Scott Walker: Attempt to Gut UW Mission Was A ‘Mistake Someone Made’
After being blasted for attempting to take out key parts of the University of Wisconsin mission statement, Republican governor Scott Walker said he never intended to change their mission, and that a confused staffer made the changes.
According to Talking Points Memo, the governor’s office had sent instructions to the Legislative Reference Bureau of Wisconsin to rewrite the Wisconsin Idea, the mission statement of the state university that articulates the school’s policy goals and established in 1904. The rewrite Walker’s team sent in proposed to add a phrase that said the school would promote “workforce readiness,” but cut out chunks of language related to “extending knowledge, searching for truth and improving the human condition” via teaching, research, and public service.
Though the emails, dating from December 30th, indicated that Walker wanted to broadly change the Wisconsin Idea (as well as cut its funding by $300 million over two years), Walker today said that it was never his intention to make that change, blaming anonymous staffers for misinterpreting his request to add “career readiness” to the Wisconsin Idea and instead proposing to eliminate everything else.
“To me, in the end, it was a confusion out there, a mistake someone made,” Walker, who has a history of fighting teachers’ unions in Wisconsin, said in a statement. “What we wanted was to keep it simple and not make changes other than to add this item about workforce and career development.”
The news about the proposed changes was met with outrage, with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel pointing out numerous instances when university officials flagged the statements as troubling, only to be rebuffed by the governor’s office.
“He blamed somebody else. To me, there’s no integrity there. I’ll leave it to somebody else to decide if there’s a lie in there,” Sen. Janet Bewley told the Journal-Sentinel.
[Talking Points Memo]
[Image via Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons]
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