In a proposed change that cuts the Wisconsin university system to the bone, Walker also proposes removing every vestige of idealism from the state.
Gov. Scott Walker is once again at odds with his state’s public sector, this time for proposing massive budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin and attempting to remove references to "state needs" and improving "the human condition" from the school’s mission statement.
Walker’s proposed cuts would slash $150 million in funding from the UW system, roughly 13 percent of the school’s budget. Additionally, it would completely remove the "The Wisconsin Idea" from the UW mission statement, which prioritized extending educational resources to "every family in the state."
This is the guy who wants to run for president of the United States. He clearly hates the idea that government might serve all of the people; don’t you know the sole purpose of the state is to funnel money from the poors into the pockets of the Koch brothers? It doesn’t accomplish that goal to give people opportunity and hope.
you missed Walker’s coup de grace:
If Walker gets his way, that sentence, along with “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth,” would be entirely cut from the charter.
In its place, Walker proposes language stating Wisconsin only provides a state education because it is constitutionally required and among its top priorities are meeting “workforce needs.”
After all, why would anyone need to search for the truth when it’s already been revealed in God Perfect Holy Book™? All that’s left is the requirement to produce batches of incurious drones for the service industry.
Fuck that guy. Seriously.
Scott Walker has always been actively evil. I mean this is the guy who tried to shut down DMVs in Madison and Milwaukee while keeping them open more in red areas when people had to get an ID to vote.
If Walker succeeds in cutting the budget, UW should respond by cutting the football program, and then working down the list of other sports that burn money.
There really is no point to this. It’s shooting Wisconsin in both feet. Actively evil.
Repeat from yesterday’s thread.
1. This is a slow motion disaster for Wisconsin and U. of Wisconsin Madison. Last I read, Walker was going to cut $300 million from the U. system.
2. UW Madison is one of the top research universities in the world. It’s rated 12th in the USA. Which says a lot. 30 of the 40 top research universities in the world are in the USA. This explains a lot of our technological and economic lead.
3. It can take years and years to build up a top research university. You can destroy it in a few months. It’s basically the top minds in science fields. They wear athletic shoes and walk out the door every night. They can and will keep walking (a pun here somewhere) if they get a better deal. Competition for these scientists is very high.
4. In our HI Tech society, research universities are powerful economic drivers. It’s no accident solid state physics (computers etc.) and biotech cluster around research universities. The SF bay area, Boston, U. of Washington, San Diego etc..
It’s estimated that in the last century 80% of our economic growth came from advances in science.
5. What Scott Walker is doing is robbing from Wisconsin’s future to paper over his failures in the present. The nice thing for wreckers and nihilists like him is that the effects will take decades to show up.
Usually Loonytarians also attack public education. If you abolished public education today, no one would see much for a decade or two. Until employers noticed that most of their job candidates were illiterate and couldn’t fill out an application form.
Can Scott Walker make Wisconsin into our first Third World state? Probably not, Mississippi and a few others are ahead. But he can try and so far, the voters in Wisconsin have decided to let him.
Meantime, he’s proposing a bond issue to fund a stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks. Funded in part by a tax on visiting players.
Now I’ve got nothing against a state taxing rich athletes for money they earn there, but I bet he could find better ways to use the money rather than as a giveaway to a rich owner.
1. In the last century, US per capita GDP has gone up 8 fold. 85% of that stunning economic growth has been due to advances in science and technology. We also spent per capita among the largest amounts on R&D.
2. This explains the US lead in science and economic activity. And the military which knows this because they spend ca $80 billion themselves.
3. Walker is attacking the university system. He is also attacking the public schools.
4. What is the goal here, besides destroying all state services? Without a good U. system and public education, you will inevitably end up with a Third World type economy. That is one reason why the Third World is…the Third World.
5. Walker’s claim that his magic juju Loonytarianism was going to increase jobs and tax revenues never happened. Why would employers move to a state moving backwards towards a New Dark Age? I could see why educated and ambitious people would leave Wisconsin though. Better opportunities and quite often, warmer winters.
You can’t blame Scott Walker. He is what he is. Dogs gotta be dogs.
