It was 2004, and Sara Goldrick-Rab, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, had just landed a job at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
She hadn’t planned on becoming a professor. But faculty members and fellow students kept sending her an ad for the position. It seemed like a long shot — she hadn’t finished a single chapter of her dissertation — but she got an interview.
“I arrived here at 10 p.m. in the middle of a snowstorm,” she says, “and the chair of the department was there to greet me and take me out to dinner. And I felt like I was home.”
The job called for a sociologist doing applied work in higher-education policy, and that sums up Ms. Goldrick-Rab. But from the beginning, her new position chafed in a few places. Ms. Goldrick-Rab, who grew up in a Virginia suburb of Washington, identifies as an inveterate East Coaster. So it fell to her grandmother, who attended Northwestern University, to explain the social mores of that new home. Her suggestion for surviving the Midwest: “Pretend like you’re in a foreign country.”
“This was really good advice,” Ms. Goldrick-Rab says, “and I totally did not heed it.”
She never did become fluent in Midwestern Nice, or, as she calls it, “passive aggressiveness.” Instead, Ms. Goldrick-Rab has made a career of courting controversy by speaking bluntly about her pet issues — college affordability, the topic at the core of her scholarship; politics (she’s an enthusiastic Bernie Sanders supporter); and the status of tenure in Wisconsin (more on that shortly).
That helps explain why Ms. Goldrick-Rab is going through a period of tumult even as she should be taking a professional victory lap. As a professor of educational-policy studies and sociology, she has helped push the conversation of college affordability in new directions. Free college, a policy idea she championed before it was in vogue, is now part of mainstream discourse. The Wisconsin HOPE Lab, which she founded in 2013 to translate research on low-income students into policies that support them, has helped bring issues of housing and food insecurity to the fore. And this fall will see the release of her new book, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream (University of Chicago Press), “the first time I’m showing the world from a research standpoint what I’m capable of,” she says.
Yet the fact remains that Ms. Goldrick-Rab is as well known for her online outbursts as for her research, and her brash style often overshadows her substance.
“Sara is polarizing both on campus and in other circles,” says Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis who has observed her in both settings. People don’t deny that her work is “high quality,” Mr. Hillman says. What’s polarizing is how Ms. Goldrick-Rab takes that work to the broader public.
Her methods are grounded in an identity as a scholar-activist, one few higher-ed-policy experts share. And they include an intense social-media presence that has raised questions about her judgment, especially in the last year.
Soon, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be leaving the land of Midwestern Nice. She recently accepted a new job as a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University, and plans to start this summer.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab was characteristically frank in a blog post explaining that the “vanquished” tenure system in Wisconsin had compelled her to leave. “Terrified sheep make lousy teachers, lousy scholars, and lousy colleagues,” she wrote on her blog. “And today at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thanks to #FakeTenure, I’m surrounded by terrified sheep.”
Plenty of higher-education experts are active on Twitter, but few are as prolific as Ms. Goldrick-Rab, who has more than 102,000 tweets under her belt. Her 12,000 followers include fellow researchers and total strangers. She has fans, sparring partners, and allies who sometimes find themselves rolling their eyes at her. Her tweets, which let her weigh in on the D.C. policy chatter from afar, are passionate, political, and sometimes kind of mean. All of that can bring trouble.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab has long been an outspoken critic of Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, who has cut higher-education budgets and stripped tenure protections from state law. But in the eyes of many observers, she crossed a line when she posted this in July: “My grandfather, a psychologist, just walked me through similarities between Walker and Hitler. There are so many — it’s terrifying.” She followed up by describing the governor and “many” state legislators as “fascists.”
At the time, Governor Walker was soon to announce his short-lived presidential bid. The College Fix, a conservative blog, caught on to the tweets and wrote about the “extreme comparisons” Ms. Goldrick-Rab had made. Then the campus’s College Republicans issued a news release calling on the university to “address the ongoing, out-of-line actions by tenured professor Sara Goldrick-Rab.”
The organization pointed to another handful of tweets she had sent earlier, back in June. A high-school student had tweeted a photograph of several classmates in their caps and gowns making “W” signs with their fingers. (The photo was hashtagged #FutureBadgers.) Ms. Goldrick-Rab responded by essentially questioning their decision to enroll at Madison, citing an op-ed on threats to shared governance and tenure. After some pushback from the students, she charged ahead: “University is changing as we speak. Maybe look at info?”
