Student Assembly with Chancellor Martin
Comment from David Vines (first year student): major concern is the process. The Chancellor should be asking for cuts in tuition and increases in funding. Also what’s the status of the university’s opinion on the voter ID bill?
Answer: she thinks there’s a fiscal crisis even though she’s been arguing for the university to be supported. She made a judgement that it is important to seize the opportunities before us.
Follow up: really the people that hurt most are the low income students.
Answer: the problem is there have been misrepresentations when we get public authority, so tuition increases and affordability are problems over the country. Nothing will be a magic bullet or solution, and why is that? Tuition will go up with system, but we will be able to hold harmless those making $80,000 or less.
Question: is your model high tuition high aid?
Answer: it’s not. I want medium level for the Big Ten. The high tuition high aid is the private university model. I want middle level of tuition for the Big Ten and then increased aid.
Response: the sticker price is important because it means having low income students at this school will rely on having high income students that can pay the full price. It builds on the housing bubble and it’s loans that are increasing impossible to go back.
Response from commentator: no one is advocating for the status quo. We’re asking you to take a leadership role against tuition hikes and budget cuts. It’s not a fair characterization of the debate. We’re offering an alternative.
Question: how is this not going to be perceived as an attack on the rest of the system?
Response: you misrepresent me. Other Chancellors have tried to do this before. This did not start with me, this has been offered in a range of other parts of the state. This will help other campuses, the worst thing for Wisconsin is if we fail to preserve our quality. You have to look beyond the internal politics and be in the world.
Comment: the New Badger Partnership seems to be in the best interest of singularly the institution of the University of Wisconsin Madison. Generally you would think it should be in the best interest of the public it serves. Clearly, the opposition is coming from across the state. This seems nothing other than dismantling a system that is better off left whole!
Response: why is every region in the world trying to build a world class research university? It has a value to the economy, the society. I don’t think there’s another institution that brings in over $1 billion to the state’s economy. That money goes to jobs, education, research into solutions to the world’s biggest problems, if the quality of the faculty deteriorates (and she’s talking to some are considering leaving), if you want to talk about what’s good for Wisconsin you have to talk about the dollars that go into the state.
Response from the commentor: I’m involved with this great opportunity for the state of Wisconsin, and now everyone in the state, you’re asking for people who aren’t in Madison and who don’t directly benefit from the influx of the spending money in the community of Madison, you’re asking them to give up on the idea of a system (editor’s note: confused about this question, maybe I didn’t get it).
Response from Chancellor Martin: our collaborations will be more direct than they are now if this happens.
Commentator: supports the New Badger Partnership, we’re lacking in the issue of racial diversity, from Wisconsin, how will the New Badger Partnership address that.
Response: diversity is an urgent issue. We’re holding diversity programs harmless from budget cuts, relative to other programs that’s a gain. We’re investing in a science POSSE program from New York. We’re making the most aggressive efforts we can to diversify the faculty and student body. Until we do better we won’t be serving Wisconsin well. I don’t want to educate any fewer Wisconsin students. It’d be good if there were more diversity in the undergraduate student body. No student is well served by working with people like themselves. That does not mean we’ll lower the percentage of Wisconsin residents, but we need to bring more diverse students into the state.
Question: why does it have to happen in the Spring, with the authority for Governor Walker to appoint the majority of the board, why can’t this be postponed to next Spring where the recall elections may be in place, everything may be taken care of …
Response from the Chancellor: it’s unfortunate those environments were on the same clock. I think the provisions in the statute will ensure we have a really good board. We need to have faith in the structure that we’ve put in place, that’s a structure that I’m confident that will work. We need a diverse board so that we have people focused on the needs of a major research institution.
Response: that’s granting the Governor too much authority, the others were staggered, even if they’re alumni, there are many conservative minded alumni, who will be making these decisions.
Response from the Chancellor: how much concern do you have about the Board of Regents, given that all of them will have been appointed by the Governor, and what value might it be in which the faculty are state employees, and not university employees? Might that be helpful? There are a lot of variables.
