esta pratt-kielley

By Esta Pratt-Kielley

MADISON, Wis.— Walking down Williamson Street on the East Side of Madison, where many University of Wisconsin-Madison students never venture, it would be difficult to find the Madison InfoShop if you were not looking for it.

Displaced from campus and hidden in the basement of Nature’s Bakery, a concealed world of activism lingers. What was once a university-funded student organization is now a donation-funded InfoShop run by volunteers.

Although not occupying Bascom Hill like the anti-war student activists of the late 1960s, the InfoShop is still very much alive. And perhaps serves as a reflection of the broader systematic changes that have moved the activists underground and out of the public eye.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison once was a campus deeply rooted in the Wisconsin idea, a concept of extending the arm of the university to the broader public and upholding a democracy that benefits all. A plaque placed in Bascom Hall in 1915 to commemorate the mission of “fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found” represented an administration and student body open to new ideas and alternative expressions. Now, with the increasing privatization of the University, active voices, especially student voices, perpetually suffer.

The most blatant example of this is the decreased state funding since the University’s founding to today where state funding accounts for a sixth of what it was in 1848.  According to the Madison Budget Office 2012-13 data, only 16.8 percent of the university is funded by state taxes.

When state funding decreases, other sources of revenue need to pick up the slack. This falls on the shoulders of students. According to the Madison Budget Office, funding from gifts or grants is now greater than state funding, while student tuition funding is essentially equal to state funding.

Not only are students paying more, but they are working more. Students who work and have a tough workload may want to be involved, but simply do not have the time given these financial demands.

Madison Mayor Paul Soglin said that the UW should not be called a public university given how little money the state funds. He spoke to his fear of privatization of the university and of a generation of students who are “slaves to their loans.”

Long-time activist and UW alum, David Williams, 63, said that the UW then was “totally different than UW now.” Starting school at UW-Madison in 1968, he studied history and liberal arts, which accounted for most of the university at the time. Since then, Williams said he has seen the university transform in to an elite, corporate university where students go to get a practical degree that will get them a job.

Soglin asserted, “The purpose of a university education is not to train people for jobs. The purpose of an education is to learn to think.”

What inherently made Madison a place for social and political activism rooted deep in the state’s history has shifted focus to a generation of students burdened by debt and unprepared for the wok force. According to a Harvard “Pathways to Prosperity Project” study in 2011, U.S. employers are increasingly seeing students graduate unequipped to survive in the 21st century workforce. Specifically, they are “deficient” in skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and communication.

The envisioned role of the university in its founding was to foster creative, critical individuals who by definition are more likely to question the norms in society.

“Because of an absence of activism, the university community has suffered. And it’s occurred over the last couple of decades as it’s become a more private institution,” Soglin said. “Look at all the bad results: cost of education to your generation, not to mention the quality of education.”

An increasingly corporate university shifts the focus from students to the corporations and private interests that give money to the university.

This can be seen in many instances since the early 1990s of allocating of student segregated fees. Student organizations have been systematically defunded and the radical, activist groups that presented alternative viewpoints have been consistently stifled.

Madison activist and former UW student, Tina Treviño-Murphy, 23, discussed the defunding of student groups that she was a part of and the shift from funding student groups to funding student services.

In the Board of Regents v. Southworth lawsuit that was filed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996, often referred to as the Southworth case, a student sued the university in protest of his segregated fees funding political and ideological groups that he did not agree with. The case resulted in the Supreme Court upholding the university’s allocation of segregated fees as long as they are viewpoint neutral when hearing funding requests.

While this seemed to be effective at first, it eventually led to stricter requirements for student groups to be eligible for funding, shifting the focus to funding student services that benefit all students, not just certain groups.

Madison College economics and environmental studies professor and Madison activist John Peck, 48, is an active volunteer and organizer at the InfoShop. He said after coming to graduate school at UW in 1992, he has seen the organization systematically defunded.

Peck described a similar case to Southworth where a conservative student group sued the university on basis of its funding of “radical” student groups. The InfoShop, formerly known as the UW Greens, produces “disorientation manuals” every year for incoming students to get an “alternative” history of the University along with highlighting activist opportunities throughout the campus and city. Peck had to go to the justice department for trial and the board of regents used the disorientation manuals as “proof” that the organization should not be funded through the university.

The case was successful and now the InfoShop lives underground on Williamson Street. Campus activism today is not gone, however there is much less public resistance to authority and intake of alternative messages on the UW-Madison campus today.

David Williams reflected on his time at UW and how he sees student activism now. “I think that we even have less leverage over the UW than we did in my time. At least when we threatened to shut it down, they had to listen to us and make concessions,” Williams said. “Now they are not confronted with that threat. They have the student body that they want: bright, hard-working, but fairly compliant.”