Read our campaign announcement below:
After the UWM administration presented their backward plan, the UW Board of Regents voted to fire 35 devoted, tenured faculty. This unfortunate yet expected move comes after the closures of the affordable two-year campuses in Waukesha and Washington County in the last year. In short, these campuses were no longer adequately profitable to the UWM administration, and thus worthless to the out-of-touch administrators. The UWM administration invoked a “program discontinuance policy”, set up under reactionary governor Scott Walker, that allows for these mass layoffs. This despotic purge is in spite of the fact that the UWM Foundation had a record year of fundraising, and the UW System budget currently exceeds $6 billion. All the while, Chancellor Mark Mone got a raise to $489,169/year, in addition to a monthly stipend to live in his mansion. These greedy administrators in ivory towers decided that the livelihoods of hundreds of employees and the educational futures of nearly 1,000 students were of no importance. These are the first mass faculty layoffs stemming from the 2011 anti-union bill, Act 10, ushered in by the reactionary Scott Walker. Yet, the fake progressives in the UWM administration are exploiting this law to cut our education, filling the pockets of those at the top.
In the wake of militant student protests, UWM admin has turned UWM into a repressive and militarized campus of police surveillance. With numerous new cameras, undercover police dedicated to monitoring protests and student organizations, fully equipped riot gear, and nearly 40 cops to patrol just 1/10th of a square mile–it is clear to all with a conscience that these are unnecessary expenses meant for nothing but repression. What we need is to defend our education, not to expand the police state.
There is no reason that these campus closures and mass layoffs should have happened. This is a fact that even Wisconsin state Superintendent, Jill Underly, agrees with. Superintendent Underly cast the only dissenting vote in this sham procedure to fire the tenured faculty. Underly admitted to there not only being enough in the UW system’s budget to preserve those positions but also said “there is no plan” after the closure of the two-year campuses. UWM administration is making decisions solely based on the moneybag and is disrespecting the mass protests held by the people of Wisconsin since the proposed budget cuts after the 2008 financial crisis and all throughout 2011 after Act 10 was signed. The people of Wisconsin will not stand for budget cuts while administrators stuff their pockets. We demand the funding of educational needs and a stop to admin greed!
The illusion of shared governance at universities has been exposed: it is clear that the faculty has had merely an “advisory” role since 2015 and were unable to stop this move to fire their colleagues through the university’s procedural institutions. Plainly and simply, the UW Regents and UWM administration are grossly undemocratic and have gone mask off, making it clear they care more about preserving their paychecks than preserving education.
Students for a Democratic Society is a national, multi-issue progressive organization of student activists who fight for change on campus. Our goal is to build a student movement that mobilizes students against crimes against the people committed here at home and against other people abroad. SDS at UW-Milwaukee is currently fighting to have the administration cut all ties with the genocidal settler-colonial state of Israel, and (in a separate campaign) to ensure increased black enrollment on campus.
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