Apparently I am not the only desperate liberal blogger who wants to smear the GOP in their own words…about that grant to UW-Madison to study the sleep habits of fruit flies and mice. Just today Bruce Murphy in his column Murphy’s Law at UrbanMilwaukee.com wrote just a bit about Representative Robin Vos’ (R – Burlington) predilection with finding fault with the ways and means of research on campus.
“Of course I want research, but I want to have research done in a way that focuses on growing our economy, not on ancient mating habits of whatever,” Vos said at a press conference. “So we want to try to have priorities that are focused on growing our economy.”
Vos was referring to research on the sleep habits of fruit flies and mice by Chiara Cirelli and Giulio Tononi, two highly regarded UW-Madison professors in the department of psychiatry, whose research gained them a grant of $1.6 million in the first year and up to $7.7 million over five years from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. “We are trying to understand why we sleep, why we need to sleep,” Cirelli told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We have a lot of evidence already that the major mechanisms of the regulation of sleep are surprisingly similar in flies, in mice and in humans.”
Where have I heard that before…well I quoted it in comments in an earlier blog about UW-Madison research grants and the GOP in Wisconsin.
Mr. Murphy goes on to discuss Rep. Vos’ interest in mucking around with how the university works and what research it should consider undertaking. Quite frankly allowing politicians the chance to dictate much of anything that occurs in the classroom or research facilities would be a disaster for this world class university. But as Mr. Murphy continues:
If legislators are to set the criteria for what is acceptable research, what will be the message to wealthy alumni of UW-Madison like John and Tashia Morgridge, who just announced a $100 million grant to the university. They previously gave $100 million over several years to fund the Morgridge Institute for Research, which does a wide range of scientific research. Would they want to keep funding it if legislators were to decide what research is acceptable?
To state the obvious, the Morgridges haven’t given any money to the state legislature. But they have endowed UW faculty chairs in reading, computer science, economics, geoscience, business, pediatric nursing and health systems innovation, which seems to bespeak a tremendous faith in the broadest kind of academic learning. I doubt they’d be as interested in donating to a university that prioritizes only learning that helps grow the economy.
Vos’s comment arose from his concern that professors should be teaching more courses. That’s certainly an issue worth discussing, but attacking award-winning research is a poor way to address it. Moreover, if his goal is to get more bang for the state’s buck, the reality is that UW full professors earn about 15 percent or $18,000 less in annual salary than their peer group professors. They are “pretty much at the bottom of the Big Ten,” as University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank has noted.
The percent of the UW System paid by the state has been dropping for about three decades. The state now pays for less than a quarter of the budget. Meanwhile the UW-Madison endowment — and private donations — have become an ever bigger part of how the state’s flagship institution funds itself. Those donations could decline drastically if it became a university which could only conduct research related to growing the economy. And in the long run, such restrictions would badly damage the economy Vos wants to help.
Not content with underfunding public schools, technical schools and the UW System…the GOP is bound and determined to undermine higher education as well…all to the detriment of Wisconsin’s economy.
And let us not forget that the research into ‘growing our economy’ would be limited to research that is acceptable to Robin Vos’s political beliefs.
Research into growing our economy that would focus on, say, what would happen with a higher minimum wage or finding ways to provide health care for the working poor wouldn’t even make it out of the gate.
I’d think 90% of Wisconsinites would agree with Rep Vos on this one.
I would think first too, before making that claim.