Rick Christofferson
Students from multiple UW system campuses met on May 9 for a “Reclaim Our UW” rally to advocate for equal access for all to a liberal arts education in Wisconsin.
The last few months for many seniors graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point this weekend have been an emotional roller coaster.
Their university made national headlines in March when it announced plans to eliminate thirteen majors in the humanities and social sciences. Blaming a $4.5 million budget shortfall, school leaders said the cuts were necessary in “an era of limited financial resources, demographic challenges, and rising competition.”
The school, they said, could no longer afford to be a “comprehensive university.” Instead, it would offer thirteen new “technical” and advanced degree majors and programs including Captive Wildlife, Aquaculture/Aquaponics, and Conservation Law Enforcement. On the chopping block are what many see as building blocks for a basic education: American studies, art, English, French, geography, geoscience, German, history, music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology, and Spanish.
The announcement comes on top of two large University of Wisconsin system-wide budget cuts by Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2011 and 2015, and a tuition freeze. According to University Relations, the UW System has sustained $362 million in cuts since 2012. Extreme cuts have also been proffered by administrators at UW-Superior and UW-Oshkosh. Early this spring, university employees learned that UW System President Ray Cross is planning to merge the system’s two-year colleges—along with the UW Extension—into the four-year institutions, adding to the precarity of their budgets.
The UW Board of Regents has also restricted shared governance, which gives students, faculty, and staff a place at the decision-making table, and seriously eroded faculty tenure protections—all part of a Republican battering ram on the gates of higher education in Wisconsin.
On May 9, Gigi Stahl, a senior, English major, and student ambassador for the UW Stevens Point Admissions Office, took time off from class work to speak at a “Reclaim UW” rally protesting the cuts. She was joined by lawmakers, gubernatorial candidates, and students from a number of UW campuses. It was one of several demonstrations held over the last couple of months to protest cuts.
“I have finals I ought to be studying for,” she told a small crowd in front of the state capitol in downtown Madison, “but this is important.”
Rain, at times falling hard enough to drown out the voices of the speakers, kept all but the most intrepid spectators and supporters away. The newly applied red ink was starting to run on the T-shirts worn by rally organizers stating: “Where’s Your Humanity? It’s been Cut.”
The newly applied red ink was starting to run on the T-shirts worn by organizers stating: “Where’s Your Humanity? It’s been Cut.”
But the energy of the two-hour event seemed to increase as people stepped up to the microphone to talk about why a liberal arts education is worth fighting for.
Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction and gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers described UW-Stevens Point as a “canary in the coal mine.”
“Humanities do count,” he insisted. “And if we don’t stop this effort it will spread across Wisconsin. They say the cuts are about preparing people for jobs and the hi-tech industry,” Evers continued. “Well I call that bullshit.”
Evers, a member of the UW Board of Regents, added, “I travel all across this state, and business people tell me, ‘We want to hire problem solvers, creative thinkers, and people who can resolve conflicts.’ We need a whole education system to make that happen.”
Another gubernatorial candidate, activist and author Mike McCabe, offered, “We spend more on locking people up than on unlocking human potential.”
Seth Hoffmeister, a UW-Stevens Point alumni and former student government president, noted that Wisconsin has been long recognized as a leader in higher education. It has helped this state thrive, so why dismantle it? “What we propose is NOT radical,” Hoffmeister said. He invoked the Wisconsin Idea, the notion that the entire state could benefit from the knowledge and learning generated at University of Wisconsin System’s twenty-six campuses.
Scott Walker recently tried to eliminate language related to that commitment, specifically by removing words that directed the university to “search for truth” and “improve the human condition,” replacing them with “meet the state’s workforce needs.”
“We are both engineers and artists, both workers and dreamers,” elaborated Rena Newman, a UW-Madison speaker. “We need an education that is as whole as we are.”
“We need an education that is as whole as we are.”
Another theme heard at the rally was equity, and the insult to working class and rural students in Wisconsin who would be presented with only a “vocational” model of the humanities if the proposed disciplinary changes were made at UW-Stevens Point.
