cc >> Michael Olneck: As Sara said,
I'm Michael Olneck. I am emeritus professor in
educational policy studies and sociology.
I'm very happy to have shared with Sara the task of organizing
this conference, and very, very happy to welcome the members of
the next panel who are going to speak to the idea of what the
Wisconsin Idea should mean, what it can mean.
And, as David Ward suggested, what it comes to mean can be
very different depending on the context, depending on the era,
and depending on from what perspective people are speaking
and acting. Our panel members include
representative Cory Mason, who is a member of the Assembly
from Racine. He is a member of the
Legislative Joint Finance Committee and the Assembly
Committee on Natural Resources. Among other things, he's a
sixth-generation Racine resident and a graduate
of Case High School. He received his BA in philosophy
here, and that's why, actually, he is here.
If you heard the committees I just mentioned, you didn't
hear education committee, so you might be wondering
why is Cory here. And the answer is that my
colleague Harry Brighouse from philosophy, when I was asking
him about being a part of this conference said, you know who
you really have to get for the Wisconsin Idea is Cory Mason
because when Cory was student here, I gather, or while you
were here, he had asked Harry about something in one of his
books like why didn't you talk about the Wisconsin Idea?
And Harry, also from being across the Atlantic, stated Ward
didn't know what the Wisconsin Idea was or even if you're from
New York you wouldn't necessarily...
[LAUGHTER] But if you know history,
you'd know. Anyway, I gather it was Cory who
really genuinely inspired Harry Brighouse to learn about and to
care about the Wisconsin Idea. And he said if you want a public
official who knows about it, thinks about it, feels about it,
get Cory. So we're very happy to have you
here. Todd Berry, next to him, is
president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance since 1994.
He served in public, private, nonprofit sectors, at one point
was assistant director for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue,
and executive director of the Governor's Tax Reform
Commission. He's been a member of the Dane
County Board, Jefferson School Board, CESA #2 Board of Control.
He has served on the North Central College of Illinois'
Board of Trustees. He holds bachelor's and a
doctoral degree from here as well as master's in planning and
policy and business administration, and one from
Harvard, the other from the University of Chicago.
Todd is somebody who is very concerned with the role of
higher education in the well-being of our state, in the
capacity of our state to sustain quality education, and we
welcome him. Thank you.
Allie Gardner, who I don't know if I've been introduced to.
Hello. >> Hi.
Was born in Madison. Yes.
Went to Edgewood here and is an undergraduate.
She is the chair of the Associated Students of Madison,
ASM, and somebody who works very hard on this campus and I would
say in Washington for the interests of students.
And we're glad you were released on your personal recognizance to
come back. And she plans to go into
community organizing and possibly, and this is the best,
return to grad school in EPS or sociology.
That's excellent. [LAUGHTER]
My colleague, Sara Goldrick-Rab, you've met.
She is an associate professor, both in EPS and sociology.
She attempts, in her work, to unpack the causes and
consequences of socioeconomic inequality, especially as it
relates to college attainment. She is one of the few people, or
maybe increasing number of people, who uses a range of
social science methodologies in her research.
It's not limited to qualitative or quantitative.
She is in the midst of several experimental studies that are
part of a William T. Grant Faculty Scholars project called
Rethinking College Choice in America.
She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of
Pennsylvania. I'm very happy to welcome
everybody and turn it over to Todd.
No, no, no. Sorry.
I was looking at Cory. Turn it over to Cory.
Folks will speak for up to 10 to 15 minutes.
I want to give everybody a chance at the end to respond to
one another, to converse, and then we should have plenty of
time, we go to 4:30, to have a generous discussion from the
floor with panel members. >> They're speaking and we're
responding. Did you say that?
They're speaking and they're responding.
It was never 100% clear to be exactly...
[LAUGHTER] Because I asked are you going to
make your own points, and that's part of, I guess,
responding. Anyway, I'm just going to
moderate. [LAUGHTER]
Good afternoon, everyone. This is worse than church.
Good afternoon, everyone. [LAUGHTER]
My name is State Representative Cory Mason, and I'm a proud
graduate of the UW philosophy department, which makes me
marketable enough to be a state legislator.
[LAUGHTER] I'm delighted to be
here and really excited to be invited to talk about this
topic. The Wisconsin Idea is actually
something I have a passion about.
Before I begin, there's a couple people I want to thank and
mention. First, and not the least of
which, is Mr. Miller, who's an archivist at the Wisconsin
Historical Society and helped me prepare some of the information
I have here today. But I would be remiss if I
didn't thank my mentor and old philosophy professor Harry
Brighouse who's been really instrumental in giving me new
and different ways to think about the world and challenge
the things that I confront on a daily basis.
And since graduation, I'm happy to say, has remained a good
friend. And I guess, I'll start by
talking about my first experience dealing with the
Wisconsin Idea was a bit atypical.
I, between my sophomore and junior year of my undergraduate
here, was home and it was 1996, and there was a recall election,
something I'm a little bit familiar with, that the state's
now becoming familiar with, there was a recall election in
Racine for the state senator over the stadium tax to build
the Miller Park for the Brewers. And I thought I'm a good
democrat, I should go down there and volunteer some of my time.
Long story short, the next thing I know, the democrats win and I
wind up with a full-time job in the legislature working for
then-senator Adelman, who's now a federal judge, and thought how
am I going to finish my degree? And it basically meant that I
became a non-traditional student that was working full-time at
the legislature as a staffer and going to school part-time here.
That same year, there's something called the Wisconsin
Blue Book that comes out every two years.
It's basically an almanac of Wisconsin politics that the
legislature publishes, and in it there was an article about the
Wisconsin Idea in its heyday. And, to me, this was sort of
like the greatest discovery ever because it was about how almost
100 years ago, 100 years ago now but 85 years ago then, there was
this great nexus between this end of State Street and the
other end of State Street, and that they actually accomplished
amazing things by working together.
So I became inspired about this because I was getting this great
education, practically speaking, got to clerk the Senate
Judiciary Committee at 22 years old and really learned some
fantastic things, and then would take philosophy courses over the
lunch hour or at night. And it was a great time.
And I just thought, wow, it would be so inspiring if these
great institutions could rediscover and rekindle that
nexus. And so it is with that passion
that I've always been talking about the Wisconsin Idea.
