Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI)
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker isn't just seeking to
slash funding for the University of Wisconsin system, he is—or was, until he was forced to backpedal rapidly—also seeking to shift the university's entire mission. Now he's shifting blame as the backlash hits him.
The University of Wisconsin is deeply shaped by the Wisconsin Idea, "that education should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom," that "the boundaries of campus are the boundaries of the state." It's been a guiding principle for more than a century. Enter Scott Walker: The governor's proposed budget eliminated the Wisconsin Idea from the university system's mission. In Walker's vision, that mission would be to "meet the state's workforce needs":
It also proposed striking language in state law about public service and improving the human condition, and eliminating the core principle that the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.
Faced with backlash, Walker passed the buck. First he claimed that university officials hadn't objected to the changes in their mission and that anyway the changes had been the result of a drafting error. Except that university officials had in fact objected. Walker then changed his story to claim that though his administration had been behind the removal of the Wisconsin Idea and had blown off objections from university officials, he personally had not known any of this was happening or that this was what his budget would say. As things Republican governors claim not to know their senior staff are doing under their authority, it's not a "traffic study," but completely changing the century-old mission of one of America's top institutions of public higher education isn't nothing, either. Oh, and Walker won't be disciplining anyone over it, either.
Scott Walker is a governor whose job-creation ideas have failed, yet he's still trying to make over an entire university system in the image of those failed ideas about what Wisconsin needs for job creation, and doing that as part of a plan to drastically cut the university's budget. And, like Chris Christie before him, he's asking us to replace the idea that he's a terrible person who does terrible things with the idea that his senior staff are terrible people who do terrible things and he doesn't bother to know about those terrible things. What a choice!