The Milwaukee Post

8 • Milwaukee County Post • January 27, 2017 OPINION The University of Wisconsin System is not strapped for cash and does not need more public money. Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators have done a world of good in this state but they have made almost no progress in reining in the bloated mon- ster that is the UW budget. Walker is pro- posing a tuition cut to be paid for by a big increase in state funding and he's wrong about it. The university system doesn't need more money and proves it every day. They really proved it up at UW-Oshkosh. The System itself is suing after learning that the former chancellor and other leaders at UW-Oshkosh took at least $42 million in university money and used it to finance a slew of private projects in the Oshkosh area. That's against the law. But it was going on for years and not one of the 67,000,000 bureaucrats who work for the UW System caught it. In fact, it doesn't look like any of it would have come to light had a former Oshkosh baseball coach not started blowing the whistle on one of the projects. When you are short of money, you gener- ally don't allow $42 million to go out the door. And that's the point. They're not short of money. They, in fact, have too much of it. The Oshkosh scandal comes only a couple of years after we learned that many individual UW chancellors were sitting on their own huge piles of "unallocated" money. The real term for that is slush fund. The universities had so much loot that they literally couldn't spend it all and this left each chancellor with a big stash of cash to spend on whatever they felt like. It was that revelation that led to a bipartisan tuition freeze a couple of years ago. There is no evidence things have gotten any better. A week doesn't go by without learning about another obnoxious wasting of university money on some loony course or program. UW-Madison is teaching about the evil of "whiteness" while UW-Parkside is cutting up panties and turning them into paper to combat rape (subject of an earlier column). Admittedly these are nickels and dimes but they are the loose change we hear about and can only exist if there is a culture of overspending that doesn't reject any money-spending proposal as too stupid. Back to Oshkosh. According to the allega- tions in the lawsuit, former Chancellor Richard Wells and Vice Chancellor Thomas Sonnleitner used university money to finance a number of projects including a Best Western hotel in Oshkosh and a pair of agriculture "biodigesters." I'm pretty sure a biodigester is the thing that taxes our Wisconsin tax dollars and chews them up to the point that we are still a tax hell and makes all the old people retire to low-tax states. One of the projects was the big sports complex built near campus, a project the public was inaccurately told was being pri- vately funded. The spending went on for years. Years! What kind of internal controls are in place at Van Hise Hall, the UW System Ivory Tower in Madison, that all of this money could be spent in direct violation of the law without anyone speaking up about it? The answer is there were no internal controls. The likeliest explanation is that many administrators knew about it and did noth- ing. Almost all of the projects came in the form of loans that are either partially out- standing or fulfilled. It is astonishing that these payments did not raise any red flags. It is, in fact, a scandal. Through most of this the president of the UW System has been a coat hanger named Ray Cross. His main job, so far as one can tell, is to stand up and cry about needing more money. That must be his main job because I've never seen him doing any other job. He certainly isn't doing anything to stop rogue chancellors from spending 42 million university dollars from being spent on Best Western hotels and biodigesters. He hasn't done anything to stop the outrageous liberal ideologizing masquerading as classes. He's done nothing to control costs by reducing the enormous bureaucracies at the campus- es and the system itself. Cross' performance indicates that Walker and the Republicans tolerate incompetence and do not demand results and accountabil- ity. Wonder why Trump is so refreshing for many of us? You think he'd keep an empty suit like Ray Cross around? Here's the core of the problem: The uni- versity is controlled by the Board of Regents, a body now under the control by appointees of Governor Walker. Many of these regents are fine people. But they have done nothing to grab control of this Orca- like bureaucracy. They pat Cross on the back for a job well done when he isn't doing his job. Like many local school board members, they have become co-opted and now think of themselves as the university itself rather than the representative of the taxpayers who own the university. UW-Madison keeps sliding in those rank- ings of best American universities. None of the other campuses make the list. A strong university system is indeed vital for this state. But the UW System is not underfund- ed. It is badly managed. It has enough money. It has too much money. If the Republicans who run this state are serious about improving the quality of higher edu- cation, they need to demand new leadership before throwing even more money down the biodigester. (Mark Belling is the host of a daily WISN radio talk show. His column appears weekly in the Milwaukee Post. Send your personal correspondences to Mark Belling at Clear Channel Communications, c/o WISN, 12100 W. Howard Ave., Greenfield, WI 53228). Jan. 13's question In 2016, homicides were close to last year's mark and most major crimes dipped slightly in Milwaukee.What are your thoughts about crime in the city and if it were up to you, what would you do about it? Do you feel safe in your neighborhood? People have to be convinced that they have to talk to the police when they come around. The criminals in crime-ridden areas are walking around doing whatever they want because nobody wants to be a snitch. They can get away with it and they are betting bolder and deadlier. What the people have to do when police come around is tell them what they know because that's the only way police can get help to get them off the street. You hear in the news there's been a robbery and a couple days later they're caught because of people snitching on them. People have been brainwashed for 30 years to not be a snitch. It's how you can catch them and not to brainwash people not to tell. Everybody should write the cops because they're doing a very good job and they're getting weary of the shoot- ings. They have to take care of them- selves when people are shooting at them. — Dennis Whalen Milwaukee *** What can we say or not say about all the crimes in Milwaukee and surround- ing areas as crime continues to rise? After hearing crimes every morning on the news, decent people worry about driving down the streets and fear of being carjacked, hurt, maybe shot, robbed, maybe beaten up or sexually assaulted, even though some may not get reported. Then there are thugs hurting others for drugs and drug money. Many try to blame it on no jobs; that's baloney. Some try to prove they are just bad to stay in good with gang members. Whatever the reasons, what's our answer? Whether some officials agree or not, I still, along with many others, think we need more police on our streets. Not that the ones we have aren't doing their jobs, it's just that we need more of them. I gave up writing to Mayor Tom Barrett and County Executive Chris Abele as it is like talking to a blank wall. They care more about more huge buildings in the dead downtown than for our safety. If we should be building anything, it should be more jails. And prisons in some states are being privatized so it takes a load off the states' backs finan- cially. Maybe a state prison exchange pro- gram is an answer where making it harder for visits would make someone think less about doing a crime. Or a strict boot camp for the young offend- ers. Some of the young feel it's a status symbol to go to prison. How do you take the pain away from parents who lose a child in some igno- rant crossfire? And for God's sake, par- ents have to start talking to their kids, taking a closer look at them and stop thinking, "My kid wouldn't do anything wrong." It is so hard for me to understand how some tough young people can put a gun up to someone's head or maybe kill a child in crossfire, yet can't stay clean and put on a millitary uniform to protect all the streets across America, which is being really tough. We used to be a great city, but we've got a lot of work to do to get it back that way again. — Bonnie Meyer Cudahy This week's question What do you think of the backlash to Donald Trump after one week in office? Editor's note: When responding to the Question of the Week, please include your full name with spelling, phone number and city where you live. Phone numbers will not be published. Anonymous responses are no longer accepted by the publication. Call 744- 6370, Ext. 15 and leave a brief answer. Readers may also send an email with a brief answer to: dmuck@conleynet.com. Question of the week STANDING UP for MILWAUKEE Oshkosh scandal proves UW System isn't cash-strapped

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