After strange day the Wisconsin Idea survives.

So here’s roughly what happened.

Last Tuesday (Feb 3) our Governor proposed his budget. Now, as you may remember, he has a habit of putting things in the budget that don’t look especially connected to the budget except insofar as, of course, everything is connected to the budget. So it wasn’t so surprising, I suppose, that, alongside the very substantial and potentially devastating $300 million dollar cut to the UW system (the system, by the way, is comprised by 22 different campuses, some 2-year, others 4-year, and others including substantial numbers of graduate and professional programs, so it is not just UW-Madison), proposed changes to the mission of the system. One change, which although lots of people are unhappy with it, seems to me entirely reasonable, and also trivial since it is already implied on any reasonable interpretation of our already stated mission, is that we should help “meet the state’s workforce needs”. However, along with this came other changes – numerous deletions, which amounted to at best a watering down and at worst the elimination of what we call The Wisconsin Idea, the idea that the university is here to serve the state very broadly, in terms of producing and disseminating knowledge that is valuable for the residents, public institutions, and businesses of the State.

I got an email from a journalist fairly early on Wednesday, after I had heard about the proposals, but before I had scrutinized them (because I was preparing for a class, the students in which I live in a kind of horror of disappointing, as our Governor would be pleased to know), asking what I thought about the proposals. After reading them carefully, I responded that I didn’t want to say anything publicly, because the proposals looked so eccentric to me that I had no understanding of what was going on. And I am cautious about being quoted in public about university matters, because I don’t want to be off-message, and didn’t know at the time how the leadership of my campus (in whom I’m happy to say, I have a great deal of, fortunately justified, confidence, and from whom I am happy to take leadership) would respond. But I did say that I thought the proposed changes were distinctly odd.

Here are what seemed to me that most eccentric changes. The following phrases were all deleted from the mission:

“Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth”
“Which makes effective and efficient use of human and physical resources; which functions cooperatively with other educational institutions and systems”
“Which stresses undergraduate teaching as its main priority”

Let’s start with truth.

Now, I know this won’t be a popular view everywhere, but I have always thought of the (Wisconsin) legislators in both parties as tacit allies when it comes to truth. We might disagree about what is true, but we agreed, I thought, that when we disagreed, there was some truth of the matter about which we disagreed: only the postmodernists, I thought, disagreed with us about that; and I was alarmed that their influence seemed to have spread to the Governor’s office.

Equally eccentric seemed the removal of the commitment to using our resources effectively and efficiently. As Bowen and Tobin note in Locus of Authority, faculty are often resistant to the language of cost-effectiveness and efficiency. I, personally, am quite eager to use the increasingly limited resources available to the university as efficiently as possible, so I was equally alarmed that the faculty seemed to have gained such influence in the Governor’s office.

Strangest of all, though, was this proposed deletion:

“which stresses undergraduate teaching as its main priority”

Now, this seemed strange for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, undergraduate education is central to the mission of the institution. Although at UW-Madison we have as many graduate and professional students as we do undergraduates, most of the graduate students are here because the undergraduates are here, and a very large proportion of our professional students are recruited from the undergraduate pool. Take away the undergraduates and the whole enterprise is done for. Obviously, we could make a decision to, over time, shift our emphasis to graduate and professional education, and gradually divest ourselves of the undergraduates (that’s the one thing that would convince me to leave, at this point, if I thought it was going to happen within the period that remains of my working life, which, of course, even if it started now, it couldn’t). But you’d expect that choice to be the result of some sort of public deliberation. And I would expect the initiative to come from the campus itself, and not from the legislature, and certainly not from a Republican Governor.
Still less from a Republican Governor who, only days earlier, had made a speech saying that faculty do not teach enough students (by which he clearly meant undergraduate students). I would welcome a serious profession-wide deliberation about the balance of research and undergraduate teaching, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, but having him say what he did made that a harder conversation to have. But the view I would advance in that, at present very-difficult-to-have conversation would be that the central problem is not that we don’t work hard enough, but that we don’t work smart enough – our profession has a lamentably weak infrastructure for ensuring continual improvement in instructional practice, and gives faculty too much leeway to design the curriculum around their interests rather than around the students’ needs. So, I was irritated by his comments because I thought they were counterproductive; but, regardless, the proposed change flew in the face of his very recently stated, and widely reported, comments. Basically, this was the deletion that made me disbelieve that the the Governor wasn’t behind the whole package of changes.

My guess, in fact, is that Walker had very little to do with the proposed changes. He must, surely, be spending many hours a day on the phone to potential donors at this point, no? His first public comments were supportive but my guess is that those comments were based on the assumption that he should trust his team and publicly support them. Within a few hours it was well understood what the proposals were, and every single public comment from everyone of significance – including, I should say, senior Republican officials who are, generally, not at all known as uncritical supporters of either UW-Madison or the system as a whole – was negative to the point of ridicule. It was a remarkable testimony to how popular the Wisconsin Idea is, and how deeply it infuses the culture of the state. The whole episode was worth living through, just to find that out. Once it was clear the proposed deletions were dead in the water, Walker (quite properly I thought), instead of throwing his team under the bus, blamed the proposals on a “drafting error” and a “simple miscommunication during the natural back and forth of this process”. Lots of people are now disputing this, and think that the changes were an attempt to pander to the Republican base, and I can see why the reference to the state’s workforce needs might do that (though, again, I do think that is an entirely legitimate part of our mission, both because students have a reasonable expectation that we prepare them for useful employment, and because the residents of the state, who pay for a significant part of the enterprise have a reasonable expectation that we have some concern with preparing high quality teachers, nurses, accountants, early childhood teachers, and human resources managers, just to name professions that a number of recent graduates I have taught have entered. Speaking for myself, I could also live without the snotty comments about trade schools that some critics of this proposal have been coming out with). But it doesn’t explain the removal of the ideas that we should be efficient, that we should prioritize undergraduate teaching, or that we should hand the whole operation over to the postmodernists and the relativists. None of these ideas has much purchase with the Republican base, does it?

More on the whole event here.

Note: I’m cautious about trying to direct comments, for fear of having the counterproductive effect that Daniel’s last effort to do so had (though, if you can produce that level of wit, I don’t really care what you do), but I’d appreciate it if people would refrain from just being rude about Republicans: I don’t have time to moderate the comments today, and ranting really wouldn’t serve much purpose right now.