The Threats to Wisconsin's University System

Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin

At the end of March I blogged briefly about acclaimed linguist and sociopolitical critic Noam Chomsky's Jacobin essay, "The Death of American Universities" (whose link somehow became mangled and led to a junk site--my apologies). As part of my preface, I noted that much of what Chomsky argues in this short transcribed talk, delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, would be familiar to anyone working--and paying even passing attention to the changes--in academe today, though the effects are perhaps more evident in public institutions, which are more economically vulnerable because of their reliance on shrinking state and federal support, and smaller institutions lacking the massive endowments of the elite research universities and liberal arts colleges.

Even at the wealthiest institutions, however, a neoliberal ethos has increasingly become preponderant. Nearly all US universities today are increasingly viewed and run as quasi-businesses, with all that that conceptual shift entails. Tuition costs and fees grow ever more exorbitant; students are labeled and treated like consumers; the administrative bureaucracy waxes, paying itself at near corporate levels; fiscal austerity and competition for funding have become the baseline for most aspects of the university except the sports programs and high-end infrastructure renovation; the ranks of contingent faculty swell and tenured positions dwindle; donors are given outsized say (cf. the University of Illinois and the Stephen Salaita case); market-based policies become standard; and a fixation on promoting what elites in society believe will translate into direct benefit for corporations, or what is popular--and preferably what falls at the nexus of the two (computer science? biomedical engineering? financial engineering and sciences?)--gains emphasis at the expense of all else, with concomitant corporate-style jargon, acronyms and programs proliferating like kudzu.

I could give numerous examples of how this has played out at institutions across the country, including my current one, where, as I noted three years ago when I arrived here, the three-university system, and particularly the universities in Newark and Camden, found themselves in a fight for their lives. The story of that particular battle is a complex one, but let me just note that it was student, staff, faculty, administrative, union, and alumni pushback that not only saved the university, but perhaps made those who were seeking yet again to transform it for the worse to step back, at least temporarily, and rethink their actions. We have subsequently been engaged, at our university, on the conceptualization and development of a strategic plan that has been a model of shared consultation and conversation. When I was in Montana this past spring, several professors at that state's university whom I met there, and who were not directly linked to the conference I attended, bemoaned the constantly shrinking budgets and the onslaught of attrition. They spoke with admiration of what had occurred in New Jersey.

Just last week, the  University of North Carolina's Board of Governors' educational planning committee announced the elimination, discontinuation, consolidation, and demotion of whole departments across the entire university system, including one at flagship campus University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a policy the full board later voted up. Over fifty percent of the cuts were slated for four campuses: East Carolina University, UNC-Greensboro, North Carolina State University, and UNC-Charlotte. Among the eliminated programs were African Studies, women's and gender studies, various K-12 educational programs, and so on.  The Board of Governors based their decision, as one put it quite bluntly, on neoliberal principles: "We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand."  This followed the recent move by Tom Fennebresque, NC Board of Governors president, who, along with the rest of his colleagues, had previously ousted UNC's highly regarded president, Tom Ross.

Yet as far as I know, the most extreme assault thus far on public universities and the American university system, which is also an attack on academic freedom, appears to be taking place in Wisconsin, where that state's Republican-dominated legislature's Joint Committee on finance voted this week not only for over $250 million in budget cuts but also to remove guarantees of shared-governance involving faculty and students, and to strike faculty tenure, from state law. The legislation clearly states this:

Tenure: Approve the Governor's recommendation to delete the definition of a "tenure appointment" and language establishing the conditions under which the Board of Regents may grant a tenure appointment to a faculty member. Delete current law specifying that a person who has been granted tenure may be dismissed only for just cause and only after due notice and hearing. In addition, delete the definition of "probationary appointment" and provisions limiting the length of such an appointment to seven years.

That is the chilling language taken directly from "University of Wisconsin: Omnibus Motion," linked above, which Wisconsin State Senator and Majority Caucus Chair Sheila Harsdorf and Representative Michael Schraa introduced for a vote. Both are Republicans.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the proposed legislation passed the committee on a party-line vote, despite warnings from Democratic legislators that it would harm the university system, widely acknowledged and ranked as one of the nation's best, and it will likely pass both GOP-majority houses of Wisconsin's legislature. After that Republican governor Scott Walker, who had previously gutted public and private sector unions, and survived a recall election, intends to sign the bill into law, whereupon he plans to launch his run for the presidency on the Republican ticket. The tenure-stripping measure was but one of several on which the legislature and Walker, who had initiated a push to restructure the system into a more top-down format, agreed, though there was disagreement on others involving the independence of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tuition increases, and the depth of the cuts.

