Regardless of how creative an organization gets with cutting its staff's pay, the end result is still the same - renewed interest in collective bargaining for wages.
Governor Doyle found a creative way to cut state workers' pay - requiring mandatory furloughs. Yes, all state employees, including those who work for the UW System, will have to take 16 days off over the next two years. And yes, they are also not working during those days.
But it still amounts to an involuntary reduction in how much all faculty and staff get to take home.
Can UW schools afford for the state to regard educators in the same light as a clerical worker in a DNR office?
Unlike those clerical workers and others, who are supported largely by state tax revenue, paid by all who do business in Wisconsin, UW educators work in an institution supported in a large part by student tuition. We pay to keep this place running, and for the governor to undercut our education by taking educators off the payroll for 8 days per year is unacceptable.
Doyle's move becomes more frustrating given the ever-shrinking state contribution to UW schools.
The state, at one time, paid 100% of the cost of tuition, just as if state universities were public schools. That percentage has declined over the last half-century, and recently the proportion paid by students was, for the first time ever, greater than the contribution from Wisconsin taxpayers.
With this in mind, our politicians should adopt a new doctrine in future decisions regarding the UW System: for every percent increase in the disparity between what the state pays to run the UW schools and what students pay, there should be a parallel decrease in the authority the legislature has over what UW schools do.
Take Viterbo University as an example. Students there pay nearly $20,000 per year for tuition, which is reasonable for a private university. Here, we pay much less, but that gap is slowly closing.
When in the decades to come that gap closes, so too should the era of legislative authority over UW schools. After all, the UW System has no power to dictate to Viterbo with whom that university can contract for services because there is no financial relationship. Viterbo is supported by private dollars and grants.
Chancellor Gow and UW President Kevin Reilly have both said they want to see educators making a competitive salary. Others have said, off the record, that raising tuition might be the only way to accomplish this worthy goal.
On the record, we recognize that the state's subsidy is only going to keep shrinking. We also recognize that faculty should be paid enough to keep the good ones in UW schools. By using the deductive reasoning we learned in PHL 101, we can only acquiesce that tuition hikes are inevitable, but only acceptable if accompanied by less state control.
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