The great surprise of election night was the Midwest’s swing to Donald Trump, a result driven to a considerable extent by heavy rural support for his candidacy. This shift was particularly dramatic in Wisconsin. In 2008, Barack Obama carried 40 of the state’s 47 nonmetropolitan counties. In 2016, Trump carried 42 of those counties.
The Midwestern surprise is only one illustration of an increasingly sharp urban-rural divide in the United States, a divide with partisan, economic, and racial dimensions. In geography, politics, and mission, public universities are caught uncomfortably in the middle of this divide.
One explanation for the causes of this shift — and for what it means for higher education — may be found in Katherine J. Cramer’s recent book, The Politics of Resentment (University of Chicago Press), a work that is the result of five years’ worth of conversations with rural Wisconsin residents. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, finds that her respondents are not motivated by any principled, systematic opposition to government; rather, their hostility arises from their feeling that government has left rural areas behind and does not respect rural people. While “rural” undoubtedly carries a racial freight, Cramer produces ample evidence that rural is not simply a code word for “white.”
Cramer is particularly illuminating on rural residents’ attitudes about the Madison campus and the University of Wisconsin system. She finds that people in Wisconsin take a great deal of pride in the quality of their universities, and that support for the Badgers is a large part of the identity of rural Wisconsinites. But she also produces ample evidence that they feel that UW at Madison is not for rural people. They view Madison as the domain of hippie professors and rich-kid students (who are, increasingly, from outside the state or foreign). They perceive the university as too expensive for many rural residents, and so selective as to exclude the graduates of underfunded rural high schools. Aside from the representatives of the extension service, university researchers — even those conducting research in rural parts of the state — are seen to be fixated on bizarre topics of little relevance to the everyday well-being of the state’s residents; two of Cramer’s respondents expressed puzzlement about researchers who came to their area to conduct elaborate studies of mice and patterns of log decay. Professors at Madison are seen as lazy and overpaid, people who sit idly behind a desk, leave their teaching assistants to do the labor of educating, and then demand a luxurious retirement as a right.
I recently joined the faculty at the University of Kansas, another institution that has been greatly affected by the fiscal policies of a divisive governor. And for me the job is a welcome homecoming: I grew up in a semirural part of Kansas. The attitudes Cramer encounters toward Madison are much the same as those I encountered, growing up, toward KU and the city of Lawrence. Although the balance of people in my hometown — a county seat with about 12,000 residents — would have counted themselves fans of the Kansas basketball team, I often heard the university characterized as an institution run by out-of-touch liberals dedicated to teaching rich kids graduating from the large, well-funded high schools in the Kansas City suburbs.
The public state universities serve is often very different from the public that governs them.
Many viewed the university as an impersonal place where students, especially from small towns, could get lost in the shuffle. KU’s student body is larger than the population of most Kansas counties. The campus was, and so far as I know still is, sometimes referred to as Snob Hill, a locution I occasionally saw accompanied by a pantomime of professors drinking tea with their pinkies stuck out to the side. This, of course, is a misconception.
But common stereotypes about KU reflect an emotional, personal interpretation of some undoubted facts: Lawrence is an overwhelmingly Democratic city in a state that has been almost unwaveringly Republican since the 1860s. The university does serve an enormous number of students from Kansas City’s prosperous suburbs — those suburbs are young and growing, and in many cases within commuting distance, making Lawrence the inexpensive option for many students. And, in the larger sense, it is certainly true that parts of the state are moving in very different directions. While the state population is growing, the great majority of counties are shrinking. The suburbs prosper while other parts of the state face hard times. More than 20 years ago, my colleague George Frederickson wrote about the problem of making effective public policy for these “two states” of Kansas — then, as now, generally beneficial policy is a challenge but by no means an impossibility. But many residents in Kansas and elsewhere have concluded that government in a state (or country) with large regional differences is a zero-sum game.
In the many other states where such divides exist, public universities find themselves stuck in the middle. Elected officials like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker have successfully marked out universities for special disfavor, in part by playing to the sorts of stereotypes discussed in Cramer’s book. The dwindling and uncertain state support for universities has contributed to precisely the sort of changes that her respondents objected to: increasing tuition, diminishing proportions of in-state students, and a heavy emphasis on the kinds of research that can attract large quantities of external funding. In this way, the financial vulnerability of public universities may necessitate decisions that make them seem more removed from the everyday realities of their states.
Many public universities are also in the middle geographically and economically. Although some flagships like Madison, the University of Texas at Austin, and Ohio State are in unusually well-off communities at the seats of state political power, most public universities are in modestly prosperous midsize cities — nice places to live and work, but certainly not positioned to determine the political direction of a state. (And of course, controversies over tenure, collective bargaining, and guns on campus make it clear that institutions like Madison and UT at Austin are in no position to dictate state policy, either.)
Finally, nearly all public universities are directly governed by states and charged to serve them, yet the natural public of a university may have a very different scope. Most public universities serve a basically local or regional population of students and have a limited profile in the public life of the state. A few have an undergraduate student body that is nearly national, and at both the undergraduate and graduate levels many public institutions serve an increasingly international body of students. All of these institutions contribute to scholarship as a global undertaking.
Public universities thus face a pair of challenges. First, the public they serve is often very different from the public that governs them. Second, they find themselves situated in states — and now, a country — where the public has chosen officials who reject the value of scholarship and the very idea of the general welfare. Making the case for the public value of universities is as important as ever, but higher education may be entering a period when it will be singularly difficult to make that case.
