Here I go again, sending a letter to the editor of my local newspaper in response to what I see as a gross mischaracterization of what goes on at UW-Madison. The column that set me off was here. Tell me if you think my response was off base:

In his Feb. 25, 2009 column, "Make public workers share the pain," Mike Ivey wrote, "head down to the UW-Madison campus, GEF II or the City-County Building, and it's like the Great Recession isn't happening. The conferences, meetings, long lunches and paid sabbaticals go on as usual." He went on to suggest that public employees reduce their supposedly extravagant salaries to balance the state budget. This is not reporting; this is a blanket accusation of waste and fraud based on stereotype and distortion. As a UW-Madison professor myself, I can only speak for my particular state-connected institution, but I would like to remind my fellow Cap Times readers that the state funds less than 20% of the costs of UW-Madison, that our full faculty salaries are $13,500 below the median for our 12-campus peer group (including neighboring state universities), and that the overall UW faculty headcount has declined every year since 2004. Yet in 2008 we admitted over 200 more freshmen than we did in 2004. In short, we are already doing more with less. If Mr. Ivey wishes to suggest that state spending should be further cut in tough economic times, then we his readers can debate whether that is wise given the increased demand for state services (especially health care and education) as the economy slows. Or if Mr. Ivey feels that a progressive tax increase should be levied so that all Wisconsin residents making above a certain income (not just public employees) should pay more to help balance the budget, then we can debate what qualifies as "affluent." But I do not expect to see my work and that of my fellow state-connected employees, especially those at UW-Madison, derided and dismissed as wasteful and fradulent without evidence in the newspaper that claims to be my "progressive voice."

Sources:
http://www.wisc.edu/about/facts/budget.php#budgetrevenue
http://apa.wisc.edu/Diversity/FacStaff_GenderEthnic_200708_MH.pdf
http://www.news.wisc.edu/16048
http://www.news.wisc.edu/15893
http://www.news.wisc.edu/10196

Because people liked my Facebook cowboy hat, here by popular demand is the Alternate Universe Greg With Long Jerry Garcia Hair.

My previous note, with the lovely Obama-like posterized rendition of my face, is unavailable because the UW Madison university-wide file storage space, MyWebSpace, has gone down as of Friday morning and won't be back up until Sunday. A two-day outage of a such a service might not seem like a big deal to an outside observer, but let me put it in context: I have stored dozens if not hundreds of supplementary class files for a 400-person introductory mass communication course on MyWebSpace, intended to be used as students complete writing assignments. The first of three big writing assignment that my students are completing this semester is due in section next week; this means that most of them probably budgeted time over the weekend to work on it. A two-day outage of the file server over the weekend thus comes at the worst possible time for my 400 students.

A bit of background: I began moving files to MyWebSpace in order to gain more control and flexibility about how and when they were delivered, rather than relying on library "electronic reserves" schemes or on my department's own web server (which has been subject to its own complicated technical and administrative difficulties over the last semester).

None of these three scales — the departmental IT resources, the library IT resources, or the university IT resources — has proven reslient enough for my needs. (I know that servers fail and hard drives die, but I expect such critical resources to have nearly-instant backups or mirrors at the ready.) It seems that my next option is to either scale down — say, repurposing an old Mac as a personal file server for my classroom needs — or to scale up — moving items to Google's domain, for example. Either way, the department and the university lose the opportunity to "brand" the eductional resources produced and distributed under their institutional umbrella.

"Hope" was already taken.

(See Obamicon.me)