Dear Rep. Ballweg of the 41st District,

In the interests of promoting tradition, you are helping to entrench ignorance. In placing your interpretation of morality above the goals of this university, you are betraying the most sacred charge of any institution of higher learning: to educate those in pursuit of a degree.

As the vice chairman of the Assembly Colleges and Universities Committee, you oppose the University of Wisconsin granting domestic partnership benefits to its same-sex faculty members, putting opinion before necessity and personal conviction before efficiency. You oppose granting domestic partnership benefits because you believe only couples committed in a ?traditional? manner deserve them.

Traditional? Let?s not even start on what the ancient Greeks would have to say about that one.

Do you really need to be reminded that any policy a legislator pursues must be judged objectively for its practical value, not through the bizarre lens of a concept so vague as ?tradition?? I know that opposing domestic partnership benefits does not stem from a subliminal desire to run this university into the ground, but all things considered, that is exactly what it is doing.

In every business or institution, the most qualified people are chosen for their positions. They give all their energy to the institution. In return, the institution does whatever it can to retain those individuals, because it benefits from having the best employees steering its course.

In a university with notoriously poor faculty retention rates, alienating its very heart and soul makes no sense. The professors are the people who the students depend on to develop the intellectual integrity that makes UW worthy of respect, not legislators obsessed with imposing a personal standard of ethics on tens of thousands of people.

In an article published by The Badger Herald (?Representative brings ?traditionalist? view to college,? Dec. 7), you lament the fact that we lose valued professors, but you refuse to consider the possibility of using domestic partnership benefits to help retain current faculty and attract new professors.

Why? Is there any justification, beyond your personal convictions, for driving qualified faculty members away from this school? If you can present a single piece of evidence demonstrating that this policy is beneficial to UW, please bring it forward.

A side note: No one is asking you to endorse homosexuality ? you are being asked to endorse the future of this university.

Your opposition to domestic partnership benefits is especially confusing considering the other treats the Legislature was willing to throw at UW, among them a whopping $250 million construction grant to renovate the Memorial Union Theater and replace Union South. In the final version of the budget that passed in October, the state Legislature decided to increase funding for the University by $62 million. However, only $10 million was dedicated to retaining faculty members, and of course none of it went to providing domestic partnership benefits.

You are part of the state Legislature, Ms. Ballweg. You know very well that a paltry $10 million in one of the largest universities in the country is, to say it politely, insignificant.

Spending $250 million on renovating buildings that don?t need to be renovated and only $10 million on retaining faculty is comparable to a morbidly obese person dropping $1000 on a tummy tuck, when a pair of jogging shorts costs $10. It spends all of the taxpayers? money on cosmetic improvements that the university doesn?t need, while neglecting a more urgent requirement that costs comparatively less.

This university has every right to offer whatever benefits it feels will help it retain qualified members of the staff.

If Wisconsin wanted to be traditional, it would also carry out such measures as withholding voting rights from women and counting a man?s slaves as three-fifths of his vote in elections.

Tradition, you see, is by no measure inherently correct.

With the stance you have taken, you are not representing students from rural areas, as you claim in a previous edition of the Herald. You are certainly not representing this university. You are representing an unjustified personal opinion.

No one is telling you what to do with your life, Ms. Ballweg. I suggest you stop telling our professors what to do with theirs.

Sincerely, 

Sam

Sam Clegg ([email protected])
is a freshman majoring in English.