cc
conversation today by talking about something that is extremely important here at the University of Wisconsin and
really all around the world.
It's the Wisconsin Idea. It's something that we sent you a survey on a little earlier, a
few days ago, and you provided
us with your feedback on what you know and what you don't know about the Wisconsin Idea.
And it's also very important
here at the University of Wisconsin because we are celebrating 100 years of the
Wisconsin Idea. And so with that, I want to introduce my colleague and
Katherine Sydor. graduate student here at the UW,
Katherine is a project assistant with the UW Center for
She is also a master's degree candidate with the UW School of Public Affairs, the La Follette School of Public Affairs, and
she'll be providing today's lecture.
Katherine Sydor: Good afternoon, everybody. We touched on the Wisconsin Idea, I believe Jeanan mentioned
it maybe the first day of class.
But we're really going to get into it, talk a little bit about the history, and then about the
importance of the Wisconsin Idea
to everyone in this room, to campus, to University of
to talk about how that connects to the themes that we're talking Wisconsin, and then we're going
about in this class throughout the entire semester.
As Jeanan said, my name is
Katherine and I just want to give you a little bit of my background so you understand why
I'm giving this lecture, and
then you can maybe make some connections between public
and Entrepreneurialism as we policy, politics, government,
move through the semester. I went to high school in
I went to Hartford. I don't know if everybody is Wisconsin.
undergrad where I majored in from there. And I went to Minnesota for my
history and women's studies. I then moved out to Washington, DC, where I worked for Congress
for about four years. I worked for David Obey who used
Wisconsin, Wausau, Superior area. And then I worked for a senator Wfrom Oregon, Senator Jeffrn
Merkley, for a little while.
After that decided I wanted to come back to school, get my master's in public affairs, and
that's what I'm doing at the
I've got one more year to go. And the La Follette School of Public Affairs is named for Bob La Follette, who we're going to
get to in just a little bit during our lecture here.
Just a couple notes. A timeline for your notes might
be helpful as you're listening
to this lecture. You're going to want to take
It's going to help you do the assignment that Jeanan's going notes on what I'm saying.
I can put the PowerPoint up on to talk about at the end of class.
Learn at UW if that would be helpful for you all, and if you have any questions or you want
to talk about your assignment,
You guys all have my email. talIt's Sydor@wisc.edu.ur assignment, please feel free to email me.
you, so I'd like a little bit of audience participation, So, what is the Wisconsin Idea? I really hate just talking at
That's how we can all learn together. Does anybody want to take a stab A little bit of back and forth.
Does anybody? You guys all responded to that at what the Wisconsin Idea is?
some thoughts or ideas. Anybody want to help me out, So I'm assuming some people have
[INAUDIBLE]
Once people get educated, they go out and try to do other forms of service. >> Service?
Yeah, good. So she said once people become
I think is definitely a good educated they go out and do other forms of service, which
definition. Does anybody else have any other thoughts?
Sure. >> It helps the-- [INAUDIBLE] As far as careers go
and other aspects of life.
>> So she's saying that it's helping prepare people for their
career-wise but maybe community-wise, right? life after college, not just
Great. I think those are really good
ideas.
So just so you know what the survey said, the one that we
had heard of the Wisconsin Idea before and 31% had heard of the Wisconsin experience. And this is sort of interesting
because we've been doing this poll the last year, and this is a slightly higher percentage
year in the last two semesters. Last year, I believe, it was than what we had gotten last
more around like 20% or 22%. So I think the awareness of the
Wisconsin Idea is growing a little bit more.
that undergraduate students aren't super familiar with it. Generally, I think Jeanan's experience in the past, we found
And I honestly wasn't either until I had come here for
graduate school.