And when I met Harry for class, he had written this book called
School Choice and Social Justice, the conclusions of
which I found atrocious, but the point that I thought was
interesting about it is he was talking about the school voucher
issue in a way that nobody had really been thinking about in
those terms before. It was a new way to think about
it, to talk about it, and put it in terms of social justice,
which, I thought, was very interesting.
And I said, why aren't you talking to state legislators
about this because this is a very informed, well thought out
public policy position that policymakers have no connection
to, and what about the Wisconsin Idea?
And so from there we've had a number of conversations about
that, and I'm happy to say I might have had some small
influence in the way he looks at his work.
But here's what, I have two big thoughts about the Wisconsin
Idea that I want to share with you today.
Number one, I am annoyed with which the way it is talked about
as this great historical, once upon a time sort of thing and
would like to see it reinvigorated in its heyday
almost 100 years ago. Number two, my thoughts about
what it means to give public access and public interest and
what a public university is might be broader than what
you're thinking about in the next couple days, but I want to
challenge your thinking about it because when I think about the
public interest of the public university, I'm not just
thinking about how we win people over with our utility as an
economic engine or our utility in terms of access and tuition.
It's something far greater that I think harkens back to the idea
of the Wisconsin Idea. The other thing that I have to
mention in terms of access, and I'm only going to talk on it
briefly, but I think it's so important and I wish the
chancellor were still here to see this.
So if we have another budget deficit, and I'm sure we will
sometime again in the future, the easiest place for
legislators like me to cut is the university system.
It is the easiest place to cut because there is no consequence.
None. And that, as a graduate and
somebody who loves the University of Wisconsin, is
really frustrating. So a $250 million cut, perhaps
the single biggest cut we've seen, supplemented by another
$60 million cut as part of the budget adjustment that came
later, and I couldn't get a clear and concise, other than a
very strongly worded letter from the chancellor, there was no
outcry on what this would mean to our communities.
I couldn't get UW Parkside to explain to me what this would
mean for programs or for students or tuition or access.
Put in short, the University of Wisconsin does a horrible job
advocating for itself in the legislature, and that has got to
change. Because what you have in terms
of raw materials with students and alumni and faculty all over
the state is a great untapped resource that has not demand the
real consideration that the university deserves in the state
budget, and until that changes you will continue to be the
easiest place to cut. And that will affect our future
students and the future economic growth of this state.
So I plead with those in this room who listen and those
beyond, the university system has got to find a way to be an
advocate for itself. Broadly speaking, though, what I
intended to talk about is when people say the Wisconsin Idea,
I've come to learn that they think it means a bunch of
different things. Sometimes they think it means
innovation, or maybe it means a breakthrough at the University
of Wisconsin in a specific field.
Maybe it means a way to brand the university.
That what makes us different. We've got Badgers football and
the Wisconsin Idea. But it's not entirely clear what
that means. Maybe it's a radio network, the
Wisconsin Ideas Network. Maybe it means the borders of
the university are the borders of the state, and you certainly
hear that most often in the simple definition of it.
And certainly UW Extension still speaks to that.
What Babcock did over a hundred years ago speaks to that.
At its height, Professor Frederick Jackson Turner said,
"But quite as much in the field of legislation and of public
life in general as in the industrial world the is expert
needed. The industrial conditions which
shape our society are too complex, problems of labor,
finance, social reform, too difficult to be dealt with
intelligently and wisely without the leadership of highly
educated men, and women, familiar with the legislation
and literature on social questions in other states and
nations." This was at a time when it was
unheard of for the universities to be advising legislatures.
Its origins come from John Bascom himself, who said, "There
is a harmony of productive action by which the gains of all
are secured, and the laws of this harmony are political
economy." And his students, famously, were
Robert La Follette and Charles Van Hise.
And he also brought Ely to the UW, who will become import in
this story as well. So, Professor Ely was a
professor of economics whose students were John R. Commons
and Charles McCarthy, probably the two most important figures
when it comes to the Wisconsin Idea and its influence of public
policy. He also got into a bit of
trouble, but I wanted to talk about this trouble he got into
because I think it serves and important reminder.
All too often the university is told don't get involved in
public policy. We're supposed to be out of it.
We're just there to do research, not really offers opinions.
And Ely offered opinions, and those opinions went on to be the
germ that went on to create things like unemployment
insurance and workers compensation, minimum wage, all
kinds of things. But there was, the
then-superintendent at Wisconsin really didn't like Ely.
He thought he was too much of a radical.
And there was this great trial that the Regents had and
absolved him and came out with this great statement which has
now become almost a model of this state, and certainly one of
the rallying cries of academic freedom in this state and in
this country. When they said, "Whatever may be
the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe
that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever
encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing
by which alone the truth can be found."
This was because he was getting in trouble for offering input on
public policy and taking stands on some of the big issues of the
day. So Charles McCarthy was a
student of Ely, and this is a picture, this relief is a
picture in the assembly chamber at Wisconsin.
It's right at the front of the hall.
There are no reliefs of any legislators in the hall, but
there is a relief of this man, Charles McCarthy, who is the
first director of the Legislative Reference Bureau.
And while he had that appointment, it was an
appointment from the UW. He was UW faculty when he served
in that role. And he, literally, wrote the
book on the Wisconsin Idea, now 100 years old, and if you want
to be inspired about what a university can and should do for
the public interest in this state, I would encourage you to
read it. It has a beautiful foreword by
Teddy Roosevelt that makes him sound a little bit like John
Rawls, believe it or not. And goes on to an amazing
influence on what public policy can be and should be for a
state. He is in part responsible for
unemployment insurance, workers compensation.
He invented the idea of the technical college system, the
apprenticeship model, all of which became adapted as national
policy. Charles McCarthy also said this
great thing in this foreword to this book.
He was a student here and said this about his work at the
legislature. He said, "I, a wandering
student, seeking knowledge, came knocking at the gates of the
great University of Wisconsin, and it took me in, filled me
with inspiration, and when I left its doors the kindly people
of the state stretched out welcoming hands and gave me a
man's work to do." John R. Commons, the professor
of economics, he was appointed with the encouragement of
McCarthy and other legislators to the Wisconsin Industrial
Commission, and he helped create unemployment insurance and
workers compensation. He was on the Wisconsin Minimum
Wage Commission and Wisconsin Civil Service Law, which was the
precursor to collective bargaining laws in this country,
and he helped create the Public Service Commission.
