Don’t play politics with UW-System budget

If legislative leaders have their way, 188 people who work in the UW-System will lose their jobs this year as the state seeks to take $32 million from the university system’s budget.

The job cuts won’t come because of budget shortfalls and the need to tighten spending and cut back. The state budget has never been healthier. State coffers are currently overflowing with about $8 billion in surplus funds. The Wisconsin Department of Administration projected the state is collecting about $16.5 million a month just in interest earned.

The reason party leadership in Madison wants to cut these jobs is because the people in those jobs are actually doing their job in working for more diversity and inclusion in the UW-System.

Republican party leadership, it seems, is scared that when white kids from Waukesha and other parts of the state go to UW-Madison, they might get exposed to people who don’t look and act exactly as they do. They are bothered that, gasp, these people have valid viewpoints and are contributing members of an increasingly diverse society. Or worse, that they may get information or be exposed to new ideas which might differ from the party line taught at home.

Who would have thought such a thing could happen at an internationally recognized university system that has served as a primary economic engine for the state for the past 175 years and whose core philosophy rests in the Wisconsin idea: “The boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.”

Instead, politicians want the university system to focus on being a really expensive four-year job training program.

“(The UW System and UW campuses) need to refocus their priorities on being partners and developing our workforce and the future of the state,” said Rep. Mark Born of Beaver Dam and a co-chair of the powerful Joint Finance Committee. Born defended the plan to cut $32 million from the UW-System’s budget, the amount paid to run the diversity and inclusion offices where those 188 people work.

This spurious focus on job preparation is especially ironic considering that earlier in the budget process, the legislature killed a plan for a new engineering building which would have directly contributed toward job and career training.

If people’s lives and livelihoods weren’t at stake, the entire exercise would be a laughable farce. As it is, the actions of the legislature to declare war on diversity in the state university system is embarrassing. Actions such as this reinforce the negative stereotype of Wisconsin as being unwelcoming to new people and ideas.

It is embarrassing to see leaders unable, or at least unwilling, to look outside of their ideological bubbles to recognize that there is a wide world out there filled with ideas and people who would stand out like a sore thumb back in their rural Wisconsin communities.

Students in the UW-System will go on to be business leaders, entrepreneurs, scientists and even politicians. The proposed budget cuts are an obstruction to the goal of preparing the next generation of leaders in a diverse world.