With one week until the gubernatorial elections, The Daily Cardinal's Elizabeth Medhin sat down with Democratic candidate Jim Doyle to discuss issues pertaining to students and education.
This is the first of four interviews with each of the gubernatorial candidates.
[At the Wisconsin Economic Summit Oct. 14-16] there was a proposal that would cut nearly $500 million from the UW System. Would you support a cut like this?
I would not support a cut like that. I thought it was a little ironic that right at the economic summit they are talking about cutting what is maybe the single biggest driver in our economy.
You know, it's the university system, the great research that goes on at the University of Wisconsin System, particularly the Madison campus, but also all of the teachers, all of the journalists, all of the scientists and lawyers and doctors for this state. This is where most of them are all trained and educated. We have to understand that if we want better paying jobs in this state, we have to have well-educated people and we, as I've said often, do have a treasure in our university system.
And the second thing is the great promise of our university system that my parents benefited from, and generations before them, was that you didn't have to be rich to get a world-class education. That this was our promise, to everybody, every young student in Wisconsin ... that money should not be what keeps you from getting the great education we have to give here. ...
One of your goals is to keep graduates in the state to help the economy. Right now the UW System has a deplorable retention rate for minority students. More than half of the students of color who attend the UW System transfer to other schools before they graduate. As governor, how would you change this trend to meet your goal?
You are striking at an issue that is very close to me personally. I have two sons who are African American ?? my oldest son was admitted to UW-Madison and Michigan State. ?? After being admitted to both of the schools, Michigan State called him up almost every week. ?? They really showed him that they wanted him to come to Michigan State.
It wasn't a question of so-called \easing admissions."" He had been admitted on his grades to both schools, now the question was who really wanted him to go. And I watched it first hand, I watched a university, a Big Ten university like Michigan State, go after him. And Wisconsin sent him his admission notice and from what I could see, never paid another bit of attention to him. ?? I see that we really need desperately to reach the critical mass of minority students, African American students, so that when students do come to Madison, they really sense that this is a good, welcoming place. ...
I think this is something where you really have to listen to the students. It's easy for me to sit up here and say what I think it takes for them to stay. I guess what I would want to do is really listen to the students, particularly those who left, about what were the causes, what were the reasons and then really look at what of those are correctable.
And is that something that you would strive to do as governor?
Well, yes, and you brought up the real reason for this in the beginning. This isn't just about being ""nice"" to people, this is about we really keep talented people here in the state of Wisconsin.
With respect to higher education and the UW System, what separates you from your opponent, Governor Scott McCallum?
Well, I think that I am just much more basic about what I want to achieve. I don't think you can keep beating up on teachers. I don't think that you can keep driving teachers' salaries down. ...
We are already facing looming teacher shortages. We are having more and more difficulties attracting young people into teaching.
One of the reasons, it's pretty simple, is that we have put caps on teachers salaries. We don't put them on firefighters, police officers, engineers, anybody else, but the only people in this state that we put caps on their salaries, other than maybe, I guess, professional football players have some kind of salary cap at $10 million [laughs], but the only one we put a cap on is on teachers.
I am also very focused on how we make sure that we have better teachers. If you can imagine, this governor actually proposed saying that you didn't even need a college degree to teach in Wisconsin. That was one of his so-called education reforms.
Well, maybe because I'm married to a teacher, I understand that teaching is a profession that takes training and education. I wouldn't have wanted my kids going to school with a teacher who had never been through, didn't have a college degree and hadn't been through education training. So that's another big difference.
I strongly support the University of Wisconsin. I believe some of the great research that is going on, stem-cell research most notably, has the potential to putting Wisconsin right in the center of perhaps one of the fastest growing areas of our economy.
We should be a biotech center [of] the world here in Madison. This governor, a couple of years ago, sent out a letter to everybody claiming that stem-cell research was like selling baby parts and that it had to stop'I mean, it was really bizarre.
I'm a supporter of stem-cell research. I have a mother who has suffered the ravages of terrible Parkinson's disease. Other families have gone through that and Alzheimer's and juvenile diabetes. Because of research at the University of Wisconsin, we stand on the threshold of actually curing those illnesses.
And we can have, if you can imagine, what we are sort of on poise to do ... [is] have a large part of our economy in this state [devoted] ... not only [to creating] good jobs and high-paying jobs and highly sophisticated scientific technical jobs, but its purpose is to save lives. That is what we should be focused on.
