UW-Milwaukee will have to slash $40 million from its budget if Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System becomes law. The state faces a $283 million shortfall in the current budget, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, and a $2.2 billion structural deficit in the next two-year budget cycle.
Walker announced his proposed 13% cut to the UW System last Tuesday, the same day he unveiled a $220 million state-backed financing plan for a new Milwaukee sports arena as well as made headlines with Our American Revival, an exploratory committee connected to his likely presidential run.
In addition to making the historic cuts, Walker would implement another two-year tuition freeze as well as turn the UW System into an independent authority that wouldn’t have to get legislative approval for making changes to tenure policies, shared governance and other matters enshrined in state statutes. Those changes would be made by the 18-member UW Board of Regents, 16 of whom are appointed by the governor.
UWM Business School Budget Would Be Lost
Just how enormous is Walker’s $300 million cut to higher education?
It’s just about equal to the $315 million state taxpayers will have to cover to pay for Walker’s version of health care reform in the next budget, Citizen Action of Wisconsin noted. If Walker would accept the expanded Medicare monies under Obamacare as every other Republican governor in the Midwest has done, that would more than cover the $300 million he is taking from the UW System.
UW-Milwaukee’s likely share of that $300 million is $40 million lost over the course of the next two-year budget, $20 million per year starting July 1, if Walker’s plan is approved.
Tom Luljak, UWM vice chancellor for university affairs and communications, said UWM has lost $50 million in state revenue over the past 15 years. Its largest one-year cut was $8.5 million. Now, it’s being asked to absorb a $40 million hit in just two years.
“This is much larger and more significant than anything we’ve experienced,” Luljak said.
He said Chancellor Mark Mone has put together a task force to go through UWM’s budget line by line to try to find what could be cut.
“Our priority is to protect services for students,” Luljak said.
UWM would lose an estimated $20 million each year, equal to the budget for the Lubar School of Business or the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said Mark D. Schwartz, geography professor and president of the UW-Milwaukee Faculty Senate Committee.
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“We can make certain kinds of decisions on things to cut but they are going to be cuts made on an emergency basis,” Schwartz said. “So you’re going to have to make decisions that are probably not going to be in the best long-term interests of the students or the university.”
Chase Erwin, co-president of the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants Association, said the College of Letters and Science alone could lose up to 40 faculty members or 200 teaching assistants.
“But it goes beyond layoffs,” Erwin said. “Some people may not be able to complete their degrees.”
UWM Finances Already Fragile
Schwartz said that Walker’s latest cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. State support for the UW has declined for 12 years and legislators ordered campuses to draw down their reserves and implemented a two-year tuition freeze. Yet UWM was expanding its campus and program offerings and remaking itself as a research institution, despite little help from the state.
“We have not been funded as a research institution,” Schwartz said. “There has been a disconnect between the mission we have been asked to do and the resources we have been provided to do that.”
The combination of state support and tuition has risen just above inflation in recent years. But that masks the fact that the state’s support has declined for more than a decade and students have been forced to pay higher tuition to compensate for it, Schwartz said.
“This has been a deliberate shifting of the burden of paying for higher education from the state as a collective good to the individual student,” Schwartz said. “And all of the political blame somehow seems to end up on the university’s shoulders, not on the people who have actually been making the decisions.”
Raising tuition is off the table for now, at least, if Walker’s plan is approved.
The classes of 2015, 2016 and 2017—that includes Walker’s son Alex, a sophomore at UW-Madison—would be protected from any tuition hike that would likely take place after the proposed freeze would end in 2017.
Schwartz said Walker’s lack of support for higher education would hurt Wisconsin in the long run. Walker’s agenda makes it harder to attract faculty members and researchers, students will likely pay more and the value of a UW degree could diminish.
“It seems like we’re looking at a battle over what is the university system and what is its role in the state,” Schwartz said. “Do we want to continue to fund an exceptional educational system that’s the envy of the world or do we watch it erode due to lack of support? Does the state invest in its future? We are part of the solution here. We’re not the problem.”
