Calling all UW-Madison Alums

The UW-Madison Alumni Association is trying to get the attention of the more than 130,000 UW alums living in Wisconsin with a new website. You can find it here. The website is an attempt to get alumni to help oppose further cuts to the university. It has an online petition to be sent to Governor Doyle, Assembly Speaker John Gard, and Senate President Alan Lasee. (However, according to an online poll on Rep. Pocan's blog, the letter should be addressed to the guy really running the show in the Assembly, Rep. Scott Jensen)

A more active role for the alumni is a critical need for the UW. The legislature has no problem slicing more and more state support for the UW out of the state budget every year even though they claim to be "pro-jobs". If they really wanted to generate more jobs, they would invest more and more into a system that impacts the Wisconsin economy by $4.7 billion, and that is just the Madison campus! Unfortunately, only 14 percent of the 2004–2005 UW-Madison budget comes from state tax dollars. Only a decade ago, this number was about 25 percent. That's a major drop in only ten years.

And yes, the governor did take a major chunk out one year but the deficit handed to him by the Republicans left him little choice. Whacking money out of the UW budget started long before Governor Doyle got there and he is trying to add it back now that he has gotten the state budget on its way to recovery.

So sign the petition if you are one of the thousands of alumni that owe your career to the excellent university we are so lucky to have here. Either that, or expect a lot more phone calls from the UW to raise money directly from alumni. Alumni should give back, but the entire state benefits from the UW system and the state should support it better than it does now.