Posted on 06/07/2015 5:09:29 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Walker’s Act 10 for higher education is not just about tenure. Its attack on the university that gave birth to the original Wisconsin Experiment is the logical outcome of eighty years of maligning universities as hotbeds of socialism in an attempt to undercut workers’ influence in government. It is a decisive power play in the struggle over the nature of the American government. Should workers have political power, or should a few rich men alone determine government policies? Walker’s stand is clear. He has long worked in lockstep with ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, through which corporations write legislation that goes to legislatures for approval. He is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have indicated they would like to see him in the White House.
At the turn of the last century, the “Wisconsin Experiment” led the nation as a way to develop government policies that would promote the greatest good for the most people. Gov. Robert La Follette brought together government officials, university professors and business leaders to hash out intelligent state policies.
Today there is another Wisconsin Experiment underway. This one, though, is designed to tear apart that broad civic vision and replace it with an oligarchy.
On its face, today’s Wisconsin story appears to be about budgets and entitlement. Citing the need to save money, the Joint Finance Committee of the Wisconsin Legislature at the end of May voted 12-4 to cut $250 million from the university’s budget and eliminate tenure from state law, enabling the governor-appointed Board of Regents to fire professors whenever they declared it time to “redirect” a program. Opponents are focusing on the end of tenure, but there is a larger story here about money, politics and ownership of the national government.
Significantly, Walker has referred to the measure as “Act 10 for higher education.” Act 10 was the 2011 Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, passed by the Republican Legislature at Walker’s urging. It was the measure that created such furor in early 2011, as tens of thousands of protesters converged on the Wisconsin Capitol, Democratic senators fled to Illinois to stop a vote on the bill, and Republicans finally found a loophole in the quorum rules that enabled them to pass the measure without their Democratic colleagues.
At stake in this bitter fight was the nature of American government. Should workers have the right to bargain as a unit, joining together as a political bloc to influence both their contracts and government policies? Or should they be forced to compete for national power as individuals equal to the wealthiest men in America?
FDR and a Democratic Congress first established workers’ right to political organization in 1935 with the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act). They saw collective bargaining as a way to guarantee that the government served everyone, rather than the very wealthy who had led the nation into the Great Depression. Collective bargaining would level the playing field between workers and employers in politics, guaranteeing that government policies would benefit everyone.
But from the moment of its passage, Movement Conservatives insisted that the Wagner Act perverted the government by giving workers too much power. They must not be able to work as a unit; they must stand alone as individuals, just as wealthy men did. If workers could join together, they would influence workplace conditions and government policies. Undoubtedly, government regulations would establish minimum wages and maximum hours, and require costly safety measures. These would inhibit the ability of employers to make money and therefore, Movement Conservatives insisted, amount to a redistribution of wealth. The ability of unions to exercise political power was a fast track to communism.
As soon as Republicans regained control of Congress, they curtailed the Wagner Act with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, limiting workers’ ability to strike, preventing unions from donating to national political campaigns, and requiring labor leaders to swear they were not communists. When President Truman vetoed the measure, they passed it over his veto.
Movement conservatives were only beginning their attack on the power of workers in government. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. brought the fight against government regulation to universities. His “God and Man at Yale” complained that because professors at Yale—one of the most conservative schools in the country—advocated government regulation of the economy to protect workers, they were “thoroughly collectivistic.” While they were not actively calling for the overthrow of capitalism, he explained, that was their ultimate goal: they were calling for “extended social services, taxation, and regulation to a point where a smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society.” They were corrupting America’s youth.
Three years later, Buckley identified these collectivist academics by a new noun, capitalized to suggest they were part of an international cabal that mirrored Communists. They were “Liberals.” By definition, any professor who believed that the government had any role in protecting workers, rather than defending the rights of property, was part of “liberal academia.” Liberal professors were destroying America by ushering in communism.
