Scott Walker Is Out. Can a New Governor Save Higher Ed in the Badger State?

For most of his eight years as governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker was a thorn in the side of the state’s public colleges.

The Republican largely dismissed the value of a four-year degree and questioned the public role and work ethic of the faculty members who teach at those institutions. He pushed to remove faculty-tenure protections from state law.

He tried — and failed — to nix the “Wisconsin Idea,” the state university system’s mission statement to “extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society.”

And he pushed a policy agenda that cut hundreds of millions of dollars from higher education, froze tuition, and created political turmoil through two failed major proposals to overhaul the system and its operations.

But this year, locked in a close race for a third term, Walker attempted a bold political pivot. “I’m affirming the fact that I’m a pro-education governor,” Walker told the Wisconsin State Journal in June. “I’m going to continue to be a pro-education governor and build off of that.”

Instead, he lost to an actual educator: Tony Evers, the Democratic candidate, who is Wisconsin’s superintendent of public schools. The race was tight, and it was about far more than the incumbent’s record on education. But for a governor whose utilitarian view of higher education was once a key part of his political identity, the rebranding effort was striking.

And it never really worked, said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. Walker defined himself as governor through his first budget, in 2011, which cut $250 million from the university system, said Heck. “That’s the first thing that comes to mind for most people,” he said.

Thomas L. Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, was even blunter in his dismissal of Walker’s evolution. “Governor Walker has been an education governor — for Minnesota and other states who have recruited top-quality Wisconsin faculty due to his budget cuts,” he said. “For Wisconsin, it’s a laughable slogan.”

The Austerity Agenda

Walker’s rhetoric and policy proposals were part of a growing trend among conservatives to frame higher education solely as a means to a middle-class job. Republican governors in Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina all suggested that their states should limit support for degrees that do not lead to specific jobs, though each of those politicians holds a four-year degree.

Walker does not. He has explained that he quit his degree program early in order to take a job in finance at the American Red Cross in Milwaukee. “Certainly, I wanted an education for more than a job,” he was quoted as saying, “but my primary purpose was to get a job.”

More recently, President Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, have joined the chorus of politicians urging more attention and support for vocational training rather than a bachelor’s degree.

Evers cuts a much different profile. The Democrat, who is on the governing boards of both the university system and the technical-college system, has made broad but nonspecific promises to provide more state money for Wisconsin’s public colleges and universities. He has also promised to “support and reward research and innovation from students and faculty,” and to allow state residents to refinance their student loans at lower rates than they are currently paying.

Those goals would be a welcome change for the state’s public colleges, which have endured hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts during Walker’s tenure. Evers “won’t have the austerity agenda that was the hallmark of Walker’s two terms in office,” Harnisch said.

But Evers will have to find a higher-education agenda that gets some bipartisan support from both parties because Republicans are likely to control at least one of the chambers of the state Legislature, Harnisch said.

Noel Radomski, managing director of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, said higher education would also be competing with a host of other priorities for a share of the state’s budget.

Evers has said he intends to increase state spending on elementary and secondary education while continuing the tuition freeze for public colleges, Radomski said. In addition, the state’s aging population will continue to require more spending on priorities like Medicaid, meaning there will probably be very little left for any significant increase for public colleges.

Not a Pressing Issue

Another Republican governor with few fans at public colleges also lost his seat on Tuesday. Gov. Bruce Rauner, in Illinois, was soundly defeated by his Democratic opponent, J.B. Pritzker.

Rauner was largely blamed for a political stalemate that left public colleges without most of their state appropriations for some 800 days.

It might be tempting to read his downfall, and Walker’s hard pivot, as a sign that starve-the-beast approaches to higher education are losing favor. But the ouster of those two governors is no sign that higher education has gained more prominence or a new reputation among either the voting public or politicians.

In Wisconsin, for example, higher education finished eighth on a list of issues that voters ranked as the most important in polling by the Marquette Law School. Just 7 percent of voters said the university system was first or second on their list of pressing issues for the state, pollsters found.

Public schools, not academe, were the centerpiece of Walker’s attempt to bolster his education agenda. The governor proposed a $649-million increase in funding for public schools — largely as a reaction, said Radomski, to Evers’s budget request, which called for an increase of nearly $2 billion for elementary and secondary schools.

Health care, public schools, jobs and the economy, and road maintenance were the top four issues for voters, according to the Marquette poll. Even “Something Else” finished above the university system.

Just as important, the election of new Democratic governors in places like Illinois and Wisconsin doesn’t mean that state executives are taking a broader view of the role of higher education. As Harnisch said, many of the politicians now labeling themselves as “education governors” are responding to protests over teacher pay in elementary and secondary schools.

“I don’t see this election as marking a major shift in thinking about higher education from governors,” Harnisch said. “They still view it primarily through an economic and work-force-development lens.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.