Talk:Wisconsin State Universities

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Great content! It needs to be tidied up a bit to match the Manual of Style, but an excellent start. Andrewa 19:53, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

This article should be moved to Wisconsin State Universities to conform to the principle of least astonishment. Miaers 15:26, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed; I'm glad to see you've already done it, Miaers. Thanx. --Orange Mike 00:56, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Resistance to merge of UW with WSU system

I am restoring the deleted material about resistance, as the information is not POV. I've been reading newspapers from the period, and there was genuine opposition out of Madison to the merger, by people who claimed that such a merger would cause "brand dilution" (as the marketing people say nowadays) of the prestigious UW name. By and large, incidentally, this was the same argument that was used to argue against the naming of UWM in 1956: no other institution should be called UW-anything, because that would damage the prestige of the place in Madison, center of the intellectual universe in Wisconsin. {Yep, that remark is POV; I'm in the Talk page!).--Orange Mike 00:55, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

That is definitely someone's POV. At least it is not the majority view. Otherwise UW System wouldn't came into being. I don't think UW's prestige had been damaged in any way by the merger. Instead, it had made it better. Your wording is basically promoting biased opinions. Miaers 17:08, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

It is a historical fact that there was such resistance. Yes, it was overcome. I think that the resistance was silly; but its existence is a historical fact relevant to whether the institution would ever come into being. I am not saying they were right; but they were out there. Every time you read an article from that period, these objections are mentioned. It would be a violation of the NPOV principle to omit such objections just because they were wrong or because they were (in my opinion) foolish. We are trying to accurately describe the history of this institution; and the resistance is a part of that history. Public opinion is part of the historical record.--Orange Mike 19:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)