Rep. Mike Stevens (R-18/Yankton) told the Yankton school board last night that the 2018 Legislature may consider 150 more bills than last year. That would be a 38% increase over 2017’s 390 bills.
Among that surge of bills will be further Republican efforts to dismantle higher education, that noble bastion of rigorous intellectual inquiry and liberty that Republicans mistake for leftist treachery. Speaker G. Mark Mickelson (who for a non-candidate is sure out making a lot of headlines) has said he plans to drive unions out of our public universities just as the 2017 Session banned unions from our vo-techs. In addition to banning collective bargaining, Mickelson is signaling he might try to take tenure away from our professors:
It’s the Board of Regents’ job to manage tenure. Not all—I don’t think—all states have tenure, I don’t know, but the Board of Regents has that responsibility. We’ll see how they’re doing [Speaker G. Mark Mickelson, audio transcribed from “SD House Speaker Mark Mickelson Wants to Do Away with University Collective Bargaining,” WNAX, 2017.12.11].
Good grief! Republicans at the national level are threatening to tax graduate students into bankruptcy. If I weren’t so averse to conspiracy theories, I’d think Speaker Mickelson’s war on professors was part of a larger Republican war on college.
If those 150 extra bills are all as bad as the higher education proposals Speaker Mickelson is signaling, those of us South Dakotans who believe in education nd worker rights are in for a long, hard 2018 Session.