In 1958, Movement Conservatives in seven states ran for office on right-to-work platforms that would break the unions. Their ideas were so laughably unpopular that they lost decisively in six of those states. But in Arizona, voters reelected Sen. Barry Goldwater, who had made it his mission to destroy the political power of unions. They were destroying human freedom, he insisted, and were “more dangerous than Soviet Russia.”
Goldwater became a Movement Conservative standard bearer, and his stance got national attention with the 1960 publication of “The Conscience of a Conservative,” ghostwritten by Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, but published under Goldwater’s name. This slim volume announced without a hint of irony that unions concentrated mammoth political power in the hands of a few men, and thus irreparably corrupted the political process. The only way to restore American freedom was to remove unions from politics, and make sure that individuals alone could make financial contributions to political campaigns.
Goldwater’s manifesto was elitist—it reminded readers that education was never intended to “educate, or elevate society,” but to educate individual leaders “to take care of society’s needs”—but it did not expressly attack universities. It took John F. Kennedy’s election to link unions and higher education in popular political rhetoric. Republicans horrified by the election of a Democrat insisted that Kennedy had won only thanks to the support of organized labor, and harped on his Harvard education and his Ivy League brain trust as proof that liberal academics were ruining America. Then Kennedy issued an executive order giving public employees collective bargaining rights much like those accorded to private employees under the Wagner Act. It seemed to prove that liberal academics were bringing communism to America by handing political power to workers.
In 1964, Ronald Reagan articulated a growing distrust of liberal academics in his televised prime-time speech in support of Goldwater’s presidential bid. Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” attacked the social welfare policies of Kennedy and President Johnson as leading to “the ant heap of totalitarianism.” Reagan warned against “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol” planning the economy and, for good measure, took a potshot at a Harvard education. Two years later, Reagan won the governorship of California, thanks to his fire-breathing promise to “clean up that mess in Berkeley,” where students were falling under the sway of left-wing agitators and protesting the Vietnam War.
Movement Conservatives made Reagan’s anti-intellectualism an article of faith. Although George W. Bush held degrees from both Yale and Harvard, his supporters portrayed him as an outsider from Texas, cutting brush on his newly purchased Texas ranch. Movement Conservative personalities increasingly made whipping boys of members of the “liberal academy,” with hosts like Rush Limbaugh claiming that leftists professors were conditioning people to accept collectivism by “taking hold of the education system, the university, academia system.” Gradually, Buckley’s premise took hold: that universities were, by definition, not places where scholars who believed in a wide range of roles for the federal government in society taught their research. Universities were nests of socialists.
Walker’s Act 10 for higher education is not just about tenure. Its attack on the university that gave birth to the original Wisconsin Experiment is the logical outcome of eighty years of maligning universities as hotbeds of socialism in an attempt to undercut workers’ influence in government. It is a decisive power play in the struggle over the nature of the American government. Should workers have political power, or should a few rich men alone determine government policies? Walker’s stand is clear. He has long worked in lockstep with ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, through which corporations write legislation that goes to legislatures for approval. He is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have indicated they would like to see him in the White House.
If they get their wish, today’s Wisconsin experiment will, like its predecessor, determine the direction of the nation. This time, though, the direction will be toward the greatest good for the wealthy few.
I love the way he calls it “Act 10 for Higher Education”! He is subtly taunting them with their previous loss, which tends to make them lose it.
I love the provision about alternative credentialing for teaching licenses (end run around the “education degree” requirements).
LIKE
:: Actually both ALEC and NCSL should be scorned and banned by law. They are “non-profits” that seek legislative and policy changes at the state level ::
Oh! An oligarchy, then?
I agree that the Kochs’ ideology differs from Soros’. But let’s face it, as individuals with only the right to vote, and no financial clout whatsoever, we are dealt out of the power we ought to have in a representative republic. Soros is pure evil, and means evil for our way of life. But he is joined by many of our oligarchs in his stunts, e.g., “shorting” the dollar a few summers ago. I like to think the Koch Brothers are American patriots and capitalists, and we need an answer to Soros and his minions, but I think the state of our country is perilous when this is what our political and economic system comes down to. ALEC and NCSL should have NO ROLE WHATSOEVER in a federal system.