Not bad for a guy who's an economist and a professor at the
University of Wisconsin. [LAUGHTER]
And here he is, I guess he would be second to the right on the
last of an individual receiving the first unemployment check
in Wisconsin. It was considered a great step
forward in Wisconsin in economic security for tens of thousands
of Wisconsin citizens. Edwin Witte, a generation later,
succeeds McCarthy, and, as the LRB director, still had that
appointment as a professor at the University of Wisconsin but
also served as director of the Legislative Reference Bureau,
bought very much into Bascom's idea of political economics and
why that was so important. And he invents, literally
invents with Altmeyer, social security.
He is appointed by FDR to come and chair the commission on
economic security and comes up with the idea of social
security. Now, that's an amazing legacy,
and those are the big pillars when I think of the golden era
of the Wisconsin Idea that really influence public policy,
not just for this state and not just to secure a middle class in
this state, but became national models.
But the amazing thing to me as I learned about this history is
you hear these names and they're peppered all over the campus.
Witte and Bascom and Commons. But for me, coming to the
university, only thing I knew when I came to the university
about Witte is that you didn't want to live in the dorm named
after him. [LAUGHTER]
And they called it [###] Witte when I went to school here.
[LAUGHTER] That was all I knew
about Witte. That was all the name meant to
me, and I am constantly surprised when I talk to
different classes and colleagues, both legislatively
and if I'm every invited here in the university, I say do you
know what the Wisconsin Idea is? And you usually get blank stares
or maybe a couple people know, but it's really not embedded in
our culture the way it should be, this great legacy that we
gave to the state. So, at its best, I would hope
that the Wisconsin Idea employed the expert advice of the
University of Wisconsin to advise the legislature on how to
address the biggest problems facing the state.
These solutions can be so successful that they become
national, maybe even international, models.
To this day, many of them are the structures that help hold up
the middle class in Wisconsin. That is, when I think of the
Wisconsin Idea and what a public university should do, is what I
think of. It's not just that very
important question of access and students and an economic engine
that's so important to the future innovation of the state,
it is also a university that informs what it means to be in
Wisconsin. And that, a hundred years ago,
is why Teddy Roosevelt called it the greatest public university
in America. But at the very least, the
Wisconsin Idea could reinvigorate the nexus between
the legislature and the university.
There is no major issue facing the state, from issues ranging
from economics to natural resources, where the
state-funded research should not inform public policy, but
there's no such nexus that exists today.
It just doesn't. Sometimes, occasionally, you'll
get a professor to come and talk about an issue where they have
some expertise, but it should be a matter of course, I think,
where the legislature is reaching out to the university
and the university is embracing back and saying we've been doing
really important research that gives you the best expert advice
on how to address these issues. And for too long, even though
we're only a mile apart, culturally it's as though we're
a hundred miles apart. And if we're going to think
about what it means for, whether it's pedagogy, I know people
have talked about what would it mean for distance learning or
blending of some of the departments and having more
transparency, think of what it would mean once again if part of
what it meant to be at the University of Wisconsin as a
faculty member or a researcher or even as a student you were
called upon to give input to the great issues of the day,
including public access to the university system and the
technical college system, including, I hope one day, real
advocacy on behalf of the university, but also in every
other policy matter that matters.
I'll give you two examples that I've sort of insisted on in my
time in the legislature. We have an infant mortality
crisis in Racine where we have the highest African American
infant mortality rate in the country.
It's almost 3% that don't live to see their first birthday.
And while I was creating legislation to create a pilot
project about it, I called the School of Public Health here on
campus and said do you have anybody who has expertise on
this? And they said, in fact, we have
a public health fellow who would love to work with you on it.
And he came to my office two days a week, and we made sure
that we put together a plan that was evidence-based and
researched and based on what had worked in other communities, and
we put it into statutes here. That is but one example of the
Wisconsin Idea. I will have to leave here at
4:15 because I'm going back at 6:30 to do a community event
with the University of Wisconsin Parkside and the City of Racine
and myself who opened up an environmental education center
on the Root River in the middle of a central city in Wisconsin,
in downtown Racine, and it has really been pushing the envelope
with the University of Wisconsin about what is their role in
addressing redeveloping this economic corridor, in terms of
educating people about natural resources in our community.
And it has been a great joy to do that.
We have a new provost at the University of Wisconsin and a
new chancellor, actually, who, when they inherited this, they
were like why are we running a community center in downtown
Racine? We've got other issues.
What's going on? It was taking this great canoe
paddle from the education center from about a mile upstream to
the mouth of the river and back again with the provost Terry
Brown where we were discussing everything from what educational
opportunities were for students and faculty to engage in a
process like this. So, the idea of what a great
public university can do to address issues of the day, be
them penny legislative issues or big issues facing our state,
whether it's healthcare reform or affordable childcare or
growing the economy or how do we face the great challenges of
tomorrow, are still there and still very possible to address.
The other thing I want to say about the Wisconsin Idea is when
people talk about it now and look at the legacy, they say
that's all left wing social policy, and we can't have the
university tied up in left wing social policy.
But in its day it was not viewed that way at all.
In fact, it was viewed as the great thing to stop socialism
from taking hold in the state of Wisconsin.
It was nonpartisan and it was pragmatic.
The university leaders of the time really viewed it as we
figured out how to use science and economics to figure out how
to do great things with buttermilk and how to do great
things with agriculture, some things with industrial
efficiency, why too should we not be addressing the very
complex issues that affect the state to the legislature?
The other thing that was so incredible about the policies is
there were other states that were trying to address these
issues. Wisconsin was the first place
that was really smart about it. Teddy Roosevelt says in his
foreword to the book Wisconsin Idea, he said, "As soon as
they," McCarthy and his colleagues, "decided that an
object was desirable, they at once set upon to work
practically to study how to develop the constructive
machinery through which it could be achieved.
This was not an easy attitude to maintain."
In other words, what made our ideas so brilliant was that they
worked so well functionally in the real world.
It was smart public policy. Not left policy, not right
policy, smart, effective policy that could be achieved through
real means. And this came up in two
different ways. There were other states who had
tried things that had failed. The other thing that states were
encountering is they were trying to develop these programs and
the courts kept declaring them unconstitutional.
