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Weekend Reading: We’re All Badgers Edition

February 25, 2011, 3:00 pm

By Jason B. Jones

Madison protest signAs everyone knows by now, last night the Wisconsin Assembly pulled a fast one, passing Governor Walker‘s so-called budget repair bill without the usual legislative procedures. This a day after everyone heard the tape of the governor discussing possible dirty tricks with a prank caller. While this might seem farcical, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The amount of misinformation and misundertanding about public employees, unions, and public employee unions is truly depressing. As a union president, it is news to me that we are impossible to fire. It’s news to me that we are, without exception, in favor of constantly higher taxes and expanding state government. It’s news to that I’m both overpaid and less productive than my colleagues at private universities. A long educational campaign is ahead, it seems. As a way to get started *now*, why not learn about the Month of Action to Defend Public Education in March?

Here are this week’s links, which all have a certain theme:

  • Many public employee pensions–such as the one in Wisconsin–are set up as deferred employee compensation: The fact is that all of the money going into these plans belongs to the workers because it is part of the compensation of the state workers. The fact is that the state workers negotiate their total compensation, which they then divvy up between cash wages, paid vacations, health insurance and, yes, pensions. Since the Wisconsin government workers collectively bargained for their compensation, all of the compensation they have bargained for is part of their pay and thus only the workers contribute to the pension plan. This is an indisputable fact. (via Forbes)
  • Speaking of pensions: What happened to all that deferred compensation? Ask WI pension administrators & Wall Street: Numerous state pension funds aren’t depleted because employees are contributing too little, as Walker contends . . . It’s because the financial crisis — caused in part by Wall Street pushing risky products and worsened by banks betting against their own clients — crushed the stock market, which lowered the value of pension fund assets.
  • At the New Faculty Majority’s blog, a report from Nancy McMahon, an adjunct at Madison: For those who want to portray Madison as a bunch of left-over hippies, wrong. Those occupying the Capitol weren’t born and most have little knowledge of the Vietnam War riots. (Also see this report from a visiting Californian, who notes more older folks.)
  • It’s always good to have “Some Basic Facts on State and Local Government Workers”. (Via the indispensable Christohper Newfield.)
  • Kris Olds has a great write-up from Madison, as well: n the end, however it turns out, and regardless of political standpoint, it is important for all people to realize the important role, and strongly felt views, and breathtaking energy, of Madison’s university students, and their organizations (e.g., the ASM, Badger Herald, Daily Cardinal, TAA) in engendering critically important discussion and debate here.

This week’s Wisconsin-themed video:

We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo.

Via BoingBoing, where they’ve gathered a bunch of great pics, too.

Remember: it’s not just WI: “Ballad of Shannon Jones” and “The ABCs of SB-5.” And apparently the new Ohio governor wants to create “charter universities”!

(Bonus management/employee-related video: “Disconfirmation.” Also, for Badger-related bonus video, see The Honey-Badger (NSFW, for sufficiently cursing-averse values of W.)

Have a great weekend! There are rallies in every state on Saturday to defend public services . . . why not go to one?

Photo by Flickr user awienick / Creative Commons licensed

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  • jffoster

    “There are rallies in every state on Saturday to defend public services . . . why not go to one?”

    When their rallies look more like college and university professors and less like the Ladies Garment Workers’ Union or the Teamsters, I might. (And I’m from a coal miner’s family so by no means anti union.)

    Be careful what you ask for, Poster Original. You might get it and we might go to a rally in support of the Governor and Legislature of Wisconsin (and Ohio) and against the demonstrators and demonstratresses who want to overturn the results of an election.

  • jffoster

    “There are rallies in every state on Saturday to defend public services . . . why not go to one?”

    When their rallies look more like college and university professors and less like the Ladies Garment Workers’ Union or the Teamsters, I might. (And I’m from a coal miner’s family so by no means anti union.)

    Be careful what you ask for, Poster Original. You might get it and we might go to a rally in support of the Governor and Legislature of Wisconsin (and Ohio) and against the demonstrators and demonstratresses who want to overturn the results of an election.

  • http://about.me/jbj Jason B. Jones

    If that fits your political bent, then by all means! Free speech and freedom of assembly are rights for all, of course.

  • sbrenneis

    This is just the kind of elitism the left gets accused of, when, in actuality, the undermining of the middle class that Walker is trying to ram through the Wisconsin legislature has an effect on a wide swath of Americans. That is, professors, students, labor and non-labor alike.

    Feel free to counter-demonstrate, jffoster, maybe you’ll find a better audience for your bias.

  • http://twitter.com/plcorbett Patrick L. Corbett

    I demonstrated for two days at the Capitol and have demonstrated for two weeks online (been sick). I find that “bias” exists everywhere, as we are all demonstrating for and acting in what we believe to be our personal, professional, and ethical interests. But like everyone, I would welcome jffoster to come down. These are very stirring, completely nonviolent protests. There is a sense of an awakened bear in Madison right now, and all eyes have fallen on Walker as the foolish boy who keeps whacking it in the head with a stick yelling at it to go away. His ideological agenda has forced hundreds of thousands of everyday, honestly hard-working families into a position that they must fight for their livelihoods, and now he is surprised that they are doing just that.

    This is not about economics (every national media outlet recognizes that), or union concessions (every single one has been given willingly), or local government control (they have repudiated Walker’s position), or overturning an election (most Wisconsites are now firmly against Walker on this issue). This is about demonizing state workers (including teachers) as lazy and entitled parasites that suck resources from “hard working” Wisconsinites. As someone myself who firmly believes that unions need to be reformed, I find it ironic that Walker’s position is so radical and misguided that I am openly fighting for my unionized colleagues and peers. I do this because I recognize that meaningful reform won’t happen by dropping a Daisycutter right into the institution that gives these workers a voice.