In response, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the University of Wisconsin's Board of Regents voted unanimously today to temporarily add tenure protections to their board policy should this almost broadly accepted standard will be struck from state law. This appears to be a reaction to the regent's acknowledged inability to convince the legislature to change its mind, though several members of the board have urged the legislature to remove the "non-fiscal," or non-budgetary changes from the law, thus far to no avail. Not only does the stripping of shared governance and tenure endanger academic freedom, but it transforms the future Wisconsin professoriate into an contingent precariate, subject to much easier dismissal, based on political views, statements and actions, under the rubric of elimination and discontinuation of programs, as is occurring in the North Carolina system. Should a new professor like the distinguished historian William Cronon espouse views critical of or contrary to the wishes and beliefs of Wisconsin's leaders (broadly understood), she very well could now be fired. As might any or large numbers of his colleagues.

To put it another way, the professoriate will be subject to the same precarious status as employees at most US businesses, with no guarantee of tenure to ensure stability while pursuing research of any kind, let alone controversial research, whether in the natural sciences (think of the geologists at the University of Oklahoma who have shown a causal link between fracking and earthquakes) or the social sciences (economists studying inequality, say) or the humanities (teaching socially critical works of literature), or engineering (biomedical engineers working with human embryos). But then this destabilization and quasi-privatization is the neoliberal goal, and this silencing of anything that might be viewed as socially or politically controversial is the conservative goal, isn't it?

Though the US Constitution seems to protect prior tenure contracts, the realities of the new law will eventually devastate Wisconsin's faculty, its system, and its educational profile. But then that is the same goal Republicans (and many "school reform" Democrats) have effectively pursued against public elementary and secondary education all over the US, and the effects could be just as far-reaching, since the destruction of the public sphere and commons, with all that they entails, have serious consequences. The people behind such policies act as if because they can neither accept nor transform faculties' independence and liberal tendencies, whether in knowledge, politics or any other sphere, by persuasion, then coercion might work, with dismissal a final step. We have been here before, at various points in history, and the outcome rarely is positive or pleasant. What I hope most people understand is that this is only the beginning, and if voters don't challenge such policies at the polls by publicly denouncing what is happening and voting out legislators advancing agenda like these all over the country, we will rue the day we watched this destruction unfold and sat by, doing nothing, thinking, well, that's just Wisconsin, but in my state....

However, lest we assume there was ever an idyllic or platonic idea of American university life, Chomsky, in the talk to which I linked above, brings us back to earth. As he suggests, great democratization of our universities, with students, staff, faculty, and administration all having a voice in how things are run, is the direction things shifted in the 1960s, to create the examples of shared governance we now think of, at least at many institutions, as the baseline. But let me offer Chomsky's words directly, remind us, as he does, that these ideas come out of Millian classical liberalism, which shows how far contemporary conservatism has moved from its economic and social roots:

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

Exactly. 

The New Jersey Senate Primary

A little over two months ago, our senior US Senator from New Jersey, the very rich and progressive Democrat Frank Lautenberg (January 23, 1924 - June 3, 2013), passed away after a lingering illness. He had served two non-consecutive terms in the Senate, from 1982 through 2001, and then again, in the wake of former fellow Democratic Senator and enemy Robert Torricelli's corruption-motivated withdrawal from his re-election candidacy, from 2003 through this year. A World War II veteran and beneficiary of the GI Bill, Lautenberg went on to helm Automated Data Processing (ADP), the payroll processing behemoth, but he never forgot his Depression-era upbringing and the important role that the federal government played in his life and in the transformation of the country from the 1930s on. With Lautenberg's passing New Jersey and the country therefore lost a longstanding champion of many of the best ideals and policies of New Deal liberalism. He had initiated or strongly backed laws that helped protect consumers, increased the minimum wage, penalized drunk drivers, safeguarded the country's chemical facilities, made the tax code more progressive, controlled the free flow of firearms, expanded funding for public transportation projects, and ended smoking on most airplane flights. He had also consistently supported legal abortion services, civil rights and affirmative action, and equality for LGBTQ Americans, including same-sex marriage. Lautenberg was the main sponsor of the Ryan White Care Act, which provides federal support and services for people living with AIDS. He also pushed for the 1984 National Mininum Drinking Age Act.