It’s that majority of voters who elected him. Twice. And the last time recently by a respectable margin.
I do have symphathy for the unwilling bystanders to the Walker Catastrophe. I/we had something similar happen during the Bush Catastrophe. It’s taken us 6 years to recover and will take more years before we are finally over it.
Hey *I* sure as hell didn’t vote for him. The system is rigged; and yes, Walker is actively evil.
The really weird part is, right down the block from the capitol building is a huge contingent of homeless, mostly war veterans, some of whom are not very stable but many of whom have a pretty good grip on politics. I’m amazed Walker feels safe walking around down there, and have half-expected one of them to take a potshot at him. I rather wish they would.
[We do not encourage murder or assassination ’round these parts. Stop or get banned. –pzm]
Azuma @8, while your assessment of Walker is correct, don’t ever advocate that someone be shot. Not here.
I’m going on record that I do not want anyone to “take a potshot” at Walker.
We’re behind Mississippi in one area: The current rate of vaccination.
Because Scott Walker has convinced many people outside of his two largest areas, Milwaukee County and Dane County, that they don’t NEED to be vaccinated.
Good job, Scotty Walker! You managed to ruin the county of Milwaukee,now you’re doing it to the state! (And count me as one more vote from your hometown, Wauwatosa, you ain’t never got and one more you’ll never get.)
What the heck kind of state is Wisconsin, that he has any input on the university’s mission statement?!
Walker was elected THREE times in 6 years.
Four years, my mistake!
@9/Lynna, OM
I’d rather he die on fire screaming like that poor Jordanian pilot honestly, but I see your point. Still, what do we do when evil people like this become so entrenched? The democratic process isn’t working any longer thanks to gerrymandering and manipulation of the legal system. It’s entering a specific kind of downward-spiralling failure mode I’ve seen in mechanical and natural systems before, and the speed of it is increasing.
I would never want him or anyone else to really die a violent death.
I would prefer he lived to a ripe old age and died in obscurity reviled by history for the stupidity, cruelty and hypocrisy of his political policies.
Cursed by the citizens of the state of WI and laughed at by the rest of the country.
uncle frogy
The problem, for these characters, is that education leads to science, and science discovers inconvenient facts, like the fact that human produced CO2 is the primary cause of dangerous global warming, or that coal power produced particulate pollution is an important cause of lung ailments, or that tetraethyllead in fuels was an important cause of brain damage in many other things.
Rather than spending money on scientific solutions to the problems discovered by science, a huge swathe of billionaires have decided on a shoot messenger approach; they’re spending money on manipulating politics to destroy science, because they believe they’ll make more money that way.
Objectivity–the quality of being objective.
synonyms: impartiality, absence/lack of bias, absence/lack of prejudice, fairness, fair-mindedness, neutrality, evenhandedness, justice, open-mindedness, disinterest, detachment, dispassion, neutrality
Objectivism– (1)Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Russian-American writer Ayn Rand (1905–1982). (2)Any standpoint that stresses objectivity,
Stand back and watch the irony meters explode.
Wow, such honesty from Walker.
Yeah, I know you’d love to Pay Evil unto Evil. Snap out of it.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
I would think that Walker, being such an economist, would see that some investments need a long time to return on that investment. College is NOT an expense, but a long-term investment (ROI is slow, but with a big payoff). Seems he is stuck on “instant gratification”. I’ll bet he would fail the “Marshmallow Test”*.
Delayed Gratification has much bigger rewards than “instant …” Cutting the school’s budget will be in instant increase in the ‘liquid assets’, yet eliminates the long-term gains.
Delayed Gratification is simply Delayed, it is not Never.
—
* 2 marshmallows on the table. A tells B, “you can have ONE marshmallow right now, if you do, I’ll take the other one away; OR, if you wait five minutes, THEN you can have both of them. Go, timer is started…
“The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs”
What an utterly chilling and dehumanising statement. Actually the term “human resources” is pretty much evil to begin with.
Excellent idea! I am going to promote Republican governors in all the other Big 10 states; this might be the Goopher’s only chance to win a league championship.
