Students should expect more respect for higher education from a Harvard man.

In last week’s State of the State address, the illustrious, self-proclaimed foster father of the state’s economy, Democratic Governor Jim Doyle, failed to provide a single material reference to the UW System, its future, or its budget. The deafening silence of his omission has fallen on the ears of UW-Madison students. It cannot continue.

Like the runt of the state-budget litter, the UW System has been neglected by its statewide caretakers for at least the past 10 years. But just when students thought a new set of parents might shepherd the system back into the fold of other investments for this state’s future, big daddy stepped in and followed in the steps of his predecessors.

Doyle, working with the state legislature, cut the UW System’s budget by $250 million during the last budget ‘negotiation.’ But this was no negotiation. These keepers of the purse cut the system deeper than ever before, effectively raising tuition rates and stagnating class availability. Higher-education budgets, salary-dependent as they are, should not be easy targets for legislators whose contributors only care about K-12 education.

Now middle-class students are being slowly and systematically priced out of public education, and the quality of a UW degree — the driving force behind the state’s economy — is suffering. As the chancellor, one of the last true defenders of UW’s integrity, has noted, the median income of the incoming class is almost twice that of the average Wisconsin family. Is this the state government’s conception of the Wisconsin Idea?

Wisconsin’s governor and our state legislature should be ashamed. If parents treated their children this way, they would be hauled off to prison. Why should Doyle, and the Republican legislative leadership, get a free pass?