Witnessing the UW-System’s austerity from the inside

Ongoing cuts raise unanswered questions: who gets to access education? And to what end?

In November, The Daily Cardinal released an email from Universities of Wisconsin president Jay Rothman that included “lessons” from a report he’d read, and told campus chancellors to consider them in order to “return to financial stability.”

One was: “Consider shifting away from liberal arts programs to programs that are more career specific, particularly if the institution serves a large number of low-income students.” Another was to “Make the ‘painful’ cuts and adjustments at one time and then move on.”

Rothman, who has no education background, went on the defensive shortly after, stating that he is “a product of the liberal arts,” and that he has “not asked our universities to move away from liberal arts programs.”

“I have repeatedly stated that the liberal arts develops critical thinking and problem solving skills vital to a knowledge economy and to winning the war for talent,” Rothman tweeted.

Jon Shelton, UW-Green Bay faculty and staff union president and education historian, was outspoken when his campus announced that it might cut its dance and theater majors. UW-Green Bay is supposed to be a comprehensive campus, and the announcement was made at a time when enrollment grew 7.6%.

Shelton points out that Rothman wasn’t saying that no one should have access to liberal arts education. Instead, the kinds of cuts Rothman hints at would mean offering liberal arts programs only to the select few who can attend one of the state’s flagship campuses.

“This directly fits into Rothman’s memo,” Shelton says. “Where you’re saying, ‘Yeah, if you go to Madison, you can major in theater, but not UW-Green Bay,’ right? So it means fewer options for [UW-Green Bay] students.”

This flare-up is part of a longer trend of pressure from the business community and conservative politicians to force austerity measures on universities, and funnel more students into online learning and/or “skills-based” studies. Shelton and Neil Kraus, a political science professor at UW-River Falls, wrote an opinion column in December for The Cap Times in response to the fallout from The Daily Cardinal’s reporting. They highlight a circular pattern of politicians jumping on crises to push austerity, whether that’s a demographic crisis (that never seems to materialize) or a fiscal crisis (imposed on the university system when the state has literally billions of dollars in its coffers). 

Whatever the justification, Wisconsin state legislators and UW System leaders themselves have laid out the plan multiple times, such as in the “Blueprint for the UW System Beyond Covid-19,” released in May, 2020, and the 2021 Roth Report, both of which advocated for cuts to campuses (other than UW-Madison) and a push to online learning.

“There’s a clear pattern here,” Kraus and Shelton write in their Cap Times piece. “And it begins and ends with the imposition of austerity, which is a political choice that shortchanges our students.”

When Kraus and Shelton use “our,” they are referring to all students, from all walks of life, who are seeking education, whether that’s to broaden their horizons, find greater purpose, or pragmatically gain skills to build a better life. But not everyone sees all students as “our students.” The people who are pushing austerity are not going to be affected by it, because they and their circle can afford the outsized tuition and cost-of-living at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee—or flagship public or private universities out of state. They can afford to have their students study liberal arts and major in theater or dance. And because they can afford it, they believe they deserve it.

This will affect students who come from households with fewer resources, no matter how smart,  hardworking, or deserving of a comprehensive education they are. It is resource hoarding, a tendency that has cropped up again and again in the history of education in this country. It’s a history that asks, who should access education? And to what purpose?

Work, citizenship, and fantasy

For much of American history there were parties advocating for public education, but for different reasons, Shelton says. Thomas Jefferson wanted all white men (and only white men) to access three years of public education in order to “understand the power dynamics in a democracy and to recognize tyranny,” as Shelton paraphrased. In the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s, Horace Mann published about a dozen reasons he believed in public education. The last one mentions job training but, Shelton says, it isn’t really what we think of as job training today.

“[Mann] talks a little bit about the importance of education and helping working people get job skills, but most of it is about, again, helping people to be responsible citizens in a democracy,” Shelton says. “And there’s an element of social control there, by the way. It’s, ‘We have to teach people to be good citizens, to almost behave themselves to a certain extent,’ he’s saying. But it’s not about job training. It’s not about training workers at all.”