Graduate students seem to be a little bit more connected with
So what we wanted to do is share the philosophy behind it.
that into the rest of your that philosophy with all of you so that it can be 100% of you all know what it is and can take
to the survey and gave their classrooms across campus. So I'm going to read a couple quotes from people who responded
definitions, and the thing I want you to keep in mind is that
Idea is somewhat fluid. So it can mean different things to different people. the definition of the Wisconsin
we want you to kind of stick There's some general ideas that
with. But there isn't one definition and there hasn't been one
definition throughout time
either over the last hundred years.
that Wisconsin should have a The Wisconsin Idea is the belief
major research university that contributes to the welfare of Wisconsinites, the country, and
the world through new ideas and public service. The Wisconsin Idea is that
the classroom. education is in and outside
It is a development of the skills and assets that make a student a leader and an
innovator.
It is also the idea that our education needs to go beyond the
endowed with a liberal education classroom and that we are
to teach others, to create new things, and to be leaders in a
I'm not sure who gave that global world in every way.
definition but I really like it. That's really great.
well-rounded education for all It is an idea to create a
isn't one definition. We can kind of think about all UW-Madison. So, like I said, there really
of those things as being accurate.
Here are a couple more
So in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, the university definitions.
of continues to seek ways to extend its influence beyond the
boundaries of campus. So part of the philosophy of the
entire Wisconsin educational system is this idea.
And it also has broader university implications throughout the world. Some people call it a political
philosophy, and that would be progressivism.
But the Wisconsin Idea isn't just that.
It's a lot of different things
and here are some concrete examples. Workers' Compensation.
Workers' Compensation is an idea
that grew out of Wisconsin using the concepts coming from the
Social security, an idea that was developed right here on campus, and we'll talk about Wisconsin Idea.
little bit. The public regulation of that a little bit more in a
utilities. And the nationally recognized
Institute for Research on Poverty.
Wisconsin Idea. And there are a lot of things, The work that they do on campus here, embodiment of the
like Social Security, Workers' Compensation, laws and policies
that have been in place so long that we might not even really think about them as being something that grew out of this
idea but they certainly are.
anymore. It's just that we're so used to hearing about them we don't really necessarily connect them
So just to give you a little bit of history, Charles Van Hise was
1918, and he's commonly credited university president in 1903 to
for bringing the Wisconsin Idea really to the forefront of the university.
A little background on him. He was born in Fulton,
So he was a life-long Wisconsinite. And, like I said, he was the Milwaukee.
And he really had some great president for 15 years.
connections with some other people who developed the Wisconsin Idea on campus.
One being Bob La Follette.
supported Charles Van Hise's And we're going to talk about him in just a second. But Bob La Follette, Sr.,
presidency of the university. So there were some great connections between these sort
of Wisconsin statesmen about a
hundred years ago. And the big thing that Charles
implement the University of Wisconsin Extension division did is he created and help
which became the backbone of the UW System.
How many of you guys have heard of UW Extension before? Pretty good amount, right?
of the university system, and, It's a pretty big important part
again, this is one of just sort of the embodiment of the Wisconsin Idea that we're going
to have little pieces of the
university out across the state, spreading out, bringing the knowledge of the university to
people out there and also bringing the ideas and the
have for researchers to solve here. quI'm just going to read thef out in the rest of the state
Wisconsin Extension system from their website. definition of the university
So University of Wisconsin Extension provides statewide
access to university resources
life. aAnd, again, I want to sort ofe oemphasize the back and forth and succeed in all stages of
between UW Extension and the nature of this relationship
people of Wisconsin. It's not like UW Extension is just giving out information.
They're taking questions back,
too. UW Extension carries out the
extending the boundaries of the university to the boundaries of the state through its four tradition of the Wisconsin Idea,
They've got Continuing divisions.
Education, Cooperative Extension, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development, Broadcast
and Media Innovations.
So that's what Charles did. Another really important character in this story is
Charles McCarthy, who was a librarian at the Legislative
Reference Bureau, which is still a part of state government.
