Last week the Dane County Board of Supervisors took up its old habit of sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. When voting to endorse the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in 2007, the Dane County Board showed they couldn't care less about wasting time on issues in which they have absolutely no role. Now they have decided to pry into UW-Madison primate research. Twenty supervisors, including the board's District 5 student representative Wyndham Manning, are questioning the ability of the university's All Campus Animal Care and Use Committee to objectively supervise the university's research efforts.
Perhaps developing a regional transit authority was too boring for them and they decided chimpanzees would be a nice change of pace. After all, who doesn't love chimps?
Granted, the university's animal research practices have been a very divisive topic over the past few months. We ourselves have questioned the animal research at UW-Madison, and earlier this semester we called for a more clearly organized supervisory structure for the university's research division in order to ensure that all ethical standards are met. In the wake of federal investigations into UW's research practices, some retooling seems reasonable. But there are specific governmental bodies to focus on this. The Dane County Board of Supervisors is not one of them.
In this respect, Chancellor Biddy Martin was right to defend the university's primate research efforts in her response last Wednesday to the supervisors' letter. But Martin needs to acknowledge that something in the university's research practices needs to change. We are not calling for an end to primate research. Primate research has led to numerous breakthroughs in scientific study, including several discoveries made right here in Madison, and to ensure further progress is made it should continue in the future. But worthwhile research still requires oversight. The oversight at UW-Madison is at best suspicious and at worst failing, and some changes need to be made to restore faith in the university's research efforts.
It will be up to Martin and the rest of the university's administration to restore faith in the primate research program. Keeping up UW-Madison's good image is one of the most important responsibilities of the chancellor, and in the coming months, Martin's response to the primate research issue will be one of the most scrutinized aspects of her job. One can only hope that she will take a more proactive and reformist role than she has in the past week.
But one group that assuredly cannot have an effect on UW's primate research is Wyndham Manning and the Dane County Board of Supervisors. It's just a tad hypocritical of Manning to call out the university for failing in its responsibilities when he himself has failed in the most basic of his own duties: communicating with his constituents.
So let's look into primate research and see what can be fixed. But let's leave the zombie politicians of Dane County out of it, shall we?
