Scott Walker is soft pedaling his withdrawal of his own University of Wisconsin System Regent appointee - a high achieving UW-Platteville student named Joshua Inglett - after finding out that Joshua had signed the recall petition. The UW Regents serve the UW System at the behest of the sitting governor who appoints them on various cycles of rotation. While most of the Regents are politicians, business professionals or an occasional educator, there is always one student serving for a two year appointment. Obviously, this is to keep a diversity of points of view within this important high-level, and as mandated, non-partisan committee.
As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stated yesterday:
A University of Wisconsin-Platteville engineering student anticipating a new seat on the UW System's Board of Regents was renounced at the eleventh hour by Gov. Scott Walker, who withdrew the young man's appointment after finding out he had signed a petition as an 18-year-old freshman calling for the governor's recall.
Inglett is an engineering physics major, and an impressive student by all qualifications. He has already founded two businesses and has the full support of faculty and administrators from UW Platteville. On Monday, according to an article in Channel3000.com, Walker stated that "Inglett would 'serve the UW System and his fellow students well.'" On Thursday morning, immediately after a rightwing blog reported Inglett's name in the recall petition database, Walker's office announced his withdrawal. Inglett, a sophomore in college, told reporters "I felt like my character had been attacked. They had four months to look this up and Google search me. I looked it up online yesterday. It took me 15 seconds."
Walker has refused to suggest a reason for the withdrawal, but claims that it is for the student's own good. “We’re not going to pull him through all that, there’s plenty of good candidates out there to go forward in that regard,” he suggested somewhat inarticulately to reporters.
State Representative Robin Vos, once himself a student regent, blames Inglett. "He should have been honest and said, 'I signed the recall petition and I'm proud of it' or 'I signed it and I made a mistake.' This is not like you're serving on some minor board."
It is worth recalling, when we look at the success of a young man like Joshua Inglett, that Scott Walker left Marquette University while entering his fourth year, under a cloud of disgrace. While he now tells the world that he had business and family opportunities to pursue, the facts are buried in a murky past. University records about students are generally confidential and these have never been released. Marquette now has vested interest in making Governor Walker happy. However, there are plenty of accounts based on fact, rumor and speculation, regarding Walker's student years. According to a Democratic Party press release from 2010,
In February, 1988, Walker admitted violating Marquette campaign rules during his run for student government president and the Marquette Tribune deemed him “unfit” for office after finding Walker’s campaign guilty of “mudslinging,” and after reports that his campaign was throwing out copies of the paper that contained information damaging to Walker.
Walker left the university not long afterward.
Walker's GPA, upon leaving Marquette, was 2.59. Joshua Inglett is a member of the Campus Honor Society. Walker narrowly squeaked by a John Doe investigation which indicted a significant number of his closest colleagues and allies. Joshua Inglett was a resident assistant in his dorm last year and worked trouble-shooting technology issues in classrooms. In a "compare and contrast essay assignment", one might be asked to draw parallels between the two men, using actions and achievements as evidence, drawing conclusions of character and intention.
In a just universe, which man should have power and influence?
Which man has power and influence in this world?
That might be instructive essay to write, someday, when the conclusions don't stare with reptilian logic through a mediated haze, empty-eyed and dead-souled while reciting the scripts of other men so loudly and often that ethics and efficacy have inverted in the chiasmus of dogmatic repetition. The reprehensible have been rewarded, and they, in turn, get to premeditate the firing of their moral and intellectual superiors.
We brook no dissent. Mired in the cult of personality that runs our state, your anticipatory disloyalty trumps your clear qualifications.