So McCarthy used this scholarship not only to write
effective, pragmatic programs, but he also got them through the
court system as well. So it was viewed as this great
enormous achievement. It did have an egalitarian moral
ethic but not a partisan one. The idea was is that the public
university should drive policy in the public interest for the
betterment of all Wisconsin citizens.
So it does have that moral view from that point of view, but not
at all a partisan one. In fact, McCarthy, who is viewed
by many as a lion of the left, actually ran in a primary for
the US Senate against Bob La Follette because he was so
mad about his antiwar policy against Germany when World War I
ran around. So these really were a diverse
group of people who were using the best information they had
possible to encounter the state's problems.
And so when we talk about public access and what the university
is and what it means to have a public university in the public
interest, I would encourage you and hopefully maybe even inspire
you to think beyond just giving a lot more citizens access to
this great university system, but also how to reemerge with
University of Wisconsin as not just the greatest university for
what it does for its graduates, but making it the greatest
university once again because of what it does for the state.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
You can sit or you can stand. Whatever you'd like.
Well, it's sort of interesting to follow Cory
because in my rereading about the Wisconsin Idea, one thing
that came down was that there were sort of two views of it,
and one was sort of a public policy view, and one was more of
a service to people and institutions of the state.
And Cory sort of talked about the first, and I'm going to sort
of talk a little bit about the second.
And, believe it or not, we didn't talk at all before we
came. It's really good to be here.
For those of you that aren't aware, there's really some great
people in this room. You have a Regent here, if
you're not aware of it, Tim Higgins.
And you have, really, one of the lions of government and in
higher education in Wisconsin, Don Percy, here.
So it's really great to see them.
One of the problems in thinking about the Wisconsin Idea is that
nobody, probably even then, could agree entirely on what it
was meant to be. And I went back and started
reading various people's pieces, and I forgotten that my father
had written a thesis 40 years ago on the Wisconsin Idea.
[LAUGHTER] But there's a lot of good stuff
in the Wisconsin History magazine and some of the stuff
the State Historical Society did, and it's only
fitting that the Blue Book that Cory mentions had a wonderful
long piece on the Wisconsin Idea by Jack Stark back in the
mid-'90s. And then the other things I was
thinking about as I tried to prepare for this is one was
David Wertz's dissertation in '06 that he did in what was then
the ed admin department because he found some really interesting
and provocative things that we need to hear.
And I also thought that Katherine Cramer Walsh's paper
that's just come out where she was interviewing small groups
around the state, and their perceptions of the university
was fairly telling as well. But the way I'm going to look at
the Wisconsin Idea is a little bit different than Cory, and I'm
not going to diss or in any way suggest that the public policy
component isn't there, it obviously was.
But what Jack Stark argued in his history of the Wisconsin
Idea was that it's the second focus, the focus on the
university and its expertise, the research serving the state
and the people of the state that I think is even more
fundamental, and the more I thought about this, I think it
has a lot to do with why the university is in some of the
funding problems it is because it sort of forgot that component
of the Wisconsin Idea. So, what are some things the
Wisconsin Idea is not? It's not the sifting and
winnowing plaque, although I love the sifting and winnowing
plaque, and being a native of Madison used to run around
campus when I was six and seven years old.
It's not just the political and policy reforms of the teens and
the early 1900s, although that's part of it.
And, surprisingly, and this may be a little unpopular, it's not
really about students. And Van Hise, who was to some
degree could credit as the father of the Wisconsin Idea,
although there were precursors, said that a very large fraction
of the work of the university is done not for the students who
are here but for the 2.5 million people of the state.
And I think that captures pretty much the way I think about the
Wisconsin Idea. Now, more recently people have
said it's the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of
the state, and I think that's sort of a nice cliche, but I
really think it's about using the human capital, the
expertise, the research capacity of the campus to directly
contribute to the betterment of people's lives in this state.
And Cory mentioned some of the great Wisconsin Idea examples,
butterfat and so forth. There was some research early on
on cabbage disease, for instance.
But it had to do with building a partnership between the people
and the university of the state. And I love this quote from Jack
Stark because it says something about the university's current
problems. The professor building on what
the farmer already knew was fundamental in an effective
partnership and explains why farmers would travel to Madison
to support university research. I don't think you see that much
anymore. And a successor to Van Hise,
President Adams, nowhere else have the masses of the people
received so much direct assistance from the teaching
force at the university. So I really want to think about
the Wisconsin idea as really the university in a very practical
way serving the people of the state.
And I'm going to get in trouble here by probably saying some
things I shouldn't. I'll reassure you I love
Wisconsin. Cory and I share something.
I'm a sixth generation Wisconsinite, although they were
farmers in Jefferson County, but probably both from New England
by the nature of your name. I don't know.
And Camp Randall was where my great-grandfather was mustered
out of the Civil War battalions in 1865.
My grandfather taught here. My father taught here.
My mother was a staff member here.
Most of my degrees, the important ones, are from here.
And my wife was a UW system VP for 14 years.
So I do love the state and I do love the university, but I think
for a long time people have started to realize that we need
to get the Wisconsin Idea back in our heads.
John Weaver was the first president of the UW system.
And in 1972 he said to the Regents that, "...is it not
timely, indeed prerequisite, that one begin reexamination
and rededication as well to the public service role
of these universities? Should we not, with zeal,
seek a revitalization of the Wisconsin Idea?"
And that was 1972. So that's 40 years ago.
A veteran faculty member and administrator Bryant Kearl gave
a speech in the early '90s, "Who Killed the Wisconsin Idea?"
And it was meant to be a provocative title, but he really
was talking about how the idea had faded.
Jack Stark, in his history, '95, the big question for him is, has
the idea faded? And his intuition was that the
idea was much stronger in an earlier era than it is now.
And then, finally, just some recent research, both from David
Wertz's dissertation and from the Cramer piece.
David was studying Ohio State, Wisconsin, and the University of
Georgia and trying to get some insights both qualitatively and
quantitatively into how they were engaging in relating to the
public. And so he went to people on
campus, and he interviewed them, and he finds that at the UW the
virtue of the Wisconsin Idea is ultimately a low priority and
the century old concept has lost its flare.
So there's a problem here. The legislature, talked to
people there, the legislature used to know faculty.
Now they don't know anybody, he says.
