The UW Board of Regents mess produced some clear winners and losers against a chaotic backdrop of flip-flopping votes and a feeble governor.
The Regents astonishingly voted on Saturday, 9-8, to thumb their noses at $800 million in funding for the University of Wisconsin, a new engineering building, other needed capital projects, raises for 34,000 employees and support for guaranteed admission for top-ranked Wisconsin high school students… all because they didn’t want to freeze DEI and shift some DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) folks to work with all students. The horrors!
Then, on Wednesday, in a sudden about-face, three Regents – Amy Bogost, Karen Walsh and Jennifer Staton, all Evers’ appointees – switched their votes, passing the compromise plan, which was crafted by Republicans in the state Legislature (namely Speaker Robin Vos) and UW System President Jay Rothman.
Let’s start with the losers.
Tony Evers
Wisconsin’s governor has never looked weaker. First, he became the object of mockery for appropriating the name of a dead baseball legend. Now, he swings at the Regents’ ball and whiffs. Evers never got on the right side of the compromise plan. He made the crucial mistake of coming out loud and clear in support of the Regents’ Saturday vote to kill the plan.
That means the supposed education governor just gave Republicans a pile of ads, reminding people who and what he was willing to sacrifice at the altar of DEI. Caught apparently flat-footed when his own appointed Regents started to flip, Evers issued not one, but two, word salad press releases (Britt was working hard that night) that gaslit Republicans in the Legislature.
If you sorted through all of the obfuscating nastiness, it became clear the governor was still on the wrong side of it all, disagreeing with a plan that even some of his OWN APPOINTEES eventually embraced.
It’s unclear what Evers was doing behind the scenes, but he’s never been more flat-footed in his public response. Seriously, governor, you really wanted to position AGAINST 34,000 working and middle-class state workers getting raises during an era of inflation and AGAINST top Wisconsin kids being guaranteed a seat in state schools??
And don’t get us started on that engineering building…
Either narrative is bad for Evers. Either he was trying to whip votes to kill the plan behind the scenes, and he failed to do so (we were told by a well-placed source that two of the “no vote” Regents were believed to be initially for the plan until they took a five-minute break on Saturday and came back against it….) Or, he didn’t try to exercise any influence, rendering him a bit player on an important debate. It’s hard to imagine a Tommy Thompson-style governor losing this one.
Jill Underly
Underly never got on the right side of this either. First, she missed the Saturday vote. It later turned out she was on a European vacation. The Regents’ meetings were by Zoom. She couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe to dial in? Then, bizarrely, on Wednesday, she arrogantly asked the entire state to wait for an answer until she could come back to vote. Again, she couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe that had working Internet.
Her office wouldn’t say which country she was visiting, claiming she had inconsistent internet. Again, they don’t have working Internet in Europe? What? The ridiculousness of it all was exposed when Regent Amy Bogost dialed in from… Thailand.
Was the Underly caper a last-ditch effort by Evers to scrounge up another vote to kill the plan? Or was it just an attempt by her to look like she wasn’t eschewing an important vote by lollygagging around Europe? We will never know.
DEI
Those bureaucrats with their six-figure salaries are going to still be getting their six-figure salaries, and some of them just have to help all students. The horrors! But the fact is that the ideology of division in the name of inclusion took a big hit.
We obviously support helping more underrepresented folks of all backgrounds, including racial minorities, get into the UW System and succeed there and in the workforce. However, this plan will help do that more than some DEI administrator with a corner office. The difference is how you get there. Expanding school choice, strengthening families, a strong economy, lowering the costs of higher education – these are all things that will help boost more people into college.
Shifting the UW more toward workforce development will help them succeed in the workforce and get something for all that debt. In other words, there are practical ways to boost underrepresented folks without acronym-filled titles that no one can fully define.
DEI was exposed as, in some cases, window dressing. Workforce development won the arm wrestle.
Political Appointees Decrying Politics
Regents John W. Miller and Dana Wachs get the hypocrisy prize. Both had the nerve to whine about the fact the situation was so politicized when both are…. political appointees of Evers.
In fact, Miller is one of the state’s largest Democratic political donors and Wachs is a former…politician. So spare us your lectures on politics, guys. Miller actually accused the legislature of bringing forth the plan to make a political statement in a statement that bashed the Legislature.
