University of Wisconsin


Categories: Featured articles Universities and colleges in the United States

 

This article is about the University of Wisconsin. D'oh. For other possible meanings, see University of Wisconsin (disambiguation).

 

The University of Wisconsin does not exist. It did once, but it ceased to exist in 1971.

 

And nobody in Wisconsin has yet noticed.

 


 

History

 

Madison

 

 

The University of Wisconsin was founded in 1848, in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, a state of the USA. All went well until 1956.

 

The Grand Plan

 

In 1956, some meathead decided to merge the University of Wisconsin with its deadliest rival, the Wisconsin State College of Milwaukee. This of course infuriated the Madison boys, who regarded themselves as far superior to the college yokels of Milwaukee. So to even things up, the merged institution was called the University of Wisconsin, a move designed to be equally offensive to the Milwaukee people, and placed under the governance of the existing Board of Regents of the Madison campus, possibly in the hope that they would continue to be politically incompetent. This all worked, sort of.

 

The main problem with this even-handed approach was that nobody noticed. Milwaukee people continued to rubbish the snots from the University of Wisconsin, not realising that they were now some of them. Madison people continued to regard themselves as superior to anyone who didn't belong to the University of Wisconsin, not realising that everybody and his dog now did belong to it.

 

Round Two

 

Having failed to destroy the University of Wisconsin in spirit, the Establishment now settled for destroying it legally. In 1971, the then University of Wisconsin was renamed the University of Wisconsin System, in the hope that if the University of Wisonsin ceased to exist, perhaps people would stop barracking for it. This again assumed that somebody would notice. But nobody did.

 

Sorting it out

 

In 2005, somebody in Milwaukee finally realised that they were still losing football games against an institution that hadn't existed for decades, and worse, that they were still part of. Rather than improving their football (which takes effort) they launched a referendum to leave the long-defunct University of Wisconsin. Unfortunately, this meant thinking up a good new name, and that takes effort too, so the referendum failed.

 

The future

 

It is speculated that, if the students and alumni of the University of Wisconsin could somehow be made to realise that it doesn't exist, something would happen. But don't hold your breath.

 

Another referendum is planned for Milwaukee, this time seeking approval to join the University of Wisconsin rather than leave it. If this is lost as expected, then the plan is to forget that the merger ever happened. The main problem with this is that nobody remembers that it ever did.

 

watch this space