New Jersey's election laws are somewhat vague on replacing a Senator who dies, because it appears the  Governor can appoint a replacement and then call for a special election; appoint a replacement who serves until the next set general election for that seat; leave the seat open and call for a special election; or leave the seat open and wait until the next set general election for that seat. In the case of New Jersey's current governor, Republican Chris Christie, he chose to appoint a replacement Senator, his friend and fellow Republican, conservative attorney and former state Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa, and then call for a special election this fall that would not coincide with this fall's statewide general election, which includes the vote for the governorship. In so doing, Christie guaranteed that he will not have a potentially popular and victorious Democrat running for a statewide office on the same ballot as him. The special election, however, which includes a primary next Tuesday, is estimated to cost $24 million at a minimum, which undermines Christie's claims for fiscal conservatism and cost-cutting. Chiesa has thankfully chosen not to run for the seat, so it appears that whichever of the Democrats emerges victorious next week will waltz to election in the special election this fall.

On the Democratic side, four candidates are vying to replace Lautenberg. Two of them are social and economic liberals (Congressman Frank Pallone, State Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver), one a bonafide progressive (Congressman, research physicist and former professor Rush Holt), and the fourth and leading candidate appears to espouse socially liberal and economically neoliberal policies (Newark Mayor Cory Booker). Dr. Rush Holt, who has represented the 12th District for 8 consecutive terms (since 1998), has been a real progressive. A member of the Progressive Caucus, he advocated for the public option during the health insurance bill debate, has pushed for affordable higher education, has repeatedly said he would not support cuts to Medicare and Social Security, and has been steadfast in pushing for laws to ensure safe, legal and available abortion services. On environmental issues he has championed policies that would shift the country from its current non-renewable course towards renewables, a greenhouse cap, and lower subsidies for the oil and gas industry.  He also attempted to push for greater limits on the government surveillance. 

Yet he is currently in third place in the polls, just behind Congressman Pallone, who first represented New Jersey's 3rd district, from 1988 to 1993, before becoming the 6th district representative since 1993, who also has a strong progressive record, and was endorsed by Lautenberg's widow. Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver is in fourth place so far, but her record in the New Jersey State Assembly, in which she has served since 2004, has pursued consistently liberal policies, but one of her past accomplishments that particularly stands out is her work with the Newark Coalition for Low Income Housing, which she co-founded, and which was able to provoke a federal consent order requiring the Newark Housing Authority and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development to construct one-for-one replacement housing for any housing projects demolished in the city. She unfortunately has underplayed this background and stressed that she would be New Jersey's first female and black US Senator if elected.

So powerful is two-term Mayor Cory Booker's public appeal and charisma, so high his profile, that as of this weekend, he was far in the lead, polling above 50%, and barring a calamity, will win the primary, and, as I noted above, the general election. Razor sharp, a social media maven, and an actual hero--he really did pull a constituent out of a burning building, saving her life--Booker has a record of accomplishment in Newark, where crime has fallen and jobs and development have increased since he assumed office in 2006. Among his achievements have been achieving a significant crime drop, including the largest by percentage in the US from 2006 to 2008; streamlining the city's budget; increasing affordable public housing; and attacking "pay-to-play" land deals negotiated under his predecessor, convicted ex-mayor Sharpe James. He has also shown himself to be a humanitarian and public servant by example, with actions, criticized by some as stunts, like rescuing abandoned dogs, surviving on a Supplemental Nutritional Aid Program (SNAP) budget for a week, and inviting Newark residents displaced by Hurricane Sandy stay and dine in his home.  I have had the benefit of hearing him speak several times, and as I witnessed during the opening session of Rutgers University's annual Marion Thompson Wright Symposium, he can be an inspired and inspiring--rousing--orator, with more than just rhetorical gifts, but the ability to strike a deeper chord, and convey a passion, in that case for the important of history and of ideas, that other politicians cannot manage even under the best of circumstances.

