Demonstrators protest Gov. Scott Walker’s budget cuts at meeting of UW Regents
As many as 100 demonstrators opposed to Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget cuts to the University of Wisconsin rallied at a UW Board of Regents meeting in Madison on Friday.
Students, labor activists carrying signs reading “No cuts, no layoffs, no privatization” and shouting “Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Walker’s cuts have got to go,” gathered outside the Regents’ meeting room at Union South, as captured in a video posted by the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association on its Facebook page.
The rally was organized by AFSCME, participants said.
Walker’s proposed budget would cut $300 million for the University of Wisconsin over two years. Those largest-ever cuts would leave UW-Madison with a $91 million shortfall next year, prompting likely layoffs, Chancellor Rebecca Blank told Regents on Thursday.
Many regents’ first public comments on the proposed budget cuts focused on the need for collaborative, non-emotional discussion. Regent Margaret Farrow said later that protests by UW-Milwaukee students was the kind of emotional rhetoric she is concerned not overtake deliberations.
On Friday, some Regents stopped and talked with protesters as they entered Varsity Hall; others brushed by without accepting leaflets from demonstrators, said Joe Brusky, an organizer for Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association.
About 30 protestors were allowed to enter the meeting, where they continued to show their protest signs in silence, Brusky said. Security personnel closed the doors to the meeting room while there were still empty seats, leaving some demonstrators locked outside, he said.
Sergio Gonzalez, a graduate student and project assistant at UW-Madison, said that students and faculty are concerned not only about budget cuts, but by the reorganization of the UW System under a public authority governed by the Regents.
“The public authority will not be accountable to the Legislature,” said Gonzalez, a member of the Teaching Assistants Association. “Over 100 years of democratic control will be handed off to a Board of Regents appointed by the governor.”
With tuition widely expected to rise under the new university structure, Gonzalez said, many fear UW will no longer be open to students like him, the first in their families to attend college.
“We were there to remind the Regents of their obligation to students and the rest of the state,” he said.
