Exactly one year ago, I spent a hot Friday evening beneath a tent on a field outside of Harvard Stadium explaining where Wisconsin is. There are two ways I could have avoided it. I could have skipped my five-year college reunion altogether. Or I could have chosen five years ago to become a doctor, lawyer, financier, consultant, or a chaser-of-rainbows at a tech startup in New York, San Francisco, Boston, or Washington. But instead I am a doctoral student in geography at the University of Wisconsin, which sums up to three unfamiliar life choices stacked atop each other in the eyes of the majority of the people who set off into adult life together with me from beneath the shady trees of Tercentenery Theater in June 2009. So I ended up perfecting my explanation of geography (maps, not tectonic plates) and Madison (about two and half hours northwest of Chicago, about the size of Hartford).
The class report which the Alumni Association had thoughtfully sent to me in the mail a few months before made a good companion volume to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which had been released at about the same time. What does it mean to “work at a firm”? I’m still not quite sure, but quite a few Harvard graduates confess to doing it. Most of the others, launching off on their careers as well-paid professionals, looked forward to life in one of the five or six cities which now make up the full list of acceptable places to settle down in a nation which, we are led to understand, is elsewhere carpeted uniformly by trailer parks and Fox News watchers. More than a tenth of Harvard seniors who are employed after graduating earn more than $90,000 in their first year on the job—a number nearly double the nation’s median household income—so at least they can get a good view of this region of undifferentiated strip malls from the windows of business class.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, which is a state that is perhaps somewhere near the Rocky Mountains according to more than one of my former classmates, the average assistant professor—that is, somebody who is around a decade into their career with an advanced degree—makes about $84,000. Yet from the state’s governing class, today we learn that this greedy bunch of platinum-podiumed moochers is a dire threat to the state’s financial solvency.
To say professors are “in it for the money” requires, at a minumum, a tortuous stretching of the terms “in it” or “money.” Nobody does this because they’re getting rich at it. Instead, academics have always been compensated in two invisible forms of currency: social prestige and job security. The UW System will do what it can to protect faculty paychecks from the brunt of these cuts. Where the colossal improvidence of Wisconsin’s Republicans becomes apparent is in their willingness to liquidate the invisible compensation paid out to professors in the public employ—compensation which costs the state nothing. By portraying professors as desk-snoozing duffers, and by shattering the certainty carried by tenure, the state legislature has squandered the equivalent of millions of dollars. For decades, Wisconsin has been able to attract superior faculty becaues of its reputation as a state dearly committed to its educational institutions. That reputation is now almost entirely undone, and it will not be easily rebuilt.
“This is an extremely dangerous proposal which will paint Wisconsin as a flyover state for future faculty,” says Noel Radomski in the Journal-Sentinel. One year ago, I was protesting fiercely against that concept, explaining to friends who earn in one month what I earn in a year that I feel very proud and humbled to be a part of one of the best examples of a very important American tradition: the public research university. I still feel that way—but if I were a member of the class of 2010, which is gathering this evening in that same tent, I would feel a little bit less sure of that.
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2015/05/29/846/