Responding to UW faculty's no-confidence vote, Wisconsin Gov. Walker again plays Fussbudget-in-chief

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is pooh-poohing this week's unanimous, all-but-unprecedented no-confidence vote by University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee faculty​, labeling it a "fuss." What? A "fuss"? Does he mean like the 100,000 sign-carrying demonstrators who five years ago made international headlines when for weeks they "fussed" at the state capitol, after Walker moved to gut public employee unions while cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from the annual compensation of many public employees, including school teachers? Actually, this latest "fuss" over Walker's anti-higher education policies is what, in a more enlightened era, we used to call lawfully exercising your constitutional right to free speech including political dissent. If openly and jointly voting to express unanimous displeasure with your employers and what they're doing to your important work place is only "fussing," then call me macaroni. But while wise public policy is at stake, money and power are what really drives Walker's particular animus in this new protest, just as it did in the earlier union-busting controversy and many other Walker public policy initiatives. Walker has a penchant for defunding institutions he and state GOP lawmaker perceive as political opponents, no matter how vital or functionally sound they are. Indeed, the Wisconsin GOP’s modern authoritarian style, from state government right on down to localities, is to weaken all suspiciously regarded institutions so that they begin to misfire, thus providing the excuse to "reform" them through centralized, political control. Thus, even while Walker claims the UW faculty increasingly is fussing about his policies, Walker himself has assumed the mantle of Wisconsin Fussbudget-in-Chief. Walker pooh-poohed UWM faculty concerns that his policies shred academic freedom and shared governance, openly insisting in a news release this is a money issue. The news release said full UWM professor salaries averaged $101,700 in the 2013-'14 school year, while average annual pay for all workers in Milwaukee County was $49,539 in 2014. See what Team Walker did there? They compared the salaries of a small group of highly skilled, major university professors to average wages earned by all employees in Milwaukee County, including minimum-wage and presumably part-time workers. It's true: taxi drivers and burger flippers and the working poor drag down Milwaukee County's average annual income, but the county also is home to fat-cat CEOs who take home tens of millions a year and a whole bunch of people in between. So instead of comparing apples and oranges (as in, “Let’s you and him fight,”) wouldn't it be more reasonable to limit the comparison to, for instance, college-degree white-collar workers or private scientific researchers or strategic planners or business managers or even captains of industry? Wouldn't the approximate responsibilities (if not relative skill of smarts) of those cohorts be more reflective of value, and of just how valued professors are in their respective, national job market? In Walkernomics, obviously, academic professionals are very undervalued. Oh, and let's not forget: dull-as-a-spork Walker himself earns $144,000 as governor, and took home a lower six-figure salary in his similar approach serving as Milwaukee County executive before that. Last year, of course, the governor was AWOL from the state Capitol for weeks and months on end, campaigning for president. No way the dude's output is worth that of 1.5 college professors. This latest public policy outcry against Walker Republican attacks on higher education may not physically involve Wisconsin citizens by the tens of thousands as the union protests did, but it remains no small thing. The assault began earlier in his tenure when Walker lopped a $300 million from the UW budget because the state was "broke" (it wasn't, a point made obvious when he and the legislature blithely plowed most of the savings from those cuts into higher-end tax breaks for businesses and individuals — as in, “We’re so broke we can only afford to give away hundreds of millions of dollars to wealthy special interests!”). More recently, in 2015, Walker tried to excise references to the Wisconsin Idea from official UW documents. The Wisconsin Idea is a century-old UW policy stating that university research should be applied to solve problems and improve health, quality of life, environment, and agriculture for all citizens of the state. Declaring that "the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state," the Wisconsin Idea led to progressive, first-in-the-nation programs including public utility regulation, workers compensation, tax reform, and -- a special godsend to farmers and local communities -- University Extension services. Many of these successful and nationally respected programs have been opposed and diluted by Walker Republicans, who also seem to regard the UW System of 26 public college campuses as somehow competing for the hearts and minds of state voters. You see, that word “idea” is a big giveaway, right there. In Wisconsin, among today’s cabal of Republican leaders, no one else is supposed to have any