Walker Wins: New Budget Will Repeal University Tenure Photo of Blake Neff

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is poised to win a huge victory on education as the state legislature passed a budget that repeals state tenure guarantees while also slashing the budget of the University of Wisconsin.

The victory was enunciated by the acquiescence of the university, which recognized its defeat by passing a spending plan that implements Walker’s cuts. All that remains is for Walker to consummate his victory by affixing his signature to the budget.

The two-year, $73 billion budget approved Thursday makes a host of changes Walker has sought in the realm of education. Wisconsin’s school voucher program is expanded, and $250 million in funding is taken from the University of Wisconsin. That’s down from the $300 million cut Walker originally sought, but still a substantial haircut.

Bowing to the fait accompli, later on Thursday the University of Wisconsin approved its own budget, implementing the big cuts expected of it. About 400 positions will be laid off or will go unfilled, and the university’s budgets no money for pay hikes. The school’s situation is made tougher because the legislature has also frozen in-state tuition.

While academics have accused Walker of sabotaging the school’s competitiveness, Walker has refused to yield, arguing that professors should be teaching more classes. (RELATED: Walker: University Profs Need To Work Harder)

Walker’s push to slash spending at U-Wisconsin has received the most press, but his push to alter tenure may have the biggest long-term implications. Until now, tenure for professors at the University of Wisconsin has been protected by statute (Wisconsin is the only state with such a law). Now, that protection has been eliminated, leaving it up to the school’s board of regents to decide whether professors have tenure.

Not only that, but tenure itself has been weakened so that it doesn’t offer the protections it once did. Previously, only “financial exigency” (an urgent budget shortfall) could justify the firing of a tenured professor. Now, tenured professors may also be laid off whenever it is “deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision regarding program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.”  (RELATED: Wisconsin Might Destroy Tenure For Professors)

Via: Daily Caller

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Drag a Hundred Dollar Bill through a School of Journalism

James Carville once shockingly demonstrated the left's disdain for the morals of the poor, saying, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find." In truth, you can buy whatever you want much more easily if you drag that bill through a School of Journalism.

CNS reports that George Soros has seeded such schools at the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin to create shock troops for the now shelved FCC plan to monitor (bully) the media into acting as even bigger megaphones for the administration and Democratic Party than they already are:

 Two schools were working with FCC on the project, according to Byron York of The Washington Examiner. The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy, were tasked by the FCC with coming up with criteria for what information is "critical" for Americans to have. The FCC study would have covered newspapers, websites, radio and television, according to The Washington Post.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison got a whopping $1,672,397 from Soros between 2000 and 2012. The university also offers OSI-sponsored grants, scholarships and fellowships. Friedland also heads Madison Commons, a liberal journalism group "powered by" the university's School of Journalism. Madison Commons, in turn, is a project of the university but supported in part by American University's J-Lab. AU, including its Cairo campus, has received $588,395 from OSF since 2008.

On top of the 1st Amendment problems with this proposal, the schools involved have strong ties to liberal billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations and have gotten more than $1.8 million from the organization since 2000.

The journalism programs at these schools have even more ties to Soros besides their funding, including faculty members writing for university-based publications allied with Soros-funded outlets.

The schools have collaborated on this project going back at least to 2012. Lewis A. Friedland, who was a "principle investigator" for the FCC on this project, also directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He gave a presentation at Annenberg in Feb. 2012, on "communication ecology." This was just four months before the schools presented their findings to the FCC.

Via: American Thinker
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Obama campaign shuts down campus, requires students’ personal info

President Barack Obama paid a campaign-related visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Thursday, drawing complaints from several professors who criticized the mass disruption to classes.

Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at UW, sent a letter to university administrators chiding them for renting central campus to the Obama campaign.

“It hardly seems appropriate to shut the central campus down for an entire day, closing offices and seriously disrupting our mission,” he wrote. “I have several colleagues who had scheduled exams for Thursday. Surely there were other venues that would pose less disturbance.”

Others were more concerned with the registration process for the event. To attend, students followed a link from the university website to the official Obama campaign website, and gave their names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Then they had to click a box that reads, “I’M IN!”

Donald Downs, a political science professor at UW, found this troubling.

“I’m all in favor of Obama coming to campus … but in order to go, you have to go through the campaign website and provide information, and you have to click a box that says ‘I’M IN!’” he said in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Am I in for the event or in for Obama? If you really want to go to this important event, at least for a short while you are associating yourself with the campaign.”

Brown said many of his colleagues — including those who plan to vote for the president — agreed with these criticisms.

Via: Free Republic

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