Looking at Wisconsin demographics, it isn’t that hard to find statistics to back up administrators’ claims about dropping enrollments. Wisconsin’s population growth is slow, and behind that of other Midwestern states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana. And the majority of that growth is in urban counties concentrated around Madison and Milwaukee—most rural areas are losing people.
But in the bigger picture, UW-Stevens Point’s shortfall doesn’t seem insurmountable. The two-year deficit is less than 2.4 percent of the school’s 2017-2018 operating budget. Over the past several years, the faculty and staff have responded to dropping enrollments by cutting positions and consolidating programs. In fact, enough employees have already left Stevens Point as the result of buyout incentives that it may not even need to eliminate thirteen majors to balance its budget, a faculty committee argues.
Enrollment levels are uneven across the state, even rising on some campuses. More to the point, according to professors at UW Stevens Point, enrollment levels in many of the humanities disciplines targeted for elimination have been going up.
Perhaps the largest criticism is what observers describe as an underhanded and destructive process of decision making.
“Politicians in Madison have manufactured crises at the UW regional campuses, and now our administration is using this crisis to push through draconian cuts that will fundamentally change the identity of this institution,” says Jennifer Collins, UW-Stevens Point professor of political science. She said the process felt like a page out of Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine. “Relatively speaking, the budget shortfall is not that huge. Faculty understand there are going to have to be cuts, but no one expected the radical gutting of virtually all of the humanities and social sciences.”
The process felt like a page out of Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine.
Andy Felt, mathematical sciences professor at UWSP said, “their huge mistake is to only address the cost side of the ledger and not the revenue side. In even proposing this idea they are causing students to not attend UWSP, which will drop revenue further and stress the budget next year. They are assuming revenue is going to hold.”
Carole Trone, who consults on higher education issues, adds that Governor Walker may be counting on the fact that some people in the heartland resent higher education, which they feel perpetuates a continual eroding of rural culture. She notes recent Pew Research indicating the small love Republicans have for higher education, and university professors in particular.
In this light, higher education is a flimsy investment, something that rural and small town people pay for in their taxes and that leaves them poorer for it.
And that feeling is what the Republicans are banking on.
“We are close to the midterm elections, and the Republicans are making moves to show they can get things done,” observes Trone. “They counted on public opinion to support them and probably didn’t think cutting humanities was that big a deal. But it backfired on them.”
There are some signs that support for Republicans may be eroding as rightwing lawmakers batter away at a core value like public education. Patty Schachtner, a Democrat and school board member in a Wisconsin district held for almost thirty years by Republicans, ran on a pro-public education platform in special elections held in January, and resoundingly defeated her opponent.
Back in the rain in front of the capitol Mark Brueggeman, whose purple T-shirt identified him as a member of the Stevens Point Academic Representative Council, reminisced about the art department at UW-Stevens Point. “I worked there as an art professor until 1987 and then quit to paint. But in 2001, I went back as an adjunct, and the department was gorgeous. There were twenty-seven faculty and great comraderies. Next year, the number will be seven.”
“Republicans didn’t think cutting humanities was that big a deal. But it backfired on them.”
Some tenured faculty at UW-Stevens Point may be laid off as a result of the proposed changes, though it’s not known how many. Any layoffs would happen no sooner than June 2020.
On April 30, a faculty committee at UWSP filed a fourteen-page rebuttal against the proposal to cut the humanities. The administration has responded to pressure by stepping back from calling its plan a formal proposal, saying it is open to considering other ideas for balancing the budget. It plans to make a final proposal in August.
Another professor from UWSP at the rally described the last months as “dehumanizing.”
“We’ve responded to all their requests and asks; we cut our own budgets and propose alternative structures to save money,” she said. “And in the end they just care about winning. You know you are in trouble when the vice chancellor talks to a roomful of Ph.D.s like you’re kindergarteners.”
Mrill Ingram is website editor for The Progressive.