With the UW-system facing budget cuts in the neigborhood of $300 million and Governor Walker suggesting professors work harder, the best suggestion would for exactly that to happen. Professors are generally intelligent people. They're not good teachers. If you've been to college, you know what I'm talking about. They don't get paid as much as fat-cat businessmen, but they often double the salaries of the fat-cat public school teachers who got nailed in Wisconsin's last budgets. Professors need to accept the tools given to them from Wisconsin in order to make themselves more efficient and not waste time and energy protesting.
Walker has the votes. UW will lose a lot of funding. Maybe the schools shouldn't lose funding, however. What if we just lost the schools? If roughly half of state employees are UW employees, then why do they even exist? Why would we not look into a voucher-type system for colleges in our state? It would be a great way to use public funds to both support private entities AND eliminate the need for public employees. It really seems like a win-win.
Take the amount we subsidize UW campuses and put the money up for grabs. Same money, but students take it where they want. As a former public school teacher, I really don't have any love for the 35,000 UW employees. Compared to me and my fellow public school teachers, they don't work as hard. Compared to us, they don't teach as well. Compared to us, they get paid a lot more.
I know I should not buy into the divide and conquer method of dismantling the unions, but no one from the trades or from the UW system was able to stop me from losing my job as a teacher, so I'm thinking I have very little to give to them in return. Basically, if we're going to privatize, then let's do it all the time. UW, public schools, prisons, police, courts, lawmakers. All of it. Let's get the right companies in charge of all of it. Now I've taken it too far. But when did it go there? I guess we'll probably end up figuring it out later.