I actually have a friend who
And this is really sort of the used to work there. And in 1912 he wrote a book called "The Wisconsin Idea."
first time that the phrase was really coined.
was actually written by Theodore And the introduction to the book
Roosevelt, which is really cool. So Wisconsin was really getting a lot of national attention for
this idea about extending the boundaries of the university
what he said in the introduction. "In Wisconsin there has been a And Theodore Roosevelt, this is
promises by performances and to reduce theories into practice. successful effort to redeem the
In no other state in the union has any university done the same
work for the community that has been done in Wisconsin by the University of Wisconsin." So this is something that
really sort of makes me kind of proud, that this great president
wrote the introduction to this book about this sort of,
probably at the time people thought maybe a quaint idea that
here. It's just kind of neat to look has grown into such a big important part of what we do
that Charles McCarthy worked at the Legislative Reference bacBureau.at. So we're going to come back to
that again. So, as I already said, we don't want to focus too much on one definition, but in case you do
want to write something down, Jack Stark's definition might be
something that you might consider taking note of.
It's just one person's
interpretation but it's helpful to have. And just so you know who Jack
Stark is, he's the Assistant
Chief Council at the Legislative Reference Bureau. He was and I'm actually not sure
if he's still there.
to the State." But in 1995 he wrote an article called "The Wisconsin Idea: The University's Service
So as far as I can tell, really, the two big pieces of literature
written about the Wisconsin Idea or reference that have ever been
have been done through the Legislative Reference Bureau. So there was the one in 1912 by
Charles McCarthy and then there was this guy at the Legislative Reference Bureau in 1995 who was
the Wisconsin Idea as well, and so he kind of gave a lot of the information in his lecture is likfrom Jack Stark's paper.ut
He sort of outlined the history and the timeline of everything. And I think, somebody might correct me, but I believe this
is the most complete history of the Wisconsin Idea, and it was
So here's a historical frame of the Wisconsin Idea. puThink about the time thatin Charles McCarthy wrote this
book. 1912, right?
Turn of the century. Think about what life was like
in the early 1900s. The country and the state were
largely still farmland, right? beginning to become industrialized, but we were
There's a lot of family farms out there. And there was a need for smart
development practices,
especially in agriculture. So there were all these farmers across the state, across the
country, who were growing food, raising cattle, and they were looking for best practices. And this is one of the ways that
the Wisconsin Idea really sort
of took hold was with this need for knowledge that these farmers had in Wisconsin and the
research university being here
needing questions to answer. So here are all these questions.
How should we grow corn? How should we grow soy beans?
How should we raise cattle? How should we make sure that our herds don't become susceptible
to all these diseases?
Questions like that. And the university provided a lot of the answers.
The boundaries of the campus are
the boundaries of the state. This is sort of the short definition of the Wisconsin
Idea, and I'm not really sure who first said this.
But when you think of most big research universities today this
might be the philosophy that
comes to mind right away. I know there are other universities, North Carolina,
South Carolina, other big state-funded universities that
wasn't necessarily always like sort of ascribe to this philosophy as well, but it
that and Wisconsin was at the forefront of doing this. So that's kind of cool.
So now I'm going to go through a
research that they did at the coupuniversity and maybe theody this idea through the work that they've done, through the
Like I said, a timeline using dates might help you get a policies that they helped implement after being here.
bigger picture of how this has all come together.
So let's go back to the first guy, John Bascom. So he was the president of UW,
had a moral duty to share expertise broadly. and he believed that students
So here's one little side note that I think is really
interesting and cool. I was an history major in undergrad so I really like kind of going back and looking at the
whole story and seeing what sort
of the university when Bob of connections you can make between different people. So John Bascom was the president
school was named for and he was La a Wisconsin statesman, bute. And Bob La Follette, like I said, was the guy that my public
And while he was here, before that he was just a lowly student at UW.
John Bascom was president. John Bascom lived in that house up on Observatory Hill.
And that's the La Follette
house. That's where my school is housed.
