Scott Walker’s hostile waters: The destruction of Wisconsin’s universities
If you’re from Wisconsin, the Friday night fish fry is a big deal, and the fish you want on your plate is a yellow perch you caught yourself. But for years, the population of yellow perch has been in serious decline. Now on the verge of collapse, the future of this iconic fish is looking grim. Kind of like what is happening right now with the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, under siege from a legislative agenda that has been steadily decimating its numbers while pretending that the loss doesn’t matter and hey, maybe it’s even a good thing! Why do you care, anyways? It’s just stupid fish. There are always more of them.
Anti-intellectuals may yell “good riddance!” at the exodus of top-tier talent, but it’s the yellow perch paying the ultimate price for Gov. Scott Walker’s political actions. Ever since Walker began gutting the university system—cutting $250 million in funding from the UW system (while mysteriously finding $250 million in state funds to pay for a new stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks); weakening a once-prized system of shared governance; and passing a new law effectively turning tenure into a tool of a Board of Regents consisting almost entirely of political appointees — the star faculty found itself being poached, starting with senior professors such as the fish guy, Rick Goetz. He was a lead researcher at what is now called the School of Freshwater Sciences at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he studied the yellow perch. He left for NOAA, taking his grant money with him.
Just like that, the wild fish lost the top guy working on their behalf. Fish night will never be the same.
Stop whining. One fish is just as good as another. Who cares about the “ancient mating habits of whatever”? (The words in quotes were actually spoken by an Wisconsin assemblyman dismissively waving away faculty protesting against budget cuts.) The Yellow Perch doesn’t appear on the 2015 Wisconsin fishing calendar from Game and Fish magazine. Try walleye, or smallies! There are loads of other fish to fry! But the Yellow Perch was the “fish of the people” because it was abundant and delicious. It also used to generate annual state revenues in the millions. Its loss isn’t just symbolic, it’s economic.
At the School of Freshwater Sciences, professor and senior scientist Sandra McLellan routinely pulls in half a million dollars annually in outside funding. Despite the constant political framing of professors as bloviating liberal leeches, the reality is far more complex. On the flagship campus at Madison, for example, 30 percent of the total university budget is covered by outside funding brought in by the faculty. In 2009, Madison faculty brought in one billion dollars of external funding, even as the university community contributed billions more to the annual state economy. (In 2015, it was $15.4 billion.)
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http://www.salon.com/2015/08/27/scott_walkers_hostile_waters_the_destruction_of_wisconsins_universities_damages_more_than_the_liberal_academic_elite/
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