Give UW-Parkside a Fair Share of the Budget Pie

At first blush, Gov. Scott Walker's proposed 2017-2018 state budget undoubtedly drew some sighs of relief from administrators at university campuses throughout the state.

Unlike past budgets, the governor is proposing to spend 3.65 percent more on institutions of higher learning and to boost the number of authorized positions a bit as well.

But (and there is always a but in these things) Walker's budget plan is also proposing some new measuring sticks to assess the performance of campuses — with the ones that do well in "measuring up" to a matrix of standards getting a bigger slice of the pay for performance pie.

And that has some campuses already fingering their worry beads. The University of Wisconsin-Parkside is one of them. UW-Milwaukee is another.

That's because a recent analysis by UW-Madison Associate Professor Nicholas Hillman found that Parkside would rank lowest of the state's 13 UW System campuses — and would presumably then get a smaller slice of the $42.5 million in performance incentives that Walker has set aside to spur campuses to compete against each other in the next biennium.