unapproved ideas, but if they do, they’re supposed to keep it to themselves. Walker's stealth plan was to bury language in the massive state budget displacing the Wisconsin Idea language with a much narrower garblefarb of a goal: "to meet the state's workforce needs." What’s next? Renaming UW the Wisconsin State Vocational School? Many in Wisconsin continue to believe UW's mission to the state means more than just turning pure research over to private profiteers or preparing our best and brightest for productive careers in the exciting world of financial investment counseling. Wide citizen outcry forced the Walker administration to restore the Wisconsin Idea language, but that doesn't mean Walker's underlying plan to shrink and dumb down the UW system still isn't in play. The late Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois, a far more enlightened governor than the simulacrum now inhabiting the Wisconsin governor's mansion, said decades ago that the Wisconsin idea "meant more than a simple belief in the people. It also meant a faith in the application of intelligence and reason to the problems of society. It meant a deep conviction that the role of government was not to stumble along like a drunkard in the dark, but to light its way by the best torches of knowledge and understanding it could find." Yet half a century later, here Wisconsin government is, more and more stumbling along darkly, thanks to Walker and the other drunk dialers running state government, too often choosing to pass foolish, short-sighted laws under cover of darkness and after the chimes of midnight. But the assault on the Wisconsin Idea was just phase one of the UW "fuss." Phase two was the burgeoning outrage within the UW community after Walker and the GOP-dominated legislature increased their claw-back of UW System funding to nearly half a billion dollars in total. As part of this move, Walker packed the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents with business cronies. Via that board and GOP legislative mischief, Team Walker effectively redefined academic tenure at UW into near nothingness, putting once highly regarded UW at a huge disadvantage relative to other major universities. The changes appear to already have induced both an academic brain drain and a decline in research grants that for many decades at UW sustained and nurtured innovation while exposing students to cutting-edge science. Ah, but these days who needs science? Because you never know what politically inconvenient truths researchers are going to turn up. And right now, the State of Wisconsin seems intent on moving away from science-based policy formation, from water-quality issues to climate change to deer herd diseases to child health.  In the current budget, the state legislature provided no funding for UWM’s impressive young Zilber School of Urban Health but required the campus to find $40 million in spending cuts, a 6 percent reduction in its overall spending. At a time when competing schools in other states are on the financial upswing, UWM, a major doctoral institution, just can’t seem to gain traction in the GOP legislature. And it’s the same on UW campuses throughout the state, as chancellors cut entire programs and now, thanks to the GOP-imposed loss of tenure protection, are considering laying off faculty. More UW campuses likely will take faculty no-confidence votes soon. So far the academic staff at UWM (the state's second largest campus) and faculty at three other UW campus including the Madison flagship have officially linked arms. Faculty are asked whether to criticize UW system bosses for kowtowing to college dropout Walker's injection of extreme economic uncertainty and smashing of traditional, official faculty input into one of the world's great public universities. The UW already had proved itself as a powerful economic engine, without dumbing down any of its programs or encouraging its most accomplished professors (and even students) into leaving the state. One thing Walker Inc. didn’t do: Address in any substantive way rapidly growing Wisconsin college student debt, exacerbated by the ban on re-financing such loans when lower rates are available. Walker's disdain for what Alabama Gov. George Wallace used to call pointy-headed intellectualism is palpable, but that wouldn't matter if he was just being rhetorical. But he isn't. In Walker-style politics, the old standard of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has evolved into, "If it ain't broke, break it!"  But then there’s Secretary of State Colin Powell invocation of “the Pottery Barn rule,” which he applied to the Bush administration’s Iraqi adventurism but which arguably applies here as well: "If you break it, you bought it." If Walker Republicans keep on breaking stuff in the once well-run state of Wisconsin, they'll sooner or later have to pay for that politically, just as the national GOP, itself a political bull in a china shop, is likely to buy it in this fall's elections. As it happens, Walker just announced he's going to be embarking on a trade mission to Mexico. Ideally, he'd be on his trip when a President Trump built his promised wall across the US-Mexican border. Imagining Walker trapped on the other side is a nice dream, but don't share the thought too widely or Walker might fuss some more.