UWSP Research Park Moratorium Project

Welcome to Students for Democratic Education and the UWSP Research Park Moratorium Project page.

This webpage was created to help educate students about pressing issues of campus democracy involving the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. The corporatization of our university has already begun. UWSP is quickly becoming less a place of higher learning, dedicated to educating and empowering students, and more a research institution for increasing the profit margins of multinational corporations.

This page will teach you how you can keep corporations from downsizing your education and how to organize against the wave of corporatization occuring right here at UWSP.

Aligning UWSP With Multinational Corporations:

Behind closed doors, UWSP Chancellor Thomas George and Assistant Chancellor for Business Affairs, Gregg Diemer, are aligning UWSP with the Portage County Business Council and multinational corporations.

By the summer of 2001, UWSP will have played a key role in the conception, creation, and operation of a corporate-focused, university-subsidized research park. The research facility, newly renamed the Education and Business Technology Center (previously the "Communivercity), will be funded in part ($500,000 worth) by tax-payer monies, coming directly from the UW system budget. The facility will be staffed by UWSP professors, who's job will be to design and complete research projects to profit multinational corporations [e.g. Kraft Foods (a subsidiary of Philip Morris), Sentry Insurance, and Lands End.]

Under the guise of "creating more jobs for Central Wisconsin," UWSP administrators are hoping to increase the endowment of the university and sink more money into high technology, hoping to make UWSP a more lucrative investment for multinational corporations and their research/grant money.

The UWSP research park will attract corporations with the following three incentives:
1) a tax-payer subsidized high technology facility, dedicated to increasing corporate profits
2) professorial staff with reduced teaching responsibilities (i.e. less time for students, more time for corporations)
3) students (i.e. corporate workers in training) paying tuition to do the legwork for corporate research

Impacts of the UWSP Research Park on the Student Body:

-Increased class sizes
-Decreased interaction with real professors
-More emphasis on distance learning/education as training ground for corporate workers/pro-business (anti-worker) curricula
-Less emphasis on multiculturalism/pluralism/social sciences/liberal arts/democracy/student empowerment

Does this look like a
Factory?
or an
Institution of Higher Learning?

The student community of UWSP needs your support in the moratorium campaign against the UWSP research park. Construction of the facility has not yet begun, since the UWSP administration hasn't found the start-up money yet. There is still time to intercede!

UWSP administrators haven't requested any faculty/student input on this project, all the while making decisions behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny. So NOW is the time to tell them how you feel!

Below are the e-mail addresses of UWSP administrators and Stevens Point Area state representatives. Any/all of the four have the leverage to impose a moratorium on the UWSP Research Park.

e-mail UWSP Chancellor Thomas George

e-mail UWSP Assistant Chancellor for Business Affairs

e-mail 7th District Representative Dave Obey

e-mail District 24 WI State Senator Kevin Shibilski