The university used play a serious role in helping state
policy; now it's not the case. And then, finally, this is him
writing in his dissertation, there's a growing concern that
the UW has become increasingly national and international.
And when you read the UW Madison website about the Wisconsin
Idea, that's not altogether surprising because they talk
about the university's research and contribution to the state
but then they immediately add to the nation and to the global.
And that's fine. Make contributions to the nation
and the betterment of the world, but let's not forget that what
the Wisconsin Idea was about benefiting the state.
I thought David's findings in terms of how Georgia, as opposed
to Wisconsin, went about engaging the public was really
interesting. Because what he found, and the
problem with Wisconsin often is there's so many of us here that
are natives. We don't tend to leave.
We have a very high percentage of people that stay here.
So we're sort of smug, and we sort of think we do things
better than maybe than other states, when in reality that may
not be the case. There are other states that are
making real strides that we don't think about in terms of
K-12 education, in terms of higher ed.
There's a lot of investments being made in states that you
wouldn't think. But what he found was that
Georgia was spending significantly more on public
service and outreach. And what he found was that not
only that but the university was much more structured to focus on
that effort in the way it was organized.
Almost like having case managers working on public engagement,
and he saw that at Ohio State and at Wisconsin it was really
sort of haphazard and decentralized.
And I had to think back a little bit to earlier in my life when
my father was on the Extension faculty, and I remember him
talking about a reorganization then, and I think there was one
some time in the '90s and Jack Stark is talking about one in
the '60s. And of course we had this PR
stunt in the last couple years, and that's what it was where
they system decided to say we're efficient and they put the UW
Colleges and Extension together which, maybe it makes sense,
maybe it doesn't', but what it really said was, eh, Extension.
So what's also really interesting is that in terms of
the state administrators and the legislators that he interviewed
in Georgia, and I just have to read you these because they're
so great. "The University of Georgia is
seen as having people out in the community.
In response to them, the fact is that citizens feel that their
lives have been enriched because of the outreach program."
And then here's a quote from the state legislator in Georgia,
which we'd probably look down our noses at, but what has put a
lot of effort into higher ed. "I dare not touch the funding
for UGA outreach because the folks depend on that expertise."
So they're very engaged, the public and the university.
And then, finally, the Cramer Walsh research, and I just want
to read you a couple things from that.
"Many residents of Wisconsin perceive that their state's
flagship university was inattentive and inaccessible."
There was general agreement that the university was excellent but
was mainly inattentive to the concerns and needs of people
like themselves. And this is the one that really
blew me away because it says their concept of what the
university might have once been with the Wisconsin Idea doesn't
even exist anymore in their minds.
She wrote, "Many members of the public do not expect a close
relationship between public universities and residents of
the state at large. They do not readily think of UW
Madison as a resource for all the people of the state."
So, as I get to, let me share a couple other anecdotal things
which sort of confirm this research.
And, again, I really do have affection for the state, but I
think back to the time that I wanted to get a master's degree
in business. I was working in a Wisconsin
agribusiness, and I wanted to get an MBA at Wisconsin.
My father was a Business School professor.
And I said to him, I can't work on a graduate degree here.
They don't have programs for evening students or weekend
students or executive students. So what did I do?
I went to the University of Chicago which had evening and
weekend and daytime on-campus programs.
It was all seamless, same faculty, same courses, and a lot
more Nobel Prize winners than the UW-Madison Business School,
I might add. [INAUDIBLE]
Pardon? And another thing, and this is
going to hit a little closer to home for use of those of you in
the ed school, I had a nonpartisan, nonprofit
public policy organization. We've been around for 80 years.
Our mission is to do research on state and local government and
share that information with the public and the media, with
school groups. We published a textbook and some
other things. I speak to the state
superintendents conference every year.
I'm sort of the lead-off speaker.
Somehow they haven't figured out that they don't want me.
I also speak to a lot of regional superintendents
meetings through CESAs and speak a fair amount at School Board
Association training sessions and so forth.
I got to tell you, I never see anybody from the university,
from the ed school. I can think of one exception,
but that's about it. Fourteen years as a private
college trustee and with a wife as a higher ed administrator, I
had a long interest in higher ed and higher ed admin, and that
had something to do with me getting a PhD fairly late in
life. So I started watching higher ed
leadership in Wisconsin, and it's sort of disturbing when you
think about it. And I'm not directing this at
Madison so much as the comprehensive campuses.
But there are revolving doors. There are chancellors coming and
going from those campuses all the time.
Just yesterday we learned that the UW Eau Claire chancellor is
leaving for a private college in Utah.
And I thought he just got here. Maybe it's been four, five, six
years. But we don't train, encourage,
promote from within. And who would be the chancellors
that would provide the leadership to reengage with the
public that people that had some connection to the state.
We import these people from all over the place.
Go look at their bios. Alabama, Washington state,
everywhere except here, and they come and go regularly.
The one exception is Chuck Sorensen at Stout, and he does a
fantastic job. And he gets Wisconsin.
But you can't expect a chancellor that comes from
somewhere else and then leaves in a few years to know anything
about the history and the culture, the ethnicity or
anything else about the state. So how can you expect them to
engage the public? I've already sort of given my
diatribe about UW Extension, and that's the one thing that was
clearly the Wisconsin Idea in terms of being involve in
community development, in agriculture, and they're still
doing that, and they're still doing a pretty good job despite
being treated like stepchildren. And as far as re-engaging the
public and trying to promote whatever the Wisconsin Idea is,
I've got to tell you, I don't think the university system gets
it at all. You look at the website, you
look at the press releases, it's all about marketing.
It's not about engaging. It's about marketing so we'll
convince you to give us more money.
So it's grassroots politically organizing the Badger Action
Network. And by the way, my wife is
responsible for some of this. So I'm hitting pretty close to
home. Economic summits a few years
ago. It was more about getting the
business community to think well of the university than to really
get engaged in the economic life of the state.
The growth agenda is a perfect example, and I have to say,
students can see through it. I've been teaching a graduate
course in the ed school the last three years, and I had a woman
come up to me in class last semester, it was a course on
politics and education, and she said to me, who are they
kidding? Growth agenda?
So we're going to educate accountants and engineers and
computer scientists who are really good people and who can
command pretty good salaries and they're going to graduate and
find out they can't find jobs in Wisconsin so they leave.