Yet Booker has also been a strong advocate of "education reform" (charter schools, vouchers and privatizing public education) and pro-Wall Street economic policy, and has received support for financial industry and corporate backers going back to his first campaign for Newark mayor in 2002. In 2010 he persuaded Facebook co-founder and impresario Mark Zuckerberg to donate $100 million to a foundation to benefit the Newark Public Schools but it remains unclear where in the school system that money will go and how well it will be put to use. The links to Silicon Valley extend beyond Zuckerberg; The New York Times revealed this week, has presided over a private tech startup, Waywire, that has barely functioning but, far worse, is basically underwritten by Silicon Valley executives and powerbrokers and had appointed the 15-year-old son of former NBC honcho and current CNN head Jeff Zucker to its advisory board. After the uproar, Zucker's son resigned, but the status of the company and this particular episode underlined that in addition to his extensive record of success, his overwhelming positive attributes, and the star power, much like former First Lady, US Senator from New York and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, that he possesses and will continue to generate, benefiting the state, he will be as beholden to the plutocrats and their agenda as to New Jersey residents and the nation.  I have donated to Booker's and Holt's campaigns, and probably will vote for Booker, but the optimal scenario would be to have Booker and Holt as New Jersey's Senators, and the current senior senator, Democrat Robert Menendez, whiling away his time at a policy institute somewhere.

As for the Republicans, the leading candidate is Steve Lonegan, the legally blind former mayor of Bogota, New Jersey, and a twice-failed candidate for governor. Lonegan was the subject of the 2003 film Anytown, USA, which chronicled his campaign for reelection that year; once elected, he pursued conservative policies such as cutting municipal spending, consolidation of departments, and privatizing services and undercutting unions. Since leaving office in 2007, he has headed the New Jersey chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative public policy organization, and pushed for policies counter to and considerably to the right of the general state political and ideological mood. He also has been dogged by various controversies, among the most recent of them that a member of his campaign staff tweeted a derogatory, racist comment about Cory Booker and the city of Newark ("just leaked — Cory Booker’s foreign policy debate prep notes," below which was a map of Newark with the words "West Africa, Guyana, Portugal, Brazil” and “Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, plus Bangladesh and Trinidad" designating Newark's differing neighborhoods). Lonegan claimed that the tweet was not meant to be racist, but then one need only need look at his past, which has included calling for a McDonald's billboard in Spanish to be taken down and trying to make English the official language of Bergen County. His main challenger is Dr. Alieta Eck, a physician and diehard opponent of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). She has gotten no traction whatsoever, and it's unlikely that Lonegan, the favorite to win the Republican primary, will exceed 45% of the vote this upcoming fall.

RNC, Pass By

Clint Eastwood at the RNC (©Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

In past years I have watched both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, or at least larger portions of the former (and nearly all of the one in 2008), and smaller ones of the latter. This year, however, has been different. I only watched snippets of several speeches delivered during the broadcast hour of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, one of my nightly staples, and in each case I had to turn them off, either because of the dishonesty being trumpeted (cf. the misrepresentation of the President's comments on government helping to build the infrastructure that makes American business success possible), the race-baiting, the nasty tone, or a combination of all three. I only heard and saw after the fact the truthless spectacle that was Paul Ryan's speech; the same was true of Clint Eastwood's now infamous mimicry with the empty chair. 

Certainly there are many issues on which to criticize President Barack Obama, though it appears that few of them, at least the ones I would lodge, such as a critique of his excessive support of the banking industry, his failure to firmly address the housing crisis, his war against whistleblowers, his steady advancement of the national security state and its attendant apparatuses, and his horrendous record on civil liberties, received any airtime in Tampa. What did get airtime were relentless, simplistic attacks on his handling of the economy, without any mention of the failed Republican and neoliberal policies, such as non-stimulative tax cuts, deregulation and non-regulation, unfunded wars and fiscal profligacy followed by fiscal austerity, bubble-producing monetary policy, and so on, which reached their apogee under Republican president George W. Bush, that led to the global economic collapse in 2008, or the almost continuous GOP obstructionism from the moment that Barack Obama took office in 2009. In fact, given what he had to deal with and the economic team he chose, as well as his half-hearted embrace of conservative austerity policies, his record, as lackluster as it has been, doesn't look so bad at all, and the GOP's obstructionism on taxes could produce an even better outcome if (when) Obama is reelected, as the Clinton tax rates would by law return, along with a resetting of the estate and hedge fund manager taxes (I believe), meaning the starvation the GOP has forced the government to endure, along with the savage cuts they have imposed, could spur a striking change in the country's fortunes.