    But as I said, these are peaceful democratic protests where all are welcomed, even opposing voices. Seeing 75,000 people gathered in peaceful protest at the state capitol in a small city is an exercise in civic rhetoric that not everyone get to see in their lifetime. It draws attention to the merits and issues of how we are governed and how we choose to voice our interests (or “biases”) when faced with the malfeasance of Walker’s blatant power grab for his campaign backers. I firmly believe that the more eyes and ears that are attuned to the issues that have created these workers’ rights protests in Wisconsin, the sooner we will see responsible and meaningful change.

  • drjeff

    Have any of you discussed this with your neighbors? I live more or less in a large city, by no means in suburbia, but not in an “in-town hipster” area, either. My neighbors are more or less “regular people” (excepting a significant percentage of university faculty and staff) and view the protesters, pretty uniformly, as acting like spoiled brats, and say that all the things they’re protesting against have already happened to them.

    So, they’re not as sympathetic to this protest as, say, Northern white folks were to Dr. King. On the contrary, they view the protesters as trying to get more tax money from people who have themselves been cut back already, so they don’t have to accept cutbacks themselves, like everyone else (fatcats excepted) is.

    All the rational explanations in the world will not help if the protesters are viewed unsympathetically. Did you pay attention at the end of The Social Network? A lawyer tells him he’ll have to settle, because a jury would look at him unsympathetically, regardless of the strength of his argument.

    I can’t see how this will end well unless or until the protests become a lot more photogenic.

  • RWEJD

    Tablets will come as a result of large-scale deployment driven by campus CIO’s. Just think about the economies brought: textbooks; meal and room information; college newspaper; teaching/learning apps (including games, simulations, assessments), etc. etc. The economies of scale are baked in – what’s missing is content. Also, look for phones to eventually replace tablets, because flexible plastic ePaper substrates are not just beginning to appear – i.e. imagine a phone that plugs into a folding piece of ePaper. There are already industrial design prototypes of this kind of device from Sony. btw, content is now a commodity; what you wrap around the content is what people are going to pay for.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/cshunt312 Courtney Hunt

    Folks may be interested in the results of a related poll (n = 550+) I recently conducted on people’s reading “device” preferences (paper or digital). Here’s a link to the blog post that contains the results (including 25 pages of comments):

    http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsBookPollFinal

  • electronicmuse

    Always looking for a mechanistic way out . . . 

    Study!

  • http://twitter.com/AmerJustice American Justice

    It’s hard enough to get students to read and this would make it easier? High impact experiences help get students to read. Let’s not let industry and government dumb them down further.

  • Ranger211

    Academic activity and assessment– and therefore grades, degrees, and future earning potential (i.e., influence)– are becoming defined by the toys: who can afford and know how to use them. Toys=access=data=power. If you think that’s not true, you haven’t been in a college classroom and observed the palpable disdain exuded by those with the toys toward those (including teachers) without. Nor the confusion and frustration from the toyless who sense, rightly, that they’re at a disadvantage and already “behind”. Nor the unease of educators who are knowledgeable and effective FTF teachers, but being supplanted by technocrats.

  • emschles

    Adding notes and tracking those notes in digital books ….http://youtu.be/uN03s33e6zM

  • electronicmuse

    The disdain is created by marketers, because they have something to sell. Have you seen the one where a foolish-looking individual is chided for being “the last to know?” ‘Course, it’s about the timing of a “flash mob,” and nobody defined what the benefit of “knowing” about this would be, but evidently “to be in the know” is the all-important thing. All the people in the ad surrounding this “ignoramus” give him the glare . . . 

    Phooey!

  • bbaylis

    What high impact experiences are your proposing? Are you saying reading itself is a high impact experience? For you it might be. For many of these students, it isn’t.

    Is it better to read romance novels and pulp fiction because they are “real books” or Aristotle, Plato and Consfuscious on a kindle?

    WHy is it easier to get many students interested in Kindles? It fits more closely with their experiences. They don’t have real books in their homes and their experiences with books in primary and secondary schools were not memorable in a good sense. Mike Rose in his autobiographic book, “Lives on teh Boundary” admitted that when he got to college, he didn’t read because he didn’t know how to read. He had to be tuaght how to read. He wasn’t saying that didn’t understand the words, he was saying that he didn’t know how to extract ideas from those words. He learned Shakespeare from an instructor who prepared study guides related to every reading, for which students had to write out answers nad turn in  At the end of the semester, Mr. Rose found that not only did he learn Shakespeare, he learned how to prepare study guides for himself, in other words, he learned how to read. Mr. Rose also admitted that not every student had the same experience or found the same joy in reading that he had found.

    Over two centuries ago, Conufscious said, “I hear, I forget; I see I remember; I do, I know.  In modern life, we could change this quote to “I read or hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do , I know. The primary and secondary teachers are playing to the strengths of the students, and slowly helping them overcome their weaknesses. They are not focusing on thei studnets’  weaknesses and losing them along the way. THe problem may be that the students are not as far as long the path as we would like them to be.

    I have always said that if I have accepted a student into the college, I have a responsiblity to assess that student fairly and if he or she doesn’t meet the standards, the college, i.e., me, has a responsibility to help that student develop the knowledge and skills necessary to meet the standards. I used that same philosophy when I hired faculty. Assessment and development are two sides of the same coin.

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.

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