Dear Professor Arrogant, who gets to decide what the greatest good is? As far as "for most people", who gets to pick the winners and the losers?
Oh, that's right, it is a enlightened collection of self-anointed, sanctimonious pinheads. You and your ilk will get us killed. IQ does not determine wisdom professor.
You got it. Add to that the nonsense that goes on meetings at the National Governors Association (NGA)!! Where corporate and “non-profit” lobbyists provide governors with binders full of legislative and policy proposals to “help” them out!
The trail now leads to ending tenure and faculty rule in the UW system.
Likely such proposals are not the only thing in those binders...
Years ago now, one of my favorite profs looked at me and said, “You’ve got to get them young.”
So yeah, higher ed is rife with leftists.
If memory serves the other 49 states leave tenure matters to the regents of their universities rather than codifying it into law.
More interesting is the drive that seems to be picking up steam requiring college instructors to teach twice as many classes as they do now. I think there's a similar initiative in North Carolina. I'm sure the other 48 states are hoping and praying for those bills to pass because then once North Carolina and Wisconsin universities are out of the research business then all that funding and all those instructors will be there for the taking.
If they turn the responsibility for tenure matters over to the regents the it certainly isn't in danger of ending.
“...eighty years of maligning universities as hotbeds of socialism...”
If Walker makes it to the Republican finish line, one reason may be the opposition to Walker by those university panjandrums and their facilitators. They have been wildly successful in convincing the electorate that universities are a hot bed of socialism. Also every other political and social disease you can name.
So, for Scott Walker, there is a segment of the vote in his favor that comes as a way for his supporters to poke a stick in those academics eyeballs. And, the same goes for his campaign for the presidency if he’s the Pubbie nominee.
Looks like pre-op Jenner.
‘Ugly to the Bone’ doesn’t begin to describe it.
Looks like a former man.
".......Think about the stifling of the debate over climate change, with states such as Florida and — surprise! — Wisconsin barring scientists from discussing actual science. Or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, research on the economy, sexual health, drugs and the “war on terrorism.” The relevance of tenure, shared (as opposed to corporate-bought) governance and academic freedom has never been greater.
In particular, shared governance has been a bedrock principle of higher education, through which faculty members have meaningfully participated in the institutional governance of their universities alongside other staffers and senior managers. Together with tenure, shared governance means that faculty members can have a voice beyond the particular departments, disciplines and schools in which they teach.
It is not surprising, then, that conservatives — who have long attacked the notions of tenure, shared governance and academic freedom more broadly — would now set their eyes on Walker’s Wisconsin (it’s worth noting here that Walker did not graduate from college) as the moment to break the institution of tenure, based on the same corporate-dominated neoliberal principles that supported the near fatal weakening of unions a generation ago. In fact, as University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee English professor Richard Grusin wrote on his blog, Ragman’s Circles, the “daisy chain of Republican power” now extends from the governor to the regents he appoints, the system president they appoint and the chancellors he appoints.
There is little doubt that, should Wisconsin succeed, corporatized boards of private universities and state legislatures in the majority of Republican-governed states will jump on the bandwagon and move with lightning speed to remove tenure protections, shared governance and, ultimately, academic freedom protections from their universities. ......." - Killing tenure is academia’s point of no return
So, what do you propose to stop this? Ask politicians to design it themselves?
I welcome input from groups. Those groups, many times, represent actual people.
The key is to elect politicians with honor, who actually try to choose what is best, not what is the most enriching or the most power consolidating.
Fallacy of pretended neutrality flows freely in her words. Of course her side is not an oligarchy. No, they're as pure as the wind-driven snow.
It’s Caitlyn Jenner’s sister!
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