And regardless of what the Alumni Association or the campus
says, that's going on, gang. We've done a lot of research on
that, and it clearly shows that we've got a fairly large brain
drain. So, enough said.
I really believe in the Wisconsin Idea.
I really believe in the power of the university to reengage with
the people and institutions of the state.
State government, yes, but more. And I think there are all sorts
of issues that we could look at. There's a real need to
understand job creation in this state.
And, with apologies to Cory, neither side of the aisle in the
legislature gets it. Yet, there's all sorts of
research out there that says what works, and what doesn't
work and it has a lot to do with young firm creation.
Another idea, school districts across northern Wisconsin
have been bleeding children for 20 years.
The K-12 population in Wisconsin has been declining since 1998.
Sixty percent of the school districts in the state are
losing kids. Part of that is demography.
The end of the baby boom echo, but that is huge across northern
Wisconsin and in the rural southwest.
Those folks are, they're just thinning out.
And helping these rural areas think about how to reinvent
themselves and stay viable is really important.
A piece of research the UW could do, but we did it instead by the
way, was to look at rural schools and what's going on in
rural school districts and how they're faring.
And there's a lot more that could be done on that in terms
of looking for models that will make rural school districts
viable. Because you can't run the old
model, the old building teacher in the classroom model is not
going to work for them. So somebody better come up with
some other ways to do education. MPS, whatever you feel about it,
it ain't working. We did a major consulting
project on MPS a few years back, and had they not continued to
cut and layoff and so forth, we predicted they would be bankrupt
by last year when we did the study.
And they're teetering on the edge.
To think about how to reorganize the place, restructure it, it
can't be just money because they're spending more money than
the average school district in this by a reasonable margin.
They've got a lot of other problems, yes, but somebody
needs to help the legislature and Milwaukee and the Governor
think about how to educate disadvantaged children in
Milwaukee. There are municipalities in
school districts in this state that are on the verge of
bankruptcy. We have no municipal bankruptcy
law. So what happens when MPS or
Milwaukee County go belly-up? Well, it's going to come out of
the university's hide and all of our hides.
We're going to cover the bills. Medicaid is going to eat
everybody's socks. It already ate everybody's socks
in the last budget. If you look at the increase in
Medicaid funding, it will line up really nicely with the cuts
in almost every other program. >> Except transportation.
Well, yeah, but there was a small little general fund
transfer, but even transportation didn't fare well
to any great sense. So the university could really
help the state think about the way to deliver Medicaid services
in ways that save some money because if we don't, the money's
going to keep coming out of K-12 education, higher ed, technical
schools, everything else. So, I'll leave it at that.
I guess what I'm pleading for the original Wisconsin Idea
is I think the early proponents defined it, which was really
service to the people in the state in very practical ways.
And I don't want to leave you on a negative note because there is
a lot of good stuff going on out there.
Now, it tends to be in the more traditional places, but my
daughter's going to finish a degree in the Ag school, going
back to her heritage five or six generations I guess, and it's
interesting to hear her talk about the work that's being done
on potatoes, huge in central Wisconsin, cranberries, huge.
In fact, she and a classmate went out and interviewed
somebody that's experimenting with growing chokecherries.
And you don't think of them as really edible, but it turns out
that what this project is all about is finding indigenous
Wisconsin food materials, crops, whatever, that we can leverage
to make money off of and create new agricultural opportunities.
So there are good things going on.
But I'll leave it at that, and I guess we're going to have time
for the other two panelists to tells us...
[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE]
Hi, my name is Allie Gardner. I'm actually going to stay
seated instead of standing up. But, as was said before, I am
from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. I was born here in Madison.
I'm the only person in my family from Wisconsin, and the only
person to attend UW Madison in my family.
And it was interesting to hear that Todd mentioned that people
from Wisconsin think that they do everything better than the
rest of the states because that causes some family controversy
sometimes since I'm the only one from here.
But I'm really excited to get to talk about this topic,
especially as a student. I think sometimes, more often
than not, we're left out of these conversations, and I think
it's really important. Although there might be
disagreement about the role that students play in the Wisconsin
Idea, I think no matter what it's very clear that we are
going to be the future actors of it on our campus and off.
So I want to touch a little bit on that and I also want to
respond to the idea of the research that benefits all
Wisconsinites and how that is and is not different from the
public policy discussion that we have when we talk about the
history of the Wisconsin Idea. And then, also, start to give my
explanation on why I think, what was said early, the loss of
flare for the Wisconsin Idea, why I think that's happened.
I want to touch on that a little bit.
But I want to start by explaining my experience as a
student coming to this campus for the first time, having a
tour, walking up Bascom and all that.
And they tell you about the Wisconsin Idea, and they use the
quote, "The boundaries of the university are the boundaries of
the state." And then they start talking
about study abroad and volunteerism and philanthropy.
And so that is the first thing that I heard coming here, and
then when I went to student organization kick-offs and we
had administrators come and speak at them, that is the same
sort of rhetoric that what you learn here you take to Peru and
China and Bolivia and you spread it across, which I think are
great things, and I think activism and charity and
volunteerism are strong here, but the context of that being a
part of the Wisconsin Idea is a strange myth, and it's one that
we start with coming in as freshman that I think needs to
be demystified. I also did some of my own
homework and research on the history of the Wisconsin Idea
with a woman who has put together this set of CliffsNotes
on the Wisconsin Idea. It's about 12 pages, and she's
currently sharing it around campus and doing these small
sort of discussion groups on it. So it was pretty interesting to
me. I didn't know any of that and
wasn't taught any of that when I came here, but definitely was
taught that we sent a lot of people into the Peace Corps,
which is great. I think that's great.
But I think it's sort of starting us off with a
misrepresentation of our mission and confusing our service to
this state and what the Wisconsin Idea historically is
and is supposed to be with this idea of global service and
global competition and a focus on the international community,
which, again, I think is really important and has become a focus
but, again, is particularly controversial or contradictory
to the Wisconsin Idea in my own opinion.
And this sort of attempt to change the mission while still
using the branding of the Wisconsin Idea and the boundary
idea isn't really working and is incredibly confusing, I think,
and is confusing a lot of undergrads and probably graduate
students too. Going back to some of the
research that I did with this woman, her name is Gwen Drury
and she works in the Community and Academic Partnership, I
believe is what it's called, in University Health Services.