Around that same time, working men’s organizations, which Shelton called “proto-unions,” were advocating for public education “because they wanted their sons largely to be educated in order to organize and build democratic institutions,” Shelton says.

It was at the turn of the 20th century that job training as we think of it became part of education, but of course, those advocates were not saying everyone should get the same training. Some cities saw the formation of the first vocational schools. In Chicago, there was a proposal to have two separate public school systems: one that was liberal arts-based for the middle class and elites, and another that would be skills- and trades-based for the working class. (It was never implemented, in part thanks to opposition from the Chicago Teachers Federation, an all-women union founded in 1897.)

Shelton says that during the Progressive Era, across the country, different communities were debating “what role education should play to solve some of the big social and economic inequalities.”

“You have some reformers who are more business-leaning, who are who are arguing for [job training], but then you also have other progressives—like the leader of the Chicago Teachers Federation, was a woman named Margaret Haley, and then people like John Dewey, progressive—who are arguing that actually, the way to use the schools to deal with these problems is to help people understand democracy better, and teach them to be actors in a democratic society,” Shelton says. “There’s a whole ongoing debate there and it never really gets fully resolved.”

Fast forward to de-industrialization, a time period where Kraus says we begin to see the formation of what he calls the “fantasy economy,” an economic narrative pushed by education consultants and politicians advocating for austerity, which he examines in his book The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, And The Education Reform Movement. Kraus argues that while pushes for more equitable, accessible education are important, too much emphasis has been placed on non-existent “skills gaps” that are used by education consultants to justify their jobs and the business community to divert attention away from their culpability for stagnant wages.

“[N]o education policy can change the fact that the economy is dominated by low-wage jobs typically requiring little formal education or the fact that the combined number of bachelor’s and advanced degree holders substantially outnumber jobs typically requiring these higher levels of education,” Kraus writes. “Further, no education reform policies can alter the wage stagnation suffered by millions of highly educated Americans working in jobs commensurate with their educational attainment. Nor can channeling students into STEM fields change the number of engineering or technology-related positions in the labor market.”

“It’s always in the interest of business to say they can’t find enough workers,” Kraus tells Tone Madison. “It’s always in their interest to say that, because it deflects the entire conversation away from business and onto two places: first and foremost, onto the education system, and then secondly, onto the population itself.”

Shelton shares Kraus’ desire to see administrators and other decision-makers question the narratives that come from the business community before using them to make reforms.

“We hear this all the time on the campus: businesses say that they want this from our graduates. And what I would say is, ‘Okay, where’s the evidence for that?'” Shelton says. “Where’s the evidence that businesses actually can’t find somebody to do this thing? I think a lot of businesses reflexively say that because businesses always want to have a cheap pool of expendable labor.”

Policymakers instead focus their scrutiny on education systems, both K-12 and higher education. That puts education on the back foot in policy and budget negotiations. Legislators have taken advantage, not just to cut funding but to impose ideologically motivated changes in higher ed. In 2023, Legislative Republicans withheld funding that had already been approved in the state budget to force the university system to cut diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. 

Kraus points out that cuts made in the name of austerity are rarely to supplemental services that frankly students or teachers wouldn’t notice. Instead it’s a vehicle for policies that would never be approved by the general public—cutting majors, faculty, and campuses—if they weren’t in the name of reform and austerity. 

“You could do a lot of things, actually. You could get rid of software and stuff like that, but that’s usually not up for discussion,” Kraus says. “It’s only English majors, theater majors, and so on and so forth. That’s what austerity does—it squeezes our institutions, to the point where something gives. And we know what’s going to give, right? It’s going to be liberal arts majors.”

Dumping the cost onto students

It’s also going to be students, regardless of what they want to study. Douglas Haynes, an English professor at UW-Oshkosh, has been researching system-wide policy, austerity, and the impact it has on students.

“Particularly first-generation and low-income students or students who are struggling to access college,” Haynes says. “Which is the majority of students we have at a place like UW-Oshkosh.”

