, because the alternatives could be far worse. Why should we let someone punch us in the gut, I was planning to write, just because he says his friends have a baseball bat?

In fact, I was even going to chastise the UW administration. Cities and counties quickly and correctly identified the devastating effects of their cuts–why didn’t we?

The university system was prepared to simply swallow $51 million in cuts, I was going to point out. System President Katharine Lyall described the cuts as “very challenging” but seemed perfectly willing to accept the challenge. Worse yet, UW-Madison’s administration seemed just as eager to take on more than its fair share of the system cuts, with Chancellor Wiley practically inviting the Board of Regents to slash close to home.

Perhaps they were too resigned or too meek, but no university official bothered to trumpet the tremendous benefits our higher-education system has on the rest of the state. Not one official pointed out that the state’s investment in education and research is re-paid many times over, tangibly and intangibly. Not one declared that cutting the sails of our flagship campus was, plain and simple, a bad idea.

Stand up, I was planning to write. Stand up to the governor; stand up to the Legislature. Stand up for the UW System and stand up for the state of Wisconsin. We cannot squeeze a strained system further, and cuts will cost our state–whether now or down the road. The folks at the Capitol need to hear it and they will listen. You just have to say it.

The problem is, someone finally did. Last Friday, faced with an uncertain yet certainly dire financial situation, university officials put a hold on undergraduate admissions at all UW campuses. This was hardly posturing–it was pragmatic preparation, the first clear demonstration from the Board of Regents that cuts do hurt and that these cuts will be particularly painful.

And, over in the Assembly, the governor’s fellow Republicans did listen–just long enough to find their baseball bats and start swinging.

By the end of Saturday’s budgetary brutality, the UW System was an additional $20 million poorer.

I’m not really sure why. It was not fiscal prudence that fueled the Republican rampage–the UW system is taking a far greater hit than state agencies and the additional $20 million cut will remedy less than 2 percent of the state’s not-so-surprising surprise budget deficit while reducing system capacity by some 4,000 students.

The Assembly Republicans understood what they were doing, and I now understand the hazards of candor. The regents blew the whistle on an unacceptable budget and now they are paying the price.

Last week, I would have urged Wiley, and the Board of Regents to stand up for higher education. I would have pushed them to fight the governor’s cuts as simply unacceptable and to unabashedly warn of the effects such cuts would have on the future of both the university and the state.

I would have called on them to insist that the great state of Wisconsin deserves a great University of Wisconsin that requires a similarly great investment.

But I now see the risk of being a whistleblower.

So this week, I urge them to fight even harder.

It would be easy to let the university slide toward mediocrity, to equate complacency with bad cuts and candor with catastrophic ones, and to decide that tolerating a gradual decline in quality is better than tolerating an irate Assembly. But such an approach would be neither honest nor fair and would be a disservice to students and the state.

It is often said that when a company cuts its research and development budget there is little doubt it is on a course toward bankruptcy, irrelevancy or both. Last week, the Assembly Republicans slashed Wisconsin’s R&D budget.

This week, the university community must stand up for itself and for Wisconsin’s future.

Bryant Walker Smith (bwsmith@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in civil engineering.