That's where the administrators have their offices. It's just an old house. And when John Bascom was
president, that's where he
lived. And when John Bascom was
seminars with the seniors at the president he used to have
university, a philosophy seminar.
years ago, Bob La Follette and And so you can imagine a hundred
John Bascom sitting up at that house where the La Follette School is housed today, having
intellectual philosophical
share what they learned here conversations where they talked about John Bascom's ideas about students having a moral duty to
with the rest of the state, with the rest of society.
And every once in a while when I think that's really cool.
I'm up at the house talking to an administrator, I like to think about the fact that Bob
La Follette was walking around
those halls a hundred years ago. So anyway, John Bascom, I digress, he really had the
early iterations of the Wisconsin Idea, at least the
though. This is just sort of his ideas philosophy. He wouldn't have called it that,
floating around in his head. And I would say he probably had
a lot of influence on Bob La Follette while he was a
student at the university. So he's kind of important to
remember. And here comes Bob. So he was influenced by President Bascom's philosophy,
and his nickname was
"Fighting Bob" and, like I said, he was a statesman. He was governor of Wisconsin, a
senator, his son became a senator from Wisconsin, and Bob La Follette actually ran on the progressive party ticket for
president.
he got 17% of the national vote. But he did lose that. That was in 1924. But he did carry Wisconsin and
So even though he didn't win, he got a lot of votes, and his ideas were fairly popular at
that time.
And he's really considered one of the leaders of progressive politics from the early part of
the last century. Like I said, the La Follette
And what's really interesting about the La Follette School, and maybe it's interesting to me named for him.
into the charter of the school because I go there, but written
Affairs needs to continue using the Wisconsin Idea in its legislatstudies.hat the La Follette School of Public
For example, when you get a master's or you do a PhD, graduate students, a lot of people, they do a thesis,?
they do like a dissertation,
like a big, long paper or a book where they write and they write and they write.
And maybe no one reads it.
Maybe your adviser reads it but that's about it. At the La Follette School
we don't write a big paper. We do a project.
policy. They are projects that are And we do a project that is something related to public
solving real public policy problems.
So like the city of Milwaukee might submit a question to the La Follette School.
of Madison, for the Wisconsin Department of Children and We've done projects for the city
project and so they submit it to Families, they maybe don't have the capacity to go through a
our school and then we learn by doing a real policy project. So we're using what we learn
here at the university, the skills and the expertise, our professors help us go through it, and it's a learning
experience but it also creates a
solid product that is actually used in society.
Wisconsin Idea continues to be So that's one way that the
Wisconsin Idea in action, like I used today at the university. And I think that public affairs is a pretty easy way to see the
said in previous examples. These master's projects are real
there's a definite connection. public policy problems, and so
You're not just kind of doing it as some sort of intellectual
Here's another guy who can give us a nice concrete example, Edwin Witte. exercise.
Wisconsin, and he was a graduate He was born in Ebenezer,
student in the economics department, and he's commonly called the father of Social
Security. And the reason why is because when he was a graduate student
Department, he actually came up with basically what was the precursor to Social Security. And another interesting
connection, he was advising Robert La Follette when Bob La Follette was governor. So he was a graduate student
here. He went up the street, talked to
Bob La Follette in the governor's office, comes up
with these ideas about Social Security, and he actually also
So that's the third time that the Legislative Reference Bureau worked at the Legislative Reference Bureau.
In 1935, so think about what was has come up in the story of the Wisconsin Idea.
happening in 1935, Great Depression started in 1929, he
Committee on Economic Security, and he took what he had been was appointed to the President's
Security, and through his position on that committee developing here as a graduate student, his ideas about Social
And he continued to be an adviser in the state and actually implemented Social Security on the national level.
grandson is actually one of my national legislature, he taught as a visiting professor, and his
professors at La Follette today. So his legacy sort of continues to live on.
But think about what I said.
