The Teaching Assistant Association (TAA) calls on Chancellor Biddy Martin to take a strong stance in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill. Her response to the bill to this point has been anything but.

In this time of crisis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we at the TAA are disappointed by the lack of vision and true leadership from university administrators. We had hoped that Chancellor Martin would speak out in support of the faculty, staff, students and community surrounding the university. Instead, her statement in response to the bill that would strip the state’s public-sector unions of the right to bargain on anything other than wages was overly guarded.

Her response should have included a clear statement about what the university can and will do to protect our collective bargaining rights. She could have expressed unconditional support for the right to her thousands of employees to bargain collectively.

We were hoping for a clear message about the various ways in which this bill could affect the university and the people who work for it. We would like to hear her say that this bill would damage the quality of education at the university by making it harder to
recruit the best and brightest graduate students, hurting the research and teaching
functions of the UW. She could have promised to fight to uphold the Wisconsin Idea and offered unwavering commitment to the University of Wisconsin as the public institution upon which the state is founded.

We were hoping for a statement of how she will push the state in the future to commit to previous levels of state support for the university.

It was inappropriate for her to present the Badger Partnership as a solution to the loss of bargaining rights facing TAs, PAs and other university employees. This crisis is not about the Badger Partnership, and Martin’s suggestion that the partnership will help us in the current crisis is disingenuous. The partnership does not propose in any way to return to us the collective bargaining rights that this bill would strip from us.

Chancellor Martin says we need to wait to see the implications of this bill. Instead, we are lobbying over the next two days to ensure this bill is not passed, and we are hoping to get her support in that effort. Please join us at the Capitol at 11 a.m. today to show your support for the collective bargaining rights of employees at this university and throughout the state.

For more information on how to get involved, check out the TAA website: taa-madison.org/2011/02/what-you-can-do-now.

Kevin Gibbons ([email protected]) is a graduate student in geography. He is the co-president of the Teaching Assistant Association.