My question …
Chancellor: not worried the Governor will line item veto his own bill. Right now I’m concerned with what we do in Wisconsin, with preserving the quality of your degree, I don’t want you ten years from now to be saying I have a degree from a university that’s not longer in the top 20 of the world, as for privatization, there’s been a drift for more private funding across the world, all of us can regret that, I regret that, I regret the changes of federal and state governments in the U.S. but looking at where we are I think it’s better to have the ability to rebalance things, keep a balance among disciplines, to make our own decisions, rather than drift in the way. Hold harmless, undocumented students, whether or not it’s legal I think we need to continue to say that we support the right of undocumented students.
I continue to think that it will work out, and I think we’ll get significant change, we’ll get what we’ll get eventually, the state can’t afford to support the quality of the institution that this is, given the competition for good thinkers worldwide, if the state could afford it, I want this to remain one of the best universities in the world.
Question: you’ve claimed the New Badger Partnership will help remain equity of access, help other campuses, any unbiased published analysis, I attempted to look but couldn’t find any documented information for what the plan consists of, and what the implications would be, yet you made very strong statements about this keeping tuition the same despite this not being passed, you’ve mentioned these dollars to the university will have a huge impact on the state, do you think it will continue to make returns to thee state, and not private interests. Is there analysis?
Response from Chancellor: there’s data there. The source of a tuition increase is a Chancellor of a university.
Response: I was unable to find such an analysis besides, “the Chancellor says so”. But Vice Provost Darrell Bazzell says there was one done by him.
Question: what about the three year terms for the Board of Trustees. Hopefully we can agree Walker will be out of office with a recall. As a future member of 18th session of the Associated Students of Madison I disagree with the 17th session vote on the New Badger Partnership. On this whole diversity issue, every single student who has spoken for the New Badger Partnership is a “middle class white”. If New Badger Partnership is helpful to other campuses, why are other Chancellors and the Board of Regents opposed to it.
Response from Chancellor Martin: I agree that three year terms are too short.
Commentator: I just needed more information on this. I went to the session with the Dean of the School of Human Ecology. Supposedly if you asked the Chancellors of the other schools they would say they actually support it. All the campuses supposedly want more flexibility and autonomy for their campuses, of the Chancellors spoke, nine of them said you couldn’t forgo this opportunity, but every campus needs what the University of Wisconsin Madison is pursuing, but we need to amend the budget so that each campus gets the flexibility they need.
Comment: I think that when you say you’ve been a strong proponent of higher education, it skews what your actions have been lately. When you have sent an email to lobby for your plan, the New Badger Partnership, judging by there are so many people that don’t know what this is, instead of asking them to call their legislator about the cuts to higher education. When fourteen lobbyists are hired to lobby for this, where’s the Shared Governance?
Chancellor Martin: we’ve hired no lobbyists. We don’t have time to have a serious conversation to protect higher education, but I’ve done a range of things, and at this particular point in the process I think the best thing we can do is get the revenue.
Commentator: to me we’re talking about the flexibility. Put this out publicly: these are the teachers we had to fired.
Chancellor Martin: I never said we can handle the cuts, bring on the flexibility. The question is how do you deal with the hand you’re dealt that preserves your education, and preserves the education of your children.
Commentator: you don’t appear to have fought the cuts very strongly, there hasn’t been a clear and out spoken campaign against cuts to higher education. Isn’t there a clear long term political benefit to organizing the Regents to say we’ll resist these cuts to higher education. Why not do that?
Chancellor Martin: the Regents and Chancellors did make these statements for resisting cuts, and we’ve seen the consequences.
Comment: student, faculty, and staff have not been consulted and people can’t even find the data to support this, and the things you’re fighting for are one student on a board of 21. That’s how we stick to our values, and that’s despite what we see from the Capitol.
Chancellor Martin: first of all when we talked to the Governor, we had several bottom lines and they appear in Chapter 37 and one was Shared Governance on campus, and any tinkering with Shared Governance would end our support of the proposal. I’m willing to meet with anyone who wants to meet with me. I don’t even mind answering the same questions over and over, I think it’s important to have more than one minute to lay out the issues, because they can’t be addressed.
I think it’s wrapping up … there’s gonna be a longer public debate?