For the tweet about Governor Walker, Ms. Goldrick-Rab received hate mail. “It got really ugly,” she says, and deeply personal.
But some of the toughest reaction to her tweets at the students came from her own campus. Ms. Goldrick-Rab told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel she was simply trying to inform them. But in addition to the College Republicans — who urged the university to stop her “harassment of these future Badgers” — both the chancellor and the Faculty Senate’s executive committee released statements expressing their dismay over her role in the conversation.
The executive committee’s statement was especially stern: “While claiming to stand for academic freedom,” it read, “she has in fact damaged that principle and our institution.” Ms. Goldrick-Rab thinks a “silent majority” of professors support her, but “I get nasty stuff from my colleagues,” she says.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab defends her decision to join the conversation but concedes that the tweets she wrote later in her exchange — after one student asked who she was — “could probably have been handled better.” And she says she sees how teenagers could have been confused by the messages. But she is perplexed by the response from colleagues.
As Ms. Goldrick-Rab sees it, tenure in Wisconsin is dead. The institutional response to her tweets felt like an attempt to embarrass her, and Governor Walker’s changes in tenure had, as she saw it, created an opening for the university to use budgetary concerns as an excuse to push her out.
Faculty reaction to the state of tenure in Wisconsin can be hard for outsiders to understand. Wisconsin had been an outlier: Other states don’t enshrine tenure in state law. While the situation in Wisconsin is still in flux, by all indications tenured professors will still have tenure. The university system has approved tenure protections of its own, but many faculty critics say those policies don’t go far enough. For many professors who’ve had state-level tenure protection, the change feels like an enormous loss.
To Ms. Goldrick-Rab, tenure is not theoretical; it’s urgent. “I worked for tenure,” she says, having earned it in 2011. “And I use the tenure protections. I don’t just have them.” Without the strongest possible protections, she feared she would face consequences for stepping out of line.
Some of the most significant events in Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s professional life have occurred far from the political drama in Wisconsin. Take the “ideas summit” on college affordability that the Lumina Foundation held in 2014. It was, for the most part, your standard-issue higher-education-policy event. Many of the usual suspects — people who study college affordability at think tanks, colleges, and research organizations — gathered in a Washington, D.C., conference room to present white papers on mainstream strategies for improving affordability: Get more student-loan borrowers into income-based repayment. Give prospective students better information on college outcomes and affordability.
Instead of offering another incremental policy fix, Ms. Goldrick-Rab and a co-author proposed a sweeping idea that hadn’t gotten much traction yet: Make the first two years free at every public college.
It was a memorable presentation, and Ms. Goldrick-Rab looks back on it as a big professional moment. She had even planned out what to wear — a black dress and “all this jewelry” — the weekend before. The idea was to look like “a corporate,” not a hippie, when calling for free college. “I know I stand out like a sore thumb,” Ms. Goldrick-Rab says, “and I know that people think I’m an idealist. And I don’t care, because I think I see something. I think I see the bigger picture.”
Rather than getting into the details of her proposal, she began by speaking frankly about how scared people are when it comes to paying for college. It was, says Zakiya Smith, the Lumina strategy director behind the meeting, “more of a heartfelt presentation than an academic presentation.”
These days, talking about “free” college doesn’t sound quite so crazy. Tennessee and Oregon have enacted laws making community college free. The Obama administration has proposed doing something similar nationally. Having a plan for free or debt-free college seems to be a requirement to run for president as a Democrat. None of those free-college plans amounts to Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s specific proposal, and she’s certainly not the only influence behind them. Still, the attention the issue attracts today is vindicating.
Free college isn’t the only issue she has worked to elevate. The HOPE Lab’s research exposing the extent to which college students face housing and food insecurity has drawn significant media attention. The lab has even brought together advocates and groups working to combat the problem.
And Ms. Goldrick-Rab will get a new round of attention with the release of her book, which draws on the results of an ambitious study of low-income college students in Wisconsin, and proposes ways to help students like them.
The three projects — free college, homeless students, and the book — share one core idea. Through the data she’s collected, and especially her interviews with students, Ms. Goldrick-Rab has become convinced that coming up with tuition is far from the only financial obstacle college students face.
She is not satisfied to publish findings about how to help low-income students. She feels a responsibility to change things for them. Sometimes that means poking holes in the conventional wisdom about college students. Sometimes it means poking at other experts who believe it.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab doesn’t reserve her public, no-holds-barred criticism for politicians like Governor Walker. She also levels it at other higher-education experts.