So he's graduate student, he's doing research, he comes up with
Security, and we have one of awesome idea for Social
most important, arguably, one of the most important pieces of our
today. social welfare safety net still
And lots of people are still talking about the importance of Social Security, but a lot of,
I think, pretty strong arguments
can be made that it's an incredibly important part of our
Here's another guy. Stephen Babcock. government.
Institute is. And how many of you guys are And Babcock Hall is named for him over where the Dairy
actually from Wisconsin? The vast majority.
So we're all cheeseheads, right?
Do you guys know why we're called cheeseheads? You can actually thank this guy.
We're going to learn a new
little factoid today maybe you can take outside the classroom. In 1890 he came up with a method
to test the butterfat content of
was in the milk that was coming off of the farms and then Andimprove the cheesemakingwe were able to better test what
And he developed that test while processes.
he was at UW, while he was a researcher here.
that developed nutrition into a science, which of course today I He also did a lot of research
about a hundred years ago, the think we all probably think about that a lot, but think
notes about him. very beginnings of this science of nutrition. Some other little interesting
operating student housing Whecooperative in Wisconsin.ate tI'm not sure exactly where ite is, but it's got to be around
here somewhere. And like I said, the Babcock
important work. So the Babcock Institute is this Institute is named for him, and they continue to do really
little research institute that writes papers and reports
related to dairy farming, basically.
Obey in Washington, DC, we used the materials that were produced And an interesting side note, when I worked for Congressman
by the Babcock Institute when he were talking about legislation
related to dairy farmers in Wisconsin.
So that's another example of the information, the research, the
work that's being done at the university being taken out all
the way to Washington, DC, but for the benefit of everyone in
Wisconsin.
One of the last ones I wanted to talk about is Gaylord Nelson. Does anybody know, has anybody
heard of him before?
So he was the founder of Earth Day, and the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental
Studies is named for him. And he's a pretty important guy to Wisconsin. He passed away a few years ago,
but he was a Wisconsin senator
and a governor, and his environmental legacy continues to live on here at the
university. He did a lot of work for small
business as well, not just environmental stuff.
He worked on the Regulatory Flexibility Act which improved
the way federal agencies regulated small business, and he
worked for the Wilderness Society in 1980.
for his environmental work in the Apostle Islands. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
I don't know if anybody has ever been up there.
It's beautiful. The Apostle Islands National
Park is named for him. So the last people I want to
talk about are the Morgridges.
thrown around campus a lot So who's heard of the Morgridges? I feel like their name has been
in the last couple years. And why? Because they've given a lot of
money to the university, which
is another way that you can think about the Wisconsin Idea being embodied.
They donated $175 million to
help students go to the university, and they obviously established the Morgridge Center
for Public Service. John Morgridge was the CEO of Cisco Systems, which, if you
corporation that designs and don't know, is a multinational
sells consumer electronics, networking, communications technology, and services.
And he's part of a group of billionaires, you may have heard
of this, who have committed to giving the majority of their
wealth to philanthropic causes. And think we'll probably talk about more of those people later
But it's pretty cool that some on in the semester.
of those people have ties to the University of Wisconsin.
Idea being somewhat circular in this nature. And so think about the Wisconsin
It's supported by the state, the Wisconsin Idea is.
It's publicly funded and so it
follows that the knowledge and efforts turned out from the university should benefit the
people who are supporting us. So that's the taxpayers.
you can, to take away from this lecture is think about you're paying tuition but a substantial thing I would like you guys, if
is through state funding. No matter what, some of what part of your ability to be here
pays your tuition comes from the taxpayers of Wisconsin.
And think about what that means as far as what you want to do with your education and with
place. your life after you leave this
It doesn't mean that you need to go into something that's public service related, but it does
mean that when you get a job and
when you're out there and you've got a great life for yourself,
extend what you've gained through being here, how can you extend that to other people in think about what you can do to
Benefit the community that the state.
helped you get to where you are. That's it.
[APPLAUSE]