Like many Wisconsinites, we were encouraged to hear University of Wisconsin Chancellor Biddy Martin has extended an olive branch to the prominent business lobby Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce by meeting with the group’s executive board and its president, Jim Haney.

The act of diplomacy comes in the wake of a contentious relationship between the university’s administration and WMC. The tension was highlighted by a blistering essay published last September in Madison Magazine by former UW Chancellor John Wiley, in which the former UW chief expressed nothing short of contempt for WMC and its conservative agenda. He criticized the group’s support for deregulation and lower taxes, questioning whether it had the state’s best interests at heart when the public sector, specifically UW, has been so unfortunately under-funded in recent years.

At the time, we criticized Wiley for making such attacks, concluding the action would do nothing but prove a hindrance to the incoming chancellor and turn funding for the university into a bigger partisan controversy than it already had become. We worried that the university could be putting its relationship with the Legislature in jeopardy by biting the bait that demagogues like Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, outgoing chairman of the Assembly Committee on Universities and Colleges, lay on a near-daily basis.

So it is fortunate Martin has made it clear her administration will not allow Wiley’s personal vendetta against WMC to get in the way of her attempts to establish a supportive relationship between UW, the Legislature and the business community. Although WMC’s political clout will likely be significantly reduced with Democrats controlling both chambers of the Legislature, the group is nevertheless an important representative of the state’s private sector, and snubbing it only invites an act of retribution that would do none of us any good.