The “Future of the UW System” committee: A retread of a rerun of a repeat

The Republican-led effort is primed to double down on the austerity logic behind the UW’s problems.

Earlier this year, the Republican-led state legislature created a Legislative Study Committee on the Future of the UW System. Membership is stacked in favor of Republicans and business interests. There are no students or union members, and two of the three faculty are from UW-Madison. 

Full disclosure: I applied for the committee but was rejected. For many years, I’ve studied higher education politics and policies in detail. But I support publicly funded, public higher education, and that’s a non-starter for the Republicans. 

The committee is the latest chapter in a long-running plan to cut the UW and impose corporate priorities, including narrowing the curriculum, imposing online education, and closing campuses. These priorities have been stated repeatedly, by the Republican Party, the Walker-appointed Board of Regents, and the current Board, a majority of whom were appointed by Governor Evers.

The real justification for cutting the UW is greed. Corporations and the wealthy don’t want to pay taxes, want an oversupply of cheap, highly educated labor (primarily in STEM and technical fields), and want to feed at the public trough through lucrative contracts.  

But this is politics, and so the public justifications are numerous, ever shifting, and often ridiculously silly. This sentiment was echoed by committee member Senator Chris Larson, who suggested that the committee “may already be a farce before it starts.” And these justifications have been only slightly modified over the years as politicians have deployed them to cut public education funding. In fact, I’ll go ahead and lay out the arguments we’ll see in this report; I doubt they will be any different from all the other reports politicians, businesses, and administrators have been shilling for decades. 

The most common public justification is the demographic cliff/crisis/trends, etc. Whatever the specific terminology, the word “demographic” must be used. Just say “demographic,” and the rest of the sentence is as incomprehensible as Charlie Brown’s teacher. You’ve won the room via boredom as everyone tunes out, and have laid the groundwork to get rid of the English major, hire more consultants, buy more software, and lay off more faculty and staff.     

But population panic is a very old corporate trick. Turns out the Reagan administration was fretting about an “aging workforce” and “shrinking numbers of young people” too. In 1987.    

What the committee won’t discuss is that Wisconsin’s population is growing. Before it writes its population-doomsday final report, maybe the committee could take a look at the UW System’s own top secret enrollment numbers, which show an increase in total enrollment last fall?  There’s no demographic crisis at all.

Rust belt cities that are half as big as they used to be, that’s a real demographic crisis. 

I suspect that the committee also will cite “inflation.” Because of “inflation,” we must lay off faculty and staff, while giving Chancellors huge bonuses and spending tens of millions on new software and consultants. Meanwhile, inflation is 3%.    

The latest argument for cutting both K-12 and higher education—including the UW System—has been that “federal Covid funding has ended,” as if federal Covid funding was the key to funding the UW for the previous several decades?   

Many other facts will definitely not make it into the committee’s report, such as the state’s biggest surplus in history, or the tens of millions the UW insists on spending on corporate products and services that do nothing whatsoever for our students. Also not mentioned will be the explosion of income and wealth among the highest earners in recent decades, which could easily fund public services through this thing we call taxation. These are bad facts for the austerity narrative, so they’re left out.

The truth is that public higher education in Wisconsin and across the country used to be substantially publicly funded. Tuition and fees were minimal as a result. Public meant public. But Reagan-era neoliberalism demanded privatization of public services so the highest earners could pay less taxes, and income and wealth could be transferred upward, all under the guise of greater “efficiency.”   

As a result, the last few decades have seen the gradual, systematic de-funding of public higher education. Tuition and fees are no longer inexpensive. Higher education has largely accepted its status as “tuition-driven,” so our only incentive is to maximize enrollment.  

I’m sure the committee will cite CEOs’ self-interested claims about the workforce, as if they’re not self-interested at all. We’ll hear lots of blather about “high-demand fields,” “skills gaps,” and the pressure for campuses to jettison whole fields of study.  

Within the larger discussion of the economy, Republicans and business will always want to talk only about education because it’s in their interests to do so. This shifts the discussion away from a neoliberal political economy constructed to keep workers’ wages low and benefit the highest earners. How can we not know this by now? 

The committee will also cite the data provided by tech vendors (as the UW often does) which—big surprise!—touts the efficiency and cost-savings of their own products.

There. I just saved everyone precious time they would have spent reading the final report of the Legislative Study Committee, a version of which has already been written about a zillion times.  

Is this even real? 

Why does anyone think any of this is in good faith?    

It would be humorous if the effects weren’t so devastating for our students and the residents of the state.