Sifting and Winnowing

Bashing System and the Regents has joined football, hockey and basketball as a major sport on the UW-Madison campus, including in (often grossly insulting) comments on this blog. As Sara Goldrick-Rab has just pointed out (here), players in this game often have no data of any kind.

One theme is that System bleeds state funding to Madison, diverts money from the flagship to other campuses and that as budgets get cut, Madison suffers disproportionately. There’s evidence on this: the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau has just provided vast amounts about higher ed funding in Wisconsin. (Here are the links, with a little context.) #690 lays out the material on public authority. Check out this passage from paragraph 10 (p. 4):

When adjusted for inflation, state funding provided for UW-Madison and for all other UW System institutions decreased from 1990-91 to 2010-11. Over that period of time, state funding for UW-Madison decreased by 2.8% while state funding for all other UW System institutions decreased by 6.8%. At the same time, enrollment at UW-Madison increased by 1.5% while enrollments at all other UW System institutions increased by 23.4%. When these increases in enrollment are controlled for, state funding for UW-Madison decreased by 4.2% while state funding for all other UW System institutions decreased by 24.4%.

As I understand this, over the last 20 years, Madison has had a tiny increase in enrollments while other campuses have grown by a quarter, yet other campuses have been hit far harder by budget cuts.

Three weeks ago, S&W contributor Joe Salmons shared his conviction, apparently based on his conversations with key lawmakers, that Public Authority was already dead.

Despite that spreading belief, which was also shared by Paul Fanlund of the Capital Times and others, lobbying for the NBP continued unabated, with one observer likening the Public Authority to Monty Python’s dead parrot.

Subsequently, the “compromise” proposal was floated that UW-Madison remain within the System but get its own Board of Trustees, an idea that was sharply criticized by almost everyone who knew anything about it, including former UW-Madison adminstrator Harry Peterson.

A report this afternoon by the Cap Times’ Todd Finkelmeyer seems to make the deaths of both the Public Authority and the two-boards proposal official:

Walker’s plan to split off UW-Madison is dead

With that news,  the closing comments from Joe Salmon’s May 5 post seem worth reposting: (more…)

[The following article was provided to legislators this week by Dr. Harry Peterson.  It is reproduced here with his permission.  - Ed.]

I understand that there is no significant legislative support to break away the UW-Madison from the UW System and provide the UW-Madison its own governing board.  I have been told that a “compromise” approach would provide a governing board for the UW-Madison and have that university remain in the UW System.

I do not know with whom such a “compromise” would be struck, but, this idea fails badly and is seriously flawed.  (more…)