When Donald E. Heller, then dean of the education school at Michigan State University, announced last fall that he was taking the provost’s job at the University of San Francisco, Ms. Goldrick-Rab chided him for going to a private university with a net price of $22,000 for low-income students.
When Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told The New York Times in an article about free community college that “we should be much more concerned about quality and about completion” than the price tag, Ms. Goldrick-Rab tweeted that “rhetoric like that is elitist and even a bit classist.”
Then there are Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s tweets at and about Kevin Carey, director of the education-policy program at New America. Here’s how she responded last year on Twitter to Mr. Carey’s book: “Review of @kevincarey1 book “End of College": A white man’s delusional wet dream claims ‘secret of life’ held by University of Everywhere.” (She also co-wrote a blistering review of the book.)
Mr. Carey and Ms. Baum were among a handful of higher-education figures who chose not to comment about Ms. Goldrick-Rab for this article. Academics tend to be polite, Mr. Heller says, and Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s style — both on social media and in real life — can be “brusque.”
“A hallmark of my Twitter style is to be forthright and honest,” Ms. Goldrick-Rab says. “I don’t sugarcoat.”
Reaction to that, she says, is “the epitome of how directness from women comes off.” Most of the people who’ve blocked her on Twitter are men, she says, perhaps men unaccustomed to being called out by a woman.
Although he has been a target of her Twitter barbs, “I would never criticize her passion,” Mr. Heller says. “It’s one of her great characteristics.” Where Ms. Goldrick-Rab can fall short, he adds, is in listening to — and taking seriously — opposing arguments.
For instance, Mr. Heller disagrees with Ms. Goldrick-Rab on the question of free college. His perspective — shared by some other scholars, as well as Hillary Clinton — is that when financial aid for needy students is limited, making college free for people who can afford to pay for it isn’t the best policy.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab, he says, doesn’t always acknowledge that this point of view can be held by people who are equally well informed and who share her goals of helping low-income students.
Mr. Heller considers her a good scholar, but he is not convinced by her position that all of her activism is grounded in that scholarship. “I question if her position is always supported by her research,” he says, “versus advocacy.”
All the same, Mr. Heller says, “we need people like Sara to push the envelope.”
On a brisk Thursday in January, Ms. Goldrick-Rab is crisscrossing Milwaukee in a Honda Odyssey with members of the HOPE Lab’s staff. On the drive from Madison, Ms. Goldrick-Rab and two staffers called the lab’s managing director for an impromptu meeting to draft a pitch for a text-messaging experiment in a different state. It’s an appropriate start to a packed day.
First: a meeting about a future project with Milwaukee Area Technical College. Next: a pizza lunch with a group of students at the college, who share their experiences with housing insecurity.
One student says he had to take a break from college after his father was deported. Another describes going into foster care after an argument with his mother’s abusive husband. A young woman talks about living out of a U-Haul with her mother and little brothers. Several mention losing loved ones to illness, violence, and the criminal-justice system.
For those students, college often provided obstacles of its own. As one puts it, many were “paying for classes we don’t need with money we don’t have.”
Ms. Goldrick-Rab tells the students that their stories matter to the lab’s work. “Instead of just doing research to say, That’s hard,” she says, “we want to do something about it.” In fact, the lab will hold a conference in Milwaukee next month as a next step in tackling student hunger and homelessness.
On the day goes: The group meets with representatives from local nonprofits. Ms. Goldrick-Rab catches up with administrators and a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, who seek to assure low-income students they belong there. She also sits down with two of the professors heading up the university’s new chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab never seems to drink water or coffee, or go to the bathroom. But before returning to Madison, she makes time for one last stop. One of the lab’s staffers, Minh Mai, grew up in Milwaukee. She has been talking up her favorite frozen-custard spot in town, Leon’s, and she wants her colleagues to experience it. So the crew piles out of the minivan for a taste.
While Ms. Goldrick-Rab is often on the road speaking at national policy events, the lab grounds her in Wisconsin. By design, its focus is statewide, not Madison-centric. She describes the lab as her family, and she has worked to hire staff members who are raising families in Wisconsin. They’re not positioned to leave the state.
