An examination of the history of socialism

KAI BRITO Contributor

Imagine this scenario: You’re a new student at Madison College and it’s the first day of class for Fall semester. You’re not sure about which major to pick, so you start with basic classes like Basic Statistics, Introduction to Business, Intro Psychology, College Chemistry 1 and Written Communication.

You later learn that Intro Psychology is not required for any of the programs you were interested in, and quite frankly five courses is too much for your schedule, so you decide to drop the course after going to the first class.

When you go online to your Student Center to Drop Classes, you see that after you dropped the course, you aren’t getting the full amount back. Even if only a day has passed, the current Madison College policy on tuition refunds allows you to receive only an 80% refund if you drop the class before 11% of the class is completed.

However, under the current policy, even if you were to drop the class on the first day, before the class began, you would not be eligible to receive 100% refund. You would need to drop the class before the first day in order to receive the full refund for your class.

This policy is not unique to Madison College. Madison College is a member of the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS), which is the coordinating and oversight body for Wisconsin’s 16 public, two-year technical colleges. The Tuition Refund Policy is a statewide mandated policy for all technical schools written into the Wisconsin Administrative Code by the WTCS.

In the Technical College System Board (TCS) section, under TCS 10.08, the guidelines clearly state, “[a] student shall receive 100% refund of program fees, material fees and out-of-state tuition for a course, if application for refund is made by the student prior to the first scheduled meeting of the course and the student does not add another course.”

A straight-line reading of this text would lead you to believe that you could drop a class before the first meeting time and receive a full 100% refund. However, Madison College is using additional district policies written in the “WTCS Tuition & Fee Guide FY 2022-23” to prevent students from receiving what they are due.

“[S]ome discretion may be applied when the refund application is made the day the student is first scheduled to attend the class. If taken literally, district staff processing the refund application would be required to compare the time the refund application was made to the time each dropped course started. Districts may adopt policies and procedures which treat all refund requests received on a particular day as having been received at a specified time – for example 12:01 a.m. or 11:59 p.m.”

The last line is particularly interesting because it suggests that Madison College has the power to interpret this ruling in a manner that would be favorable to students but chooses not to do so.

For example, Madison College could choose to implement a policy where all dropped classes on the first day could be treated as having been received at 12:01 a.m. This interpretation of the rule would allow all students to receive a Full 100% refund if they dropped at any point on the first day of class.

So the question I have for Madison College administrators is this: Why don’t students get their full money back after one day of class?

If Madison College has the power to extend the drop deadline for students, which I have established that they do, why aren’t they doing this now?

As students, we have power to influence policies that directly affect us at Madison College. We can demand the administration to create rules that support students in making better decisions for their academic future.

From Kai Brito LETTERS

What I am asking for is not unreasonable. All I want is for students to have the opportunity to go to the first day of class and think about whether they really need the class without the concern of a financial penalty looming overhead.

Madison College needs to empower students to make decisions that put them on the path to success, and updating the tuition refund policy would be one way to do that.

EBENEZER IDOWU, JR. Staff Writer

Socialism has been around for a couple of centuries, but in recent years, it has seen an uptick in popularity. A recent presidential nominee ran on a socialist platform. Several senators and representatives are self-identified democratic socialists. Many Americans even believe that certain European countries have tried socialism and succeeded, a key part of the construct of democratic socialism.

But where did socialism come from? Why is it so popular today? Does it present a superior alternative to free-market capitalism?

In this two-part series, I will examine past and contemporary socialism, revealing its track record and comparing it to capitalism. Let’s start with the history.

History of Socialism:

The Early Days Socialism as a political and economic institution began in the 19th century, but socialist ideas have been around for thousands of years, as Encyclopedia Britannica points out. One notes socialist governance and principles in many ancient civilizations, such as ancient Egypt and ancient Greece.

To be clear, this does not mean those societies were socialist, but rather that they had elements of collective ownership. Wikipedia, in their article “History of Socialism,” describes the former as “a theocratic state which … employed peasants in massive labor projects and owned key parts of the economy,” contrasted to the free market equivalent, in which private companies use contracted workers to perform manual labor. Ancient India’s first emperor, Chandragupta, instituted a sort of socialism.

In Chandragupta’s empire, the king collectively owned all land and the working class paid taxes to him. In return, the emperor supplied the workers with farming tools, “agricultural products, animals, seeds, tools, public infrastructure and stored food in reserve for times of crisis.”

Socialist ideas made their way to ancient Greece, where the Greek philosopher Plato wrote a book called “Republic,” in which he described the ideal socialist society. In Plato’s vision of socialism, according to Encyclopedia Britannica’s article, “Socialism,” people share their goods as well as their “spouses and children.” Thomas More built on this idea and wrote a book called “Utopia,” which, as History.com informs us, described people living on an invented island where money does not exist (they abolished it) and individuals live in a communal setting. The Enlightenment gave more vigor to socialism, allowing it to emerge as an alternative to the exploitative capitalist economic system of the industrial revolution.

Utopian Socialism

Socialism officially started in the 1800s with the industrial revolution and the advent of free-market capitalism. Many politi-

» SEE HISTORY PAGE 6

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