In fact, the specter haunting the circus in Tampa was W. Bush, by most measures the worst president in US history. Obama, for all his faults, has steadily dug the country out of the abyss W created. We are mostly out of Iraq, and are scheduled, despite the neocons' best efforts, to get out of Afghanistan. The US car industry has not only survived is moment of crisis but is thriving. The private sector, even with the gross lack of demand, is growing. The stimulus bill, inadequate as it was, not only saved and created jobs, but underwrote a major shift, still mostly hidden to us, in terms of the US's technological and infrastructural future. Though I disagreed with the lawless manner in which he was killed, and with the attendant policies that violate the Constitution, Osama bin Laden is dead, and his Al Qaeda network is severely weakened.  Both Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are major improvements on the laissez-faire approach to health care and the financial industry than what came before. And so on. All of this naturally was going to be elided in Tampa, but what it represented a response to, the GOP's practical and ideological failures, in economic, military and social policy, were also not  mentioned. Of course one could look at things another way: these "failures," or "#FAILs," turned out to benefit the top 1% handsomely, so in fact they were weren't failures at all, but the outcomes, disastrous for most of us, of where the GOP has been heading for over half a century, towards a repeal of the New Deal, reconcentration of wealth and power in the hands of social and political elites, and corporate dominance of government so that it benefits corporations. Or, as Calvin Coolidge pithily put it, "the business of the government is business." That is a truism if there ever was one for the GOP. People, regular people that is, the 99% majority of us, be damned.

One of the most egregious examples of the Republicans' dishonesty is their continual charge about the president's actions on Medicare, one of the most vital elements of the United States' social safety net. Since I have seen TV commentator after TV commentator, and countless high level Democrats stumble in explaining what the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) does with regard to Medicare, I took it upon myself to state, at Twitter-length, what the ACA/Obamacare does. Not that a single person in the media will be listening to me, nor will any high level Democrats, but if any J's Theater readers encounter someone who asks about that $716 billion that supposedly was "cut" to "fund Obamacare," you can say this:

Obama is saving #Medicare & extending its life by putting $716 billion in savings from ending waste, fraud & overpayments to providers. #ACA

That's 140 characters, and simple enough to state without rambling. You don't even have to credit me, and you can add: the ACA/Obamacare does not cut benefits for beneficiaries. So there you go. Obama did not raid the Medicare Trust Fund. He did not cut Medicare benefits to fund Obamacare. He is not ending the program--at least not yet, especially so long as that awful Grand Bargain scheme, which is really another means for preserving and extending tax cuts for the rich, doesn't pass--but extending it. Extending, not ending. Saving, not drowning. That $716 billion will no longer be overpaid to the providers, who in any case will all be getting more patients because of Obamacare! 

On the other hand, as countless people have pointed out, Paul Ryan's plan not only takes into account these savings from the Affordable Care Act, which he has nevertheless pledged and voted to repeal, but he furthermore wants to VOUCHERIZE Medicare, which would destroy it as it now exists.  The Republican Party fought against Medicare before it was voted into law under Lyndon Johnson, with Ronald Reagan making particularly outrageous claims about its effects, and repeatedly since, leading Republicans in Congress, as well as the GOP caucus, have attempted to gut it. But there is only one way that will happen outright: if Romney and Ryan are elected in November, along with a Republican Congress. 

That, and the knowledge that they want to do the same harm to Social Security by privatizing it (Ryan led the Congressional charge to do so with President Bush in 2005), and to Medicaid by block-granting it (Ryan also led the push for this as well), along with all of their other platform positions--extremely anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-people of color, anti-middle/working class/poor, etc.,--articulated on the campaign stump and by such leading Republicans as Todd Akin (R-MO), Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Phyllis Schlafly, Jan Brewer, and Ann Coulter, among others, was enough for me to pass by them. I may watch parts of the Democratic convention, though I feel much as I did in 1996; I worked to get the then-president elected, he was a severe disappointment, but he was a better choice than his opponent, and ultimately the country was better off four years later. 

Maybe a bit of my enthusiasm from 2008 will return. Even if not, I can say I helped add a bit of clarity on the Medicare issue, something millions Americans badly need. The clarity AND their Medicare!