So the future of the HOPE Lab was one of the most vexing aspects of Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s exit from Wisconsin, both logistically and emotionally. After much discussion, she ironed things out with the university. She will keep working with the lab as an independent consultant, and its work will continue until its founding gift — a $2.5-million grant from the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation — expires, in 2018.
When Greg Lampe, provost and vice chancellor for academic and student affairs of the University of Wisconsin Colleges, the state’s network of two-year campuses and an online one, first met Ms. Goldrick-Rab, he was struck by her respect for the work that two-year colleges do.
“From the moment I heard her speak,” he says, “I guess I could say I was a fan.” He is now the chair of the HOPE Lab’s advisory board.
When tenure protections were taken out of state law, he says, “I felt it in a very personal way.” So Mr. Lampe understands why Ms. Goldrick-Rab feels she has to leave. Still, he’d been telling her to wait. Policies, he says, can change. Lots of people hope that this one will.
But Temple offered tenure and a union with collective-bargaining power. It’s a public research university with the kind of demographically diverse student body that appeals to her and with access-and-aid policies she admires. Philadelphia lends itself to Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s research interests. The city has been her home before, and Midwestern Nice is not its language.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s new dean, Gregory M. Anderson, is also a sociologist studying higher education. The education school wants to make an impact, he says, and Ms. Goldrick-Rab’s work does that.
Did he hesitate to bring on Ms. Goldrick-Rab after her controversial tweets? “If Sara was controversial and did not have the academic chops,” he says, “then we wouldn’t be interested in Sara.” (Mr. Anderson says he expects the university’s board to sign off on her rank and tenure when it meets next week.)
Combing through the university’s data — and its Twitter timeline — “everything lines up,” Ms. Goldrick-Rab says. “Temple is clearly thinking the way I’m thinking.”
It’s a good thing, too. Because, she says, “I’m not going to change.”
In the wake of last summer’s Twitter firestorm, Ms. Goldrick-Rab says a graduate seminar she taught last semester was especially “therapeutic.” The course, planned before the controversy erupted, focused on scholar activism. In a weird turn of events, Governor Walker helped set the stage for it.
The governor had said that faculty members should teach more classes. While she hardly took that comment as marching orders, it did resonate with her view of faculty responsibilities. Ms. Goldrick-Rab is frequently asked to speak about balancing scholarship and activism, so developing a new course about the topic seemed a natural next step.
The course was built around guest speakers — scholars she was eager to meet, ones she thought her students could learn from. It became, among other things, a way for Ms. Goldrick-Rab to make sense of her own experience.
One thing the course didn’t provide was a working definition of scholar activism. Ms. Goldrick-Rab got close to pinning it down in a 2014 blog post she included on her syllabus: “Scholarly activism is not advocacy. Let me say that again, since in my experience people have trouble hearing this. I am a scholar-activist, but not an advocate. The difference is critical. An advocate begins with a core and guiding goal — not a theory — and pushes for changes to achieve that goal. In contrast, a scholar-activist begins with a set of testable assumptions, subjects these to rigorous research, and once in possession of research findings seeks to translate those findings into action.”
Naturally, Ms. Goldrick-Rab posted her syllabus on Twitter. The College Fix, apparently on the lookout for all things Sara Goldrick-Rab, critiqued it for “a notable absence": the conservative academic John C. McAdams, an associate professor of political science at nearby Marquette University. Marquette’s president is deciding whether Mr. McAdams should be allowed to keep his job after writing a controversial blog post criticizing the conduct of a graduate-student instructor in a class discussion of gay marriage.
Ms. Goldrick-Rab didn’t know Mr. McAdams, but after reading the criticism, she invited him to speak to her students for a class session devoted to scholar activism and tenure. He accepted.
He told the students about his blog, Marquette Warrior, which calls out instances in which he sees his university as falling short. Mr. McAdams says the students he met struck him as “politically correct.” And he disagrees with their professor about Governor Walker, whether colleges need more state funding, and, it’s safe to say, much more. But Mr. McAdams says he found Ms. Goldrick-Rab to be “quite pleasant.” And “although what she did was controversial,” he says, “she had every right.”
Ms. Goldrick-Rab posted a picture of her and her guest, smiling broadly, on Twitter: “fierce defenders of academic freedom from opposite sides of the political spectrum!” she wrote. After class, the two stopped off at the university club for lunch — during which, Mr. McAdams says, they had a friendly debate on the merits of taxpayer-subsidized education.
Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
