UW Deal Shows University Radicals Will Do Anything to Preserve DEI Indoctrination
The University of Wisconsin’s top brass is more interested in promoting far-left ideology than teachers’ welfare or student success
If last week taught us anything, it’s that University of Wisconsin bigwigs will do anything to protect their bigoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies—and conservatives must work harder in 2024 to defeat them.
On Dec. 13, the UW board of regents struck a lopsided deal with the state’s Republican-controlled legislature handing professors a 6 percent pay raise and $230 million to the university system to pay for construction projects—totaling over $800 million from taxpayers. That’s after rejecting the initial deal in a 9–8 vote on Dec. 9, with one regent sermonizing that his “personal faith guides me to believe in equity, diversity and inclusion.”
What did Republicans get for this largesse? A temporary cap on hiring new DEI administrators, while 42 more DEI positions will be renamed and realigned “to focus more directly on academic and student success” over the next two years.
The number of DEI jobs actually cut: Zilch. Nada. Zero.
Yet even that was too far for Democrat Gov. Tony Evers, who criticized legislative Republicans for their “political tantrums, ultimatums, and threats of retribution” while vowing to preserve DEI programs.
That’s no surprise given Evers’ fealty to the far-left, un-American ideology spread by many of the 35,000 UW professors he’s sworn to reward with pay hikes.
UW professors already earn $174,000 per year on average—the fifth-highest in the nation and more than 2.5 times the median Wisconsin household income. Yet everyday Wisconsiners are watching their incomes erode under Bidenflation while housing, food, and utility bills skyrocket.
And many of these professors support the Hamas terrorists responsible for butchering 1,300 unarmed Israelis on Oct. 7, with UW Madison greenlighting pro-Hamas student events in which protesters waved Palestinian flags and called terrorists “our comrades in arms.”
This kind of radicalism is only encouraged by UW Madison’s army of DEI administrators, whom Evers and the board of regents aim to reward with this deal.
No Room for Free Speech
Ryan Owens, a professor of political science at UW Madison, called it “a bit like moving the chairs around on the Titanic’s deck.”
“Higher education across the country is dominated by groupthink and really in need of some enhanced diversity,” Owens told Restoration News. “This deal points in that direction, but it’s not nearly as much as is necessary at this point.”
Owens pointed out that the deal requires UW to require incoming students to complete First Amendment module reinforcing the importance of free speech, a small start that may encourage genuine diversity of thought on campus. “This was a good first step and I’ll be interested to see whether the legislature can move forward on anything more structural,” he said.
But don’t expect elected Democrats to support any kind of real change on campus.
Rep. Shelia Stubbs (D–77), who represents Madison in the State Assembly, attacked even these meager concessions. “Our students deserve better than to have their education negotiated with by Republican legislators to continue their attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion,” she blasted on X (formerly Twitter). “Voting in alignment with Wisconsin values means voting to protect DEI,” she continued, adding:
As the Representative for UW-Madison, our flagship university, I must insist that we protect and preserve DEI initiatives as well as keep our promises of pay raises and funding for the Engineering building [emphasis added].
And many in the left-leaning media were similarly quick to pounce on legislators for putting ideology over faculty pay, calling it a “DEI-cuts-for-cash deal.”
Yet the Left was totally silent on Stubbs and other Democrats sacrificing those same pay hikes to preserve their racist agenda. Isn’t that putting ideology over people?
Abolishing the Left’s cancerous indoctrination programs will take a far bigger Republican majority in the Wisconsin legislature in 2024. Voters have the power to unshackle their schools next November—if they don’t take it, expect things to only get worse.
