Recently, Chancellor Mike Martin laid out his views on UWRF (the University of Wisconsin River Falls) and higher education in the Student Voice. I’d like to offer a very different perspective on public higher education. But given his stated belief in the importance of making the case that higher education is a public good, I believe that Chancellor Martin would agree with my argument.
Chancellor Martin correctly stated that: “In an attempt to appeal to students, we told students, if you get a degree, here’s what your lifelong income is going to be. We made it a private good. When it’s a private good, and then asking the public to pay for it, you’ve got to disconnect, right?” He then went on to say that: “And I think we need to return not just in Wisconsin, but across public higher education, to the argument that what we have is also a very powerful public good.”
I agree completely. For many decades, higher education has been made into a private good. This resulted from the unquestioned dominance of human capital theory, which, as an economist, Chancellor Martin is certainly well-versed in. In brief, human capital theory promulgates the notion that one’s income is – and should be – tied to one’s education and training levels.
Politically, of course, this framing set up education to fail, which explains our current predicament. The education system cannot change the jobs that exist or wage levels. The education system educates.
Yet education is very intentionally and incorrectly held responsible for a predominately low wage, low education labor market. As a result, decades ago it became politically acceptable to cut public higher education spending perpetually, even during the current period of fiscal prosperity.
This is just politics. Business and the wealthy want to talk solely about education as the path to economic opportunity because it is in their self-interests to do so. Because when we’re talking about education, we’re not talking about an economy that has been intentionally constructed for owners and shareholders while it leaves a significant majority of workers behind.
Yet Chancellor Martin inadequately addressed the role that the legislature plays in our public institution when he states: “But if the legislature isn’t going to solve it for you, you better damn well solve it for yourself….But the bottom line, it comes back to what can this institution do innovatively.”
When Chancellor Martin refers to “change in the wind,” he fails to mention who’s in charge of the wind machine. He seems to be arguing in favor of a fully privatized UWRF, a campus funded by donors, corporations, and foundations, which will necessarily reflect their narrow economic interests. Private funders have no interest in training students for the larger labor market let alone to be well informed, democratic citizens.
Chancellor Martin’s analysis implies our defunded public institution will never receive any funding increases in the future, which would effectively make it a public institution in name only. This is the narrative we’ve been hearing from all our administrators since last school year, and it appears to be coming directly from the UW System.
But it is a hopeless narrative, and particularly demoralizing and utterly incomprehensible at a time when the state is drowning in money and the UW System continues to spend tens of millions on software and consultants as our campuses shed faculty, staff, and academic programs.
Is this even real?
The word “public” means something very specific: if a good is public, it means it is paid for with tax dollars, not with private dollars. The military, the local police department, city park, and school district are public institutions. Public higher education, on the other hand, has been largely privatized because of decisions made by elected officials.
But we can’t be public and rely on private funds. That’s not what public means.
Private funders – which represent a miniscule slice of the population -- have their own interests. They’re primarily interested in getting workers for their narrow industries.
And the question of priorities hangs over the Chancellor’s interview. The UW System has made its priorities clear – we will continue to purchase, without question, more and more expensive software (most of which we don’t need), as we get rid of faculty, staff, and academic programs.
For all the talk of budget cuts on campus, I’ve yet to hear anyone in front of the room say: “You know, I’m sorry, but we just can’t afford [fill in expensive tech product here] anymore.” Our leaders only tell us they can’t afford employees.
And Chancellor Martin asserts, yet provides no evidence for, the claim that the campus has surplus capacity. I’ve been at UWRF since 2005, and it’s common knowledge that we have far fewer tenured and tenure track faculty positions now in the College of Arts and Sciences than we had several years ago.
But I’m all for data analysis, so let’s make data-informed decisions.
I’ll say again that Chancellor Martin is correct when he states that public higher education is “a very powerful public good.” But making this case while moving full steam ahead for a privatized UWRF is a massive contradiction in terms.
The public wants affordable, quality, comprehensive, in-person, public higher education. And in this state, the only way to get this is by attending a UW institution. Corporate interests want the opposite of all these things. They want to not pay taxes and make as much money as possible. This isn’t complicated.
If we go further down the path of privatization – which is clearly the path sought by the UW System -- we directly undermine the notion that higher education is a public good. More importantly, we will be providing our students with an inferior, expensive, tech-heavy, narrowed educational experience. We will be walking away entirely from the Wisconsin Idea.
Public means public. I ask Chancellor Martin to stand with AFT-Wisconsin for comprehensive, in-person, public higher education that prioritizes students and the public over corporations and the wealthy.
Neil Kraus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls since 2005, President of United Falcons, the local chapter of AFT-Wisconsin, and author of three books, including The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement (Temple University Press, 2023).
This article first appeared in the UWRF Student Voice.
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