After strange day the Wisconsin Idea survives.

by Harry on February 12, 2015

So here’s roughly what happened.

Last Tuesday (Feb 3) our Governor proposed his budget. Now, as you may remember, he has a habit of putting things in the budget that don’t look especially connected to the budget except insofar as, of course, everything is connected to the budget. So it wasn’t so surprising, I suppose, that, alongside the very substantial and potentially devastating $300 million dollar cut to the UW system (the system, by the way, is comprised by 22 different campuses, some 2-year, others 4-year, and others including substantial numbers of graduate and professional programs, so it is not just UW-Madison), proposed changes to the mission of the system. One change, which although lots of people are unhappy with it, seems to me entirely reasonable, and also trivial since it is already implied on any reasonable interpretation of our already stated mission, is that we should help “meet the state’s workforce needs”. However, along with this came other changes – numerous deletions, which amounted to at best a watering down and at worst the elimination of what we call The Wisconsin Idea, the idea that the university is here to serve the state very broadly, in terms of producing and disseminating knowledge that is valuable for the residents, public institutions, and businesses of the State.

I got an email from a journalist fairly early on Wednesday, after I had heard about the proposals, but before I had scrutinized them (because I was preparing for a class, the students in which I live in a kind of horror of disappointing, as our Governor would be pleased to know), asking what I thought about the proposals. After reading them carefully, I responded that I didn’t want to say anything publicly, because the proposals looked so eccentric to me that I had no understanding of what was going on. And I am cautious about being quoted in public about university matters, because I don’t want to be off-message, and didn’t know at the time how the leadership of my campus (in whom I’m happy to say, I have a great deal of, fortunately justified, confidence, and from whom I am happy to take leadership) would respond. But I did say that I thought the proposed changes were distinctly odd.

Here are what seemed to me that most eccentric changes. The following phrases were all deleted from the mission:

“Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth”
“Which makes effective and efficient use of human and physical resources; which functions cooperatively with other educational institutions and systems”
“Which stresses undergraduate teaching as its main priority”

Let’s start with truth.

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Safe Space For Possibly Unpopular Thoughts on Feminism, Leftism

by Belle Waring on February 12, 2015

UPDATE: REDOUBLE YOUR EFFORTS AT MAOIST SELF-CRITICISM, COMRADES; DO NOT BE GULLED BY MY MOPING. TELL US YOU BELIEVE SOMETHING CRAZY. IT IS A NEAR-CERTAINTY!

In the thread to one of my string of unfailingly well-intentioned, generous–not to put too fine a point on it, let’s just say, kind posts on Political Correctness, some of us discussed what it would be like if I were actually kind we had a “safe” thread in which we could discuss feminism without worrying we would ban ourselves from polite society by saying The Wrong Thing. Now, I cannot actually bring it about that other commenters will not remember what you said in this thread and be a dick to you about in some future thread. I can fight the tendency by asking everyone who participates to do so in a spirit of truthfulness and generosity; by banning unpleasant arguments in this thread; and by ruthlessly deleting future comments of this sort when they are made to one of my own posts. If the comment is not made to my own post I can still upbraid the person for violating what is meant to be a minor experiment in honesty and, yes, kindness. However, if you feel what you have to say is truly incendiary you can always just make a burner pseud for the occasion. The tradition followed at unfogged is that regular commenters donning a pseudonym of convenience choose some past political leader. I think it would be nice if we took up floral banners for the day and became Lady Clematis or some such, but I leave the details to you.

Now, I must tell you my own “I have the possibly wrong” opinion on a feminist issue, but it won’t make sense without context. This may seem like a silly tic of mine, this constant introduction of my actual life, blobs and swirls of ink floating on water and ox-gall, and slashed at, just so, with a fork, yielding marbled paper on which the posts are hard to read at times when compared with the black on white clarity of some of my co-bloggers. But this is the secret: the personal really is the political.

When I got raped at college I knew a lot about some things and nothing about others, but being a teenager I pretended to know mostly everything. I wasn’t a college student, even; the National Cathedral’s School for Girls sent two girls every year to study at New College, Oxford during the summer between junior and senior year, with a bunch of college students from Ohio. These programs are just money-farms for Oxford and the professors do not take them very seriously at all. When I got the reading list, I was 16, so I took it completely seriously. I read everything. All the books on the list. I didn’t understand that you’re not really supposed to. I read Ulysses. I did not understand it hardly at all and I just read that damn thing anyway, on my spring break, in the hammock on the sleeping porch at my dad’s in South Carolina, one leg pumping idly against the white uprights between which the screens are stretched, birdsong and cicada up there enough to be loud. So loud! The experience of forcing myself through hundreds of pages of something that I don’t understand is unique to my adolescence. Three Shakespeare plays. Secondary literature I had to get at the big library downtown in D.C.
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