While some of the Regents’ opposition seemed heartfelt, these guys seemed like they were just trying to score against the GOP, at the expense of the state’s universities. Both are Tony Evers’ donors and appointees by the way. But they hate politics! Spare us.
Crazy Democratic Legislators
Crazy Democratic legislators rushed over each other to gloat and applaud their organizing efforts and initial success at getting Regents to reject $800 million to help students. One even called the plan “racist” (5,200 of the staff members initially denied raises are people of color, by the way).
ORGANIZING WORKS 👏🏼 https://t.co/gVpQg4Cd1D
— Rep. Lee Snodgrass (@RepSnodgrass) December 9, 2023
Thank you to the UW Board of Regents for rejecting the GOP’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
To everyone who made your voices heard in this process – it mattered! pic.twitter.com/ewtYdTl7fG
— Representative Greta Neubauer (@RepGreta) December 10, 2023
In the end, they were left standing alone in the rain, shrieking to a party that had already moved on.
Mixed
The Regents Who Flipped
Unlike Evers and Underly, the Flipping Three eventually got on the right side of it all, but why didn’t they figure it out on Saturday? The explanations of Amy Bogost and Karen Walsh – something about needing more time to deliberate or understand the topic – were silly. Why are Regents taking votes if they don’t feel they’ve been properly briefed on them? The third Regent, a student, switched and voted for the plan after trashing Robin Vos in over-the-top tones.
Winners
Robin Vos
Masterful play, Speaker Vos. The Assembly Speaker out-maneuvered Evers and managed to get a bunch of Evers’ appointees to freeze DEI. No small feat.
We repeat. Robin Vos got a bunch of Evers’ appointees to freeze DEI.
He didn’t blink. They did. Vos doesn’t get enough credit for his master chess-playing among some corners of the right. It’s about time he did.
"I'm glad they approved the compromise tonight despite reported last-minute lobbying by Gov Evers to scuttle the deal. We finally have turned the corner and gotten real reforms enacted. Republicans know this is just the first step in what will be our continuing efforts to…
— Robin Vos (@repvos) December 14, 2023
Vos managed to say he wasn’t eliminating DEI while eliminating DEI… he just did it over time by freezing DEI, including vacancies. So it will happen by attrition.
Some would have preferred if he took a sledgehammer to the bureaucracy and administrative bloat instead of a scalpel, but the fact is he has to deal with a divided government.
The Regents Who Got it Right the First Time
The Regents who got it right the first time, including some Evers’ appointees, deserve kudos.
They are three Scott Walker appointees among them: Bob Atwell, Mike Jones, and Cris Peterson. Perhaps more notable – because it takes more courage to buck your own side’s governor – Evers’ appointees Ashok Rai, Kyle Weatherly, Héctor Colón, and Jim Kreuser, as well as Wisconsin Technical College System Board President Mark Tyler, were supporters of the plan.
The Chancellors
Three chancellors, including Mark Mone at UWM, argued for the compromise plan saying it was needed for the future health of their institutions. In so doing, they showed pragmatic leadership, putting the needs of students and their campuses before ideology. Good job.
Jay Rothman
Along with Vos, he helped engineer this deal and he took a lot of unfair heat over it. The guy isn’t a radical flame-thrower, and that’s a good thing. He arguably got more than he gave. People need to give Rothman a break (he didn’t say what the Daily Cardinal said he said a couple weeks ago, either).
The Students
High-performing Wisconsin high school students will likely now be guaranteed acceptance into UW schools, which have increasingly turned to out-of-state and out-of-country students as cash cows to plug their budget holes.
Students will get a new engineering building and $32 million will go to help prepare them for the workforce. These things will help students of all races.
UW Staff
The 34,000 state workers were the hackeysack in this game among politicians and their appointees. And that sucks. However, in the end, they’re getting the raise. Many are NOT highly paid, and they’ve had years of meager and sometimes no raises.
UW Student Journalists
Student journalists at the Daily Cardinal and Badger Herald did a great job keeping the public informed in their news coverage. They had some of the most thorough coverage.
UW Donors
As reported by the Biztimes, UW donors applied pressure to get the deal done. As quoted in the article, “A lot of donors are going to take their money elsewhere if this isn’t turned around. I know a number of them. They said, ‘well, then we’re going to have to go somewhere else, because that’s an indication that they don’t want the building or want our money.’ It’s a big problem. A very big problem.”
Money talks when money walks.
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