Let’s See if UW Professors Have Integrity

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial piece today pointing out that Pol Pot Doyle has given the profs the right to organize. The question is, will they do it?

“f some professors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison get their way, the first thing a newly minted PhD will learn about is not research or teaching—but union dues. This summer Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Jim Doyle gave the school’s professors the right to unionize. Not all want to, so this fall the faculty lounges are livelier than usual.

Organized labor has already wreaked havoc on the nation’s K-12 public-school system, and it’s often thought this could never happen to a higher education system that is the envy of the world. But over the past 10 years or so, unions have become an increasingly common presence at colleges and universities. More than 375,000 faculty and graduate students are members of a collective bargaining unit, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. That’s about a third of the total, and a 24% increase in the past decade.

Thanks to unionization provisions Gov. Doyle put into Wisconsin’s biennial budget, things are likely to get worse. There were three important elements in the initiative.” [...]

Go and read the whole thing if you’d like but it is comforting to know a few of the profs understand how devestating a union would be.

[...]“John Witte, an education scholar at the school, says he would quit if the faculty organize. He tells us it would be “demoralizing to see my hard work rewarded with the same pay as someone who doesn’t do hard work.” Unionization, he says, would be “devastating to the university.” Others worry that the campus’s pervasive atmosphere of political correctness will sway much of the faculty to vote for unionization.

In 2008, the American Federation of Teachers announced a joint campaign with the American Association of University Professors to unionize more public universities. “We don’t have a number in mind,” Sandra Schroeder, chairman of the AFT’s higher education council, said, but it’s “as many as we possibly can.” If UW Madison goes, expect more former free-thinkers to go over to the union mind set.”

Congratulations to Prof. Witte; he’s got it exactly right. Whatever a Sandra Schroeder is, she’s got it wrong and history proves it.