What she said, she explained it as it's not the Wisconsin Idea,
it's the Wisconsin Idea and trying to emphasize that this
was about Wisconsin, not that we take these ideas that we learn
in Wisconsin and go spread them elsewhere and kind of develop
them elsewhere. But the whole point was that we
have these distinctions in Wisconsin of resources, of
expertise and of needs and of different problems that we have
here, and that trying to find the solutions to those problems
and using the expertise and innovation and resources of our
own state is what the Wisconsin Idea is actually about, not
about us kind of leaving elsewhere.
And that the Wisconsin Idea was developed in a time when we had
all of these really serious social, economic, and political
crises happening at one time and that there was mass corruption
that everyone agreed was happening.
They didn't know who was influencing who.
The public felt completely disconnected to what was going
on, and they saw and intense need for transparency and
change. And that this type of change
that was necessary was going to be huge, and it wasn't going to
be easy at all for anyone. And I think that, also talking
about that relationship between the state and the university for
research, for innovation, for expertise, was critical for
directly benefiting the entire state, and also for that focus
on transparency. And the idea that those that
were setting the agenda in our government at the time, people
didn't feel comfortable with, but the idea that the university
had a different agenda and that that agenda was based in
discovery of truth and in transparency and in this sifting
and winnowing idea, people felt more comfortable with than this
agenda that was set by people who were influential at the
time. I think some of the most clear
examples would be some of the dual appointments where
professors were also mayors, professors were also advisers to
governors and also served as directors of state agencies.
Some of the policies and practices that have already been
brought up, like the creation of income tax, when we first
started to see environmentalism, and when we first started to see
public health laws, child labor laws, development of recalls, in
general, and then becoming the first place in the world that
developed unemployment insurance.
All of those things came out of that time, and there was also a
policy or a law put into place that said that the capital, the
state capital always had to have a university in it.
And that's when we saw, even geographically, our Capitol
faces Bascom. So there was a really clear line
of that connection and a need for the sort of information and
expertise that the university can provide to legislators and
to policymakers to improve people's lives.
And I think it was brought up, the role of students at this
time, historically, this wasn't about students, but as people
who now, more and more, are really heavily involved in the
research of the university, we are current actors and we are
also future actors and people that will be carrying out the
Wisconsin Idea on this campus and also around this state.
One other thing that I think was also pointed out a little bit
was how controversial some of these policies or all of these
policies were at the time. And I think that's incredibly
important to focus on. Claims that this was acts of
socialism and that these major changes people weren't ready
for, but at the same time you had Charles McCarthy saying that
nothing was going to prevent class war more than opening the
doors of opportunity to the people of Wisconsin.
And this promoted this idea of access to higher education,
access to the university, and that that's what's going to keep
us from having bad things happen in these times of huge changes.
That it was going to be incredibly difficult for the
entire state to be in agreement when we were having these huge
changes that were going against these economic, political, and
social crises. And I think what started to
interest me also was I haven't read too much about, or even
heard people talk too much about, what public perception
was like at that time because we know we hear about Bob La
Follette, we hear about Van Hise and how they worked together and
how their leadership meant so much to the Wisconsin Idea and
that likely some of these things may not have happened without
their leadership. But I'm wondering if the same
sense of elitism that we've read about in Kathy Cramer Walsh's
pieces, or that we talk about sometimes that we know about,
was still there because it was people that represented the
university and people that were in elected positions and that
they were distinct from other people.
So that really interests me to see if there was a similar
public perception of elitism back then as there is now, and
if the difference is about leadership rather than public
perception, though I think that's an important component as
well. And in thinking about some of
the examples today, if we think about dual appointments, I think
we still have some professors that work in state agencies like
the Department of Health or something like that.
We have community projects on campus.
We have something called the Science Shop, which was just
opened a week ago, and they try to focus on providing research
to community projects. We have a Community Academic
Partnership, I think it's called, which I mentioned
earlier. But I think what we're missing
sometimes is a willingness to go towards those more controversial
issues that are social or economic or political or
whatever you want to call them. We don't have a lot of the
experts really willing to talk about and work on the
controversial issues that are affecting our state like
healthcare or unemployment or student loan debt, any of those
things, and I know that, historically, we used to be a
mining state, and it was professors involvement and the
university's involvement that made us the cheese state.
And so it's big, drastic changes like that, I'm sure at the time
were incredibly controversial. I'm sure having unemployment
compensation at the time was incredibly controversial, but
now it's normal and we state those as some of the most
progressive and incremental parts of our history.
But now there's this sense of fear, it seems, on campus to
talk about those controversial issues.
They're too political. And I think, we talk about
educational innovation on campus, that's been a huge
thing, but we don't talk about state innovation and I'm not
sure why. I'm not sure if that's something
that we're not allowed to touch, we're not allowed to talk about.
I know being a student who's gone to my professors and my TAs
before and asked if I can make a class announcement, and usually
it's on issues that pertain to student government, it's not
about partisan type of work or whatever people want to call it,
but they'll say I don't know if I can let you make that
announcement because it's too political, or I don't know if I
can have you send out that email because I'm not allowed to get
too political in my department, or if I've made phone calls,
things like that. There's this real fear on
campus, and this goes back to what I was saying about why I
think there's this loss of flare on the Wisconsin Idea, and I
think the fear also stems from the fact that we lack support an
a sense of unity. The chancellor, earlier, talked
about our culture of individualism and that there's a
lack of teamwork and that that prevents sometimes from the
educational innovation that's necessary, but I think it also
prevents us from feeling like we can talk about these
controversial issues that are affecting us as citizens of this
state. We who work in the university
and go to school here, we are also citizens of this state.
So we're effected by these things directly.
And then we also have the resources here and the expertise
here to actually work on those issues, but we're told not to,
or there's this sense that you don't talk about that, that you
don't bring that up. And I think that's why we moved
from explaining the Wisconsin Idea for what it was and moved
to more a sense of stewardship, philanthropy, volunteerism
because those things are something everyone can get on
board with and they don't make people uncomfortable for
whatever reason. And I think that fear creates a
lack of motivation and a lack of activation in students and in
other governance groups as well on campus.
We lack the unity. We don't feel like there's
support in place, and we also don't have the leaders.
