Student Activists Confront Joint Finance Committee

[Note: The message below was sent to the UW Oshkosh Campus Greens by Josh Healey, a UW Madison Student Activist. Josh can be reached at jghealey@wisc.edu]. --Tony Palmeri

So Tuesday, we made our presence known up at the Joint Finance Committee meeting and things got a little interesting. Here's my take on what happened, other folks can add their perspectives too.

Seven students from MCSC, SLAC, and ASM went up to the Capitol for the 3rd time that the JFC was supposed to be voting on the UW budget (including tuition, financial aid, grants for students of color, domestic partner benefits, immigrant student access, etc.), but like the three times before that we'd gone up there, the meeting started over 2 hours late and they postponed discussing the UW to a later day, which made us even more frustrated. But when the 16 JFC members (12 Republicans and 4 Democrats) finally sat down in the hearing room and were about to start the meeting, we got our chance to give them our message.

UW Madison student Josh Healey

We stood up and went right before the JFC members and unrolled our 10-foot banner that read "Cut Tuition, not our Budget." I began to speak to the legislators, "While you all have been wasting time, there are plenty of people in Wisconsin outside this Capitol who¹ve got plenty of problems that you're refusing to help them with. The problem we're here to demand you deal with is the privatization of the University of Wisconsin. You all keep cutting the UW budget every 2 years and then hike tuition so much that thousands of working- and middle-class students can no longer afford to attend."

Most of the JFC members were shocked and upset by the disturbance. One member, Republican Kitty Rhoades, said, "It's not our fault, you really should be blaming Gov. Doyle." Not willing to play into this partisan politics, I replied, "I blame him, too. But none of you has the courage to support equal opportunity either, so you're no different."

We didn't have much time to make our stand. Within 15 seconds of us getting up there, three Capitol policemen came and ripped the banner away and started pushing us out of the hearing room. Four of us ­ me, Brandon, Sharell, and John B. ­ left the hearing room while the other three ­ Lorenzo, Joel, and Sara T. ­ stayed inside.

When we got outside, the cops refused to let the four of us leave. Having attended one of those Know-your-rights workshops, I asked them, "Am I being detained?" to which they answered no. Then I said, "So I'm free to go?" to which they said no again. Legally, if I'm not being detained, they are not allowed to keep me, but the cops' excuse was that they had to "temporarily detain" us in order to "ask us a few questions."

They had nothing to really charge us on ­ we hadn't interrupted the meeting, since it hadn't even started yet ­ so I wasn't worried, but the other three guys were pissed, since they hadn't even said anything in the hearing room. Sharell hadn't even stood up during the action and felt like he'd been profiled.

The cops took us down into the underground police station beneath the Capitol and split us up and started interrogating us individually. The second question (after getting my name) my cop asked me was "What group are you with?" made it clear that this was a questioning about politics, not personal actions. Naturally I told him we weren't with any group but rather "just a bunch of drinking buddies." After another 20-30 minutes of getting as much info as he could out of me, my cop said he'd let us go if we promised not to come back to the Capitol that day. I let him know that we had better things to do than hang out with the corporate lobbyists and their cronies/legislators.

So that was it. We went to the Joint Finance Committee to tell them that the "public university" isn't open to a large amount of the public, and instead they told us that neither is the "public" Capitol.

Feel free to pass this message on. People should know what happens when you express dissent to the powers that be.

PEACE

Josh Healey, UW Madison Student

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