I beg to differ — he’s been actively evil for a long time. The thing is, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know it.
You might recall, Walker was the subject of a prank a while back, when a blogger called him, pretending to be David Koch. I cringed when I heard the recording of that call, when it got to the part where “Koch” jokingly referred to the fact that a policy Walker favored (I forget what) would financially benefit the Kochs. I cringed because this was the caller ineptly projecting his own views onto the Kochs; I cringed because I don’t believe the real Kochs would ever do that — I don’t believe they even think that way. Sure, objectively, their politics line up all too neatly with their profit motives. And it’s safe to assume those facts aren’t unconnected. But, I truly believe that the Kochs have somehow convinced themselves that what they’re doing is right, moral and just. And the same is true of Walker. He didn’t react to that joke, but he didn’t really go along with it, either. Listening to that call, I hear an idealist, not an opportunist — even though, by my standards, his ideals are all wrong.
Educated people are more likely to vote Democratic; therefore, the only responsible thing to do is prevent people from being educated.
You KNOW that’s what he’s thinking; we just need to figure out a way to get him no say it out loud…
Nah, never mind. It’s been obvious for years now that this is his agenda, and they keep voting him back in anyways. It’s hard to see what he could say that would make his willing lackeys turn against him.
has the link to Walker getting so easily punked and revealing his hero worship of KochCo been posted yet?
if so, here it is again, because really, it cannot be posted enough:
http://www.ibtimes.com/ian-murphy-david-koch-talk-wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-full-text-270205
The only tiny positive I see is that I reflexively think “University of Washington” when I see “UW”. Then when I read further I realize it’s not my daughter’s college.
Don’t worry, Walker assures us the attempted deletion was all just a big mistake and he promised never to do it again…when anyone was paying attention.
Azuma @8:
I was going to ask what the fuck is wrong with you, but then you don’t have a problem wishing harm upon other people, as we’ve seen before. Since you clearly don’t value human life, why don’t you just fuck off.
I’m with ya Akira…Wishing for someone’s agonizing death isn’t the same as advocating for it…If something awful happened to walker. I’d be a hypocrite if i said I wouldn’t drink long and sweetly of a very strong beverage of my choice…And like you said, when evil is THIS entrenched, and those charged with protecting us from this rampant level of socopathy are in on the game THEMSELVES…Well. when all recourse for redress have been scuttled…This is how revolutions begin…
After the outcry, he walked it back, saying it was a “drafting error” and that he never instructed his aides to remove that language, just to add more language about vocational education.
Cue the documents coming out that have specific language regarding the removal of those lines from the mission statement.
Then he said it was a misunderstanding. The state senate minority leader rightly asked if this is what’s happening because his aides don’t get what’s going on, just who is running the show there?
This is a guy who can’t even take responsibility for his own male-pattern baldness. You’ll note he’s always photographed from the front, slightly below; he’s got a huge bald spot. But it’s not natural, he says, his wife asked him to get something from a high cabinet and he hit his head on a cabinet door and the scar from that is why he has no hair on the top of his head.
Riiiiiiiight.
I have it on reasonably good authority from a friend who happens to be a R lobbyist that most political operatives in that party are crapping themselves at the thought of this guy gaining steam as a presidential candidate because of weird stuff like that.
I hope he stays governor, personally – not because I like him, but because our lieutenant gov makes him look calm and rational. She’s completely batshit insane.
The only reason he keeps winning is because the Dem party in WI is incredibly disorganized and keeps fielding uphill candidates. When you’re already struggling for name recognition outside of Madison or Milwaukee, and your first exposure to the rest of the state is when Walker’s team puts you on the defensive, you’ve pretty much lost the election.
I empathize with Wisconsinites, as a grad student at a public university in Louisiana. We are preparing for the worst. A $400 million cut to Louisiana’s higher education budget could force 15 campuses to close or lose their accreditation, and my university, while not in danger of closing, could lose 3000 course offerings and 300 faculty. Bobby and Scotty can both go to hell.
Yeah. I blame the Redhead for my baldness, which started soon after we were married. Never mind my dad, his dad, and his dad’s dad (my great granddad) were all bald…..*snicker*