|
 |
 |
On
pain, tuition and moving forward after the budget 'bombshell' These are extraordinary times for our University. Even two weeks after the governor’s budget proposal was announced, pundits statewide are still using the language of the battlefield and boxing ring to describe the wallop it delivered to the University of Wisconsin System. Staggering. Stunning. A major blow. A bombshell. Cliché hunters and those leery or weary of the appropriation of sports and military metaphors for public policy discussion might quibble with the choice of words. However, no one who knows the 150-year history of public higher education in Wisconsin or its current value to more than 150,000 students would dispute that powerful language is in order. What has been proposed is a massive and unprecedented pullback of public-sector support. Taxpayer funding of the UW System will decline by one-fourth if Gov. Doyle’s budget is approved, as is, by both houses of the Legislature. Given the severity of the budget crisis, we expected pain, but we were at least looking for fairness. The pain is there. The fairness? Well, we’re still looking. At 9 percent of state GPR spending, the UW System would absorb 38 percent of the actual GPR reductions. As of this writing we have yet to identify how these cuts would be distributed among the campuses. Tuition is certain to climb. Classes, programs, jobs, enrollment and student opportunities all are at stake as we struggle to make that 38-into-9 arithmetic work. |
|
|
|
| TO NEXT PAGE |
|
|
President
Katharine Lyall (shown here, in happier times, at a campus ceremony last fall)
notes cuts to the UW System are no abstract exercise — they willl have
a very real impact on the hopes and dreams of tomorrow's students.
"We
have a system that is in jeopardy of becoming less accessible, less affordable,
of lower quality, or all three. . . We are especially concerned about maintaining
our capacity to help the state's economy recover. In the long run, growing the
economy is the only way the state can recover economically."