I think what was mentioned by Todd early is incredibly
important. Leadership is really important
here. We need more Bascoms,
La Follettes. We don't have those in our
generation, and also some other non-male, non-white leaders.
[INAUDIBLE] >> What was that?
We have Cory. [LAUGHTER]
Leaders as well. But I'm wondering if we are
developing those sorts of leaders here, if we are teaching
people to question, to attack those controversial issues,
to do the sifting and winnowing that we harp on, it's not just a
plaque but are we actually practicing that and are we doing
that so that we're creating leaders in our students and in
our faculty and in our staff too to be able to take on chancellor
positions or whatever other leadership positions that are
going to activate and motivate our communities and activate and
motivate our governance groups on campus to start working on
those more controversial issues. I think that also ties into our
disability to advocate properly because we don't have support
and we don't have leaders and we aren't activated and we're not
working on those controversial issues.
So I think that inhibits us from doing the type of advocacy work
that we need to do for the university, and instead we focus
on this global focus or this global competition and that sort
of market rather than what does this state actually need right
now? How do we use these resources to
help this state and how are we not afraid to use them to help
this state even on controversial matters?
That's all. [APPLAUSE]
Okay, is it on? Yes, okay, it's on.
I'm going to round out this panel, and I'm not going to talk
for very long. I want to first say that I think
I'm going to, as a fairly controversial person I believe,
take the chance to actually say that I remarkably agree with
much of what's been said here, both with Todd and with Cory,
and then I sort of strongly disagree with some things that
they each said. Here's a little bit of what I
agree with. We have taken a turn at some
point, I don't know when. I have only been here eight
years. I've learned, in no short order,
that that's not very long in this place.
I came here from Virginia, a place where I don't think the
universities do much for the state at all.
The place has very little sense of community, and we have no
connection to UVA. The only people who have
connection to UVA are the people at UVA.
I think that the rhetoric here has been about the value of the
degree that we offer in monetary terms.
That we spend a ton of time showing you that education pays
off and showing you that chart over and over again.
That the degree is valuable, that it has payback, and that
it's worth it. That you should go into debt for
it, that you should buy it at all costs, and that that's why
you should come here. That's an incredibly
individualizing way to think about what we're doing at this
university, and it's no wonder that we've become incredibly
individualized, at the administration level, at the
faculty level, at the student level.
Everybody's in it for themselves, and everybody's out
to become the best superstar they can be.
We're going to lose on that proposition.
We're going to lose relative to those that we want to be
competitive with. We're going to lose because
we're not in control of the economy.
We're going to lose because if we're interested in a quality
of opportunity at all, inevitably at some point, that
premium to the bachelor's degree is going to start to decline
because more and more people get it, and so there isn't going to
be such a premium. And then we're going to get
upset. Then we're going to start
pushing on our graduate programs.
The way to win here is through the notion that we are
generating something here that is a collective good, and that's
knowledge, and that's discussion, and it's what you're
doing in the room. It's the idea that people come
and exchange ideas about how to make the world better and that
we go out and then we implement them.
The problem is that, A, we don't claim that, we don't say it loud
enough, and it's hard to measure.
So we need to prove that once you've come to any of our
universities or any of our two-year colleges, that you
leave somehow changed in a way other than that you carry a
piece of paper that your employer thinks means you
learned something. That's what we fail to
demonstrate. That's what we don't show to the
legislature. They want us to have skills.
I realize that there are lots of varied and different people
within the legislature, so I actually don't want to talk
about them like one body. But we haven't made that case.
We haven't made that case. Cory's absolutely right.
And the lack of sense of a collective is why people get so
upset about their individual compensation and don't talk
about what's actually happened to moral around here.
We're upset about salaries and we turn to other individuals, to
students, to solve those problems, rather than saying our
entire unified front has eroded, and that's really what's a
shame. So I agree with you on that.
And I agree with Todd that we don't have nearly enough scholar
activists on this campus taking the work that they do in their
offices to the streets. I won't agree with you, though,
that it's not happening. I happen to know, I'm going to
use my own department just because I'm proud of my
department, Doug Harris, one of my colleagues who we
unfortunately are going to be losing, has been spending a lot
of time at the Department of Public Instruction and in
Milwaukee trying to help Milwaukee Public Schools.
I've been to a few events around the state myself and spend a
heck of a lot of time worrying about the rest of the state.
My colleague, Gloria Ladson-Billings does so.
Harry does so. Mike Olneck does so.
There's a huge number of ways in which we're out there all the
time doing that kind of work. Is it exactly the kind of work
that you hope to see or agree with politically?
I don't know. But I think what's important is
that we do leave our offices, and we do tell students that
it's important to leave this campus and to go out elsewhere.
You need to know that we get repercussions for that.
And I think Allie's starting to call it back.
I know it very, very well what happens when someone takes on a
controversial issue in this state.
You get told that you are being political.
You get told that it's inappropriate to speak out as a
professor at this institution and to have an attitude or
particular opinion. You get questioned as to whether
you're supposed to be protesting.
It doesn't become a Badger to get arrested publicly
protesting. Actually, I think that's the
definition of a Badger. Whenever that changed, that's
when we lost it because going out and taking what you know
from your learnings and your classes and taking what you know
from your research to the streets, to the people of the
state, that's what we're supposed to be doing here.
The one other thing I want to raise is that there is an
unfortunate attitude, and it is inculcated from the moment that
students set foot on this campus and from the moment that faculty
get here, that we are to be internationally recognized.
And you don't get internationally recognized
by focusing on the issues of Stout and Racine and etc.
In fact, if you study Wisconsin, and I know this very well,
you're told, wow, you're studying that very
white and very Midwestern state, and it has nothing to do with
the rest of the nation, and it's hard to get famous doing that.
So that's a problem. But we're going to have to find
other incentives to ensure that the faculty and the students
do focus on the issues of the state, and we're going to need a
lot more than a bus tour around the state, one that I'm happy to
be going on this year but that I understand isn't even taking me
that far north, and then I'm afraid we're going to sort of be
on a tour. Look at the UW Madison
professors, aren't they cute? [LAUGHTER]
I'm not cute. I have controversial ideas, and
I really hope that we get off the bus and really, really talk
to people about the way that Kathy has about what they think
of us and why they think that. Some of it's true.
A lot of it's not. But nobody's going to fix this
for us. It's on us to do it.
So thank you. [APPLAUSE]