One challenge of Haynes’ research is that austerity is a slow-moving train wreck, and it’s hard to pinpoint or foresee the impact of any one change or cut. 

“It’s been going on in slow, punctuated bursts of cutting and crisis for really the past decade,” Haynes says. “One of the really challenging things about covering what has been happening in the UW System is a lot of the theorization of the system and its impacts on students has been gradual and is cumulative. And that makes for a harder story to tell, because there isn’t one sudden moment where everything changed. But that’s true of many forms of structural violence, or structural austerity. It’s not necessarily all one dramatic event.”

The long-term push of divestment and austerity has pushed the cost of education onto individuals. At a campus like UW-Oshkosh, where students come from backgrounds that struggle to access college in the first place, that impact is compounded. 

“What I’ve seen is that students have really been pushed to a breaking point where it’s not really manageable, anymore, to be a college student, and, and stay sane or to financially manage it,” Haynes says. “Many students I have work 40 to 60 hours a week. I had a student last spring, who worked third shift at a factory full-time and was a full-time student. Many of them have family or caregiving obligations, and deal with the mental health challenges that come with being a young person these days, and also have been accentuated through the pandemic. [It] has really put a lot of students in a situation where the viability of colleges is really in question for them. It’s really not an exaggeration. I’ve gotten to the point where semester after semester now I feel like I’m worried about certain students staying alive, helping them stay engaged through this semester. That’s certainly not all students. But that’s become a kind of constant feature of working closely with students at UW-Oshkosh for me.”

What motivates students to stay enrolled under these conditions? Haynes says that many “have deeply internalized the notion that if they play by the rules of the economic game, this is what they need to do to succeed and have a stable life.” 

“I think the jury’s still out on what that looks like over the long term in the future for students who are carrying such a huge debt burden, and are facing trying to find jobs and an economy that may have lots of jobs, but not necessarily lots of really good jobs,” Haynes says.

The pitch Haynes and his liberal arts colleagues are making echoes those of early education advocates: Students are learning skills not only for the workplace but also for participating in democracy and society. 

“You’re learning critical thinking skills and learning how to participate in a democratic society and learning communication skills, and transferable skills that are applicable in lots of different professional contexts, and help you be a good citizen,” Haynes says. 

The financial stakes of obtaining an education, Haynes says, often pushes students to focus on more “practical” areas of study. “I think that that is a cultural problem, that we’ve reduced education to its economic value,” Haynes says. “I don’t blame them in the sense that this is a very, very expensive thing. And it better have some kind of tangible worth, from their point of view.”

“I think it’s important to remember that that is a natural consequence of how we have let the cost of college get out of control in a way that falls exclusively on individuals, rather than being seen as something that’s for the common good,” Haynes says. “That’s at the cost that we all share to further society and prepare future generations. And that’s not really part of the narrative of higher education anymore. You don’t even see it from the leaders of higher education.”

But there are still students under those circumstances choosing to gain something from their education greater than a job: the opportunity to pursue passion, curiosity, and to live a fuller life.

“So many students I know have undertaken enormous sacrifices to major in things like anthropology and geography and environmental studies, with no clear set career path, and have done so very happily,” Haynes says. “The real consequence [of austerity] is that the state is saying, who can go to elite schools, like UW-Madison, deserve opportunities to be exposed to all kinds of disciplines, the breadth of human experience and knowledge. And students who, for whatever reason, do not qualify or cannot afford it, or cannot travel there, as many of my students who have gotten into UW-Madison but need to live at home, for example, would not have been able to take advantage of it. [The state is saying] those students, they don’t deserve it, they shouldn’t be exposed to the breadth of human experience. They don’t deserve to have things like community-based learning. They don’t deserve to have opportunities to study abroad. That’s for students who can get into or afford elite schools, and everybody else needs to have vocational training.”

Haynes adds: “I think the public needs to know that not everyone is being considered equally in terms of having equal access to higher education opportunities.”