Back to the Future at Stevens Point

Glen Moberg, Wisconsin Public Radio

To Lee Sherman Dreyfus, a former Wisconsin governor and chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, the campus he led was the same as Harvard, just in a different location. Or so claimed Tom Loftus in a recent essay he wrote as a eulogy to UW-Stevens Point.

For Loftus, a former member of the UW System’s Board of Regents and a political colleague of Dreyfus, this once-great university died on March 5, 2018. On that day, my job as provost was to share with the campus curricular recommendations designed to repair our budget and stabilize enrollment.

The proposal called for the elimination of numerous liberal-arts majors, the shifting of resources toward more career-focused programs, and the reimagining of the university’s core liberal-arts curriculum. For Loftus, those recommendations were reason to mourn. “Apparently, Aristotle and Socrates got it all wrong,” he wrote. “So RIP UWSP as you once were. You had a good run.”

Perhaps Loftus is right. UW-Stevens Point enjoyed its heyday during Dreyfus’s tenure. In the post-World War II decades, enrollment increased tenfold, from about 800 students in 1939-40 to more than 8,000 in the 1970s.

During those years, the number of academic programs grew from a handful of education majors to more than 40 undergraduate majors and seven master’s degrees. Dozens of faculty members with new doctoral degrees joined the teaching ranks, and a construction boom — to house the expanding library and academic colleges, and to meet the residential and recreational needs of students — transformed the campus. At the root of it all: the benevolent hands of government eager to invest taxpayer dollars.

Since then, however, everything has changed for UW-Stevens Point. Public funding has declined, from 50 percent of the university’s budget to 15 percent. As this subsidy eroded, the cost of education shifted from taxpayers to students. Tuition was free until the late 1960s, and fees were modest; today, a year’s tuition, room, and board at UW-Stevens Point costs Wisconsin residents just under $16,000. Higher prices produced mounting student debt, prompting what has become a six-year tuition freeze mandated by the Legislature.

Gone is the flood tide of baby-boom students streaming onto the campus. Instead, Wisconsin’s population is aging, and the number of 18-year-olds graduating from local high schools is projected to continue a general decline. Meanwhile, competition escalates, and new alternatives to the conventional college degree, once distant possibilities, are here.

If some critics look at our proposed curricular changes and see the death of a dream, I can understand. As an undergraduate from small-town Ohio, I attended the local public university. When I left high school, I planned a career in engineering; when I started college in the fall, I switched to physics; and by the time I graduated, I had also earned a degree in history. I carried my education to graduate school and eventually to a job as a history professor, which I still consider a remarkable gift.

That future small-town students in central and northern Wisconsin may be unable to walk this same path through UW-Stevens Point is a regional loss I feel personally.

So how can a historian make these kinds of recommendations? In short, we have tried nearly everything else. In tumultuous times, academic leaders are encouraged to remember the history and traditions of their institutions, and to do their best to preserve them, an ideal task for a historian.

As it turns out, although the liberal arts have long been present at UW-Stevens Point, values such as applied learning and career preparation were always the predominant focus, characterizing the interests that brought most students to the campus and shaping a majority of our programs.

Like many regional public universities, UW-Stevens Point began in 1894 as a normal school, an institution intended to provide vocational training for the next generation of public-school teachers. By 1927, it had become a teachers college with the ability to offer baccalaureate degrees in education, but nothing else. Throughout that period, students could take traditional subjects like history, English, mathematics, and science, but primarily in the service of preparing to teach.

Of course, few people in Stevens Point were content with that limited mission. Nearly everyone — chancellors like Lee Sherman Dreyfus, faculty members, and local citizens — dreamed that their small university could be more like Harvard. In fact, to read historians such as David Labaree, this one dream fueled much of the expansion of American higher education through the 19th and 20th centuries, as institutions big and small assumed as many trappings of the modern research university as possible: Ph.D.-trained faculty members, graduate programs, research budgets, and majors in every discipline.

For a brief time, the remarkable prosperity of the postwar era, Cold War tensions that equated education with national security, the baby boom, and an expanding job market all conspired to make that dream attainable. By the 1970s, UW-Stevens Point had blossomed from small teachers college to full-fledged regional university.

Yet even as UW-Stevens Point grew during the postwar era, applied learning and career preparation played the primary role in shaping the expansion. True, a new College of Letters and Science emerged, with majors in philosophy, history, English, and the traditional subjects of the liberal arts for students not seeking teaching credentials.

But alongside those programs came a new College of Applied Arts and Sciences, which quickly divided into a College of Natural Resources and a College of Professional Studies. Career-focused programs in those colleges drew a majority of students to Stevens Point then, just as they do today, in a clear expression of the institution’s enduring identity.

Far from abandoning the liberal arts at UW-Stevens Point, our current proposals aim to preserve as much as 80 percent of our faculty and courses in those disciplines through refocused majors and minors and a strengthened core curriculum for all students. With all deference to Socrates and Aristotle, the programs will offer genuine opportunities for deep engagement in the liberal arts and for students to pursue an “examined life,” albeit in different form.

For Loftus, Dreyfus, and anyone who experienced the halcyon days of public higher education, it is easy to imagine how our current story might seem one of decline and even death. Take a broader historical view, however, and you will just as easily find adaptation and innovation in the name of preserving the institution’s strong tradition of career preparation built on a foundation in the liberal arts. UW-Stevens Point was never meant to be Harvard, or even UW-Madison. That dream does deserve a eulogy.

In its place, we must recommit to the birth of a new kind of regional public university: collaborating with local stakeholders to identify and meet community needs, responding to a changing world of professional work, and endeavoring to solve regional problems. If we succeed, we will continue in best tradition of the Wisconsin Idea, placing knowledge in the service of central and northern Wisconsin.

We are only just beginning to write our future history.

Greg Summers is provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.