Have the inevitable discussion about rising tuition with one of your well-informed peers, and chances are they’ll read you a veritable riot act of legislative abuses that the state’s flagship school did nothing to deserve: prison spending now totals roughly three-quarters of education funding, and state support of UW-Madison, currently hovering around 18 percent, is at an all-time low.
The litany of woes doesn’t end there: many legislators use Madison, and the university in particular, as a cultural bogeyman to please their constituencies. When Assembly Chair of the University and Colleges Committee Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, lambasts Madison’s insidiously European preference for bikes over cars, the absurdity would be almost fun if not for his concurrent efforts to eliminate all embryonic stem cell research in the state.
But then ask that same intelligent, thoughtful friend of yours what should be done – nothing better illustrates the ugly political trap from which this university is trying to extricate itself. More likely than not you’ll be treated to a lengthy discourse on the state’s historic relationship with this university and our duty to advocate policies that support instead of butcher funding for a research powerhouse that attracts thousands of jobs.
This argument – the most common one offered by opponents of Biddy Martin’s soon-to-be-more-clear Badger Partnership – has much to recommend it in the moral sense. Complaining about the devil is much easier than trying to live next to him.
And unlike the dubious methods used in other contexts by what will inevitably be a leftist opposition, they are not manipulating history when they claim that the past 20 years have amounted to a betrayal.
Being theoretically correct, however, does not absolve our responsibility to act like adults. Yes, raising tuition is un-progressive in the limited sense. But the few campus luminaries who deride the Badger Partnership as a neoliberal plot should question why many of the people echoing their calls for tuition freezes in the Legislature are inveterately right-wing. Take Nass himself, who frequently proposes limiting tuition increases to 4% a year, regardless of inflation.
The ugly fact is that complaints about how it used to be mean nothing to legislators who have waited years for such a rich opportunity to indulge their backwardness. In the headiness of control they will slash the UW-System’s budget to new lows and then prohibit any way of compensating for the shortfall. Concurrently, the same legislators will also demand more authority to regulate our internal affairs. Domestic partnerships and embryonic stem research are just two examples. This should not be a difficult reality to grasp.
Conversely, the money promised by the Badger Partnership would do more than simply render certain administrative causes feasible. It would allow this university to pay its professors what they can earn elsewhere. It would provide funding for smaller discussion sections and permit the university to disregard onerous state regulations when determining what goods to buy and how to construct its buildings. The Badger Partnership may be unpalatable for the burden it imposes, but at least it moves beyond recrimination and proposes something viable.
Biddy Martin has probably set her mind on a tuition increase, and no amount of administrative language can obscure the painful reality that a great many students will go further in debt to pay for it. But as a former roommate argued, that money is the difference between the people who work at this university having control over its affairs and Scott Walker puppeteering it directly to mediocrity. And those who oppose the Badger Partnership by virtue of its imperfections owe it to themselves to move beyond whining about corporatization. At worst, this spring will drag out all the usual ugliness of the tuition debate, complete with implications of class warfare and fascism. On the other hand, it will also be a rare opportunity to make sense.
Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.
