Don’t look for Wisconsin Republicans to reverse course on their proposed diversity, equity and inclusion cuts at the University of Wisconsin.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Wednesday defended his plan to cut $32 million from the UW System’s budget if university leaders don’t shift it away from DEI efforts.
“The goal is really fairly simple, it is to say that if you are at UW System, on any of the campuses, you should be able to be taught. And you should be able to learn. It should not be indoctrination, where you’re only allowed to have one point of view,” Vos told reporters.
Vos has pushed against the University of Wisconsin’s DEI administrative force for the past month.
Back in May, he said he wanted to find a better use for the $16 million that was spent last year on nearly 200 DEI administrators at the state’s 23 UW campuses.
He said that again on Wednesday.
“They tell me we don’t have enough people to be in engineering. We don’t have enough folks who are teaching an awful lot of careers. But. boy are they able to find millions of dollars to put into a curriculum and an ideology,” Vos added.
Gov. Tony Evers and top statehouse Democrats on Wednesday slammed Vos’ proposed cuts. The governor called the idea “disastrous for our UW System, almost certainly causing cuts to campuses and critical programs statewide, and will only hurt our kids, our state’s economy, and our state’s workforce in the process.”
The top Democrat in the Wisconsin Senate, Minority Leader Melissa Agard, echoed the same theme.
“Republican actions to cut funding from the UW System for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is small-minded, wrongheaded, and counterproductive to our state’s efforts to recruit and retain our future workforce,” Agard said in a statement of her own.
But Vos said the UW System chose to focus on DEI instead of the state’s workforce needs.
“We gave [the UW System] more than enough time to say ‘Let’s redouble our efforts, to take the money which is going into [DEI] any promote economic development, and careers that we know we need, and filling jobs that should be taught to kids in Wisconsin.’ And they kind of ignored that,” Vos added. “So, iIf they have extra money then I think it should be taken back, and the taxpayers of Wisconsin will have a chance to use it for something better than indoctrinating kids with left-wing ideology.”
The Republican-controlled legislature was supposed to vote on the UW System’s budget Tuesday night, but that vote was delayed because of the DEI spat.
Vos did not say when lawmakers will try and vote on the university’s budget again.
