In the spring of 1990, Scott Walker, then a senior at Marquette University, decided to leave college before finishing his degree. A job in finance had opened up at the American Red Cross in Milwaukee, and Mr. Walker, now the governor of Wisconsin and a Republican candidate for president, leapt at the opportunity. “Certainly, I wanted an education for more than a job,” he has since said, “but my primary purpose was to get a job.”
It’s impossible not to consider that statement when regarding the governor’s recent gambits in higher-education policy.
In January, when Governor Walker released his proposed budget for the next two years, he put the finances and mission of Wisconsin’s university system front and center. He recommended granting the system autonomy from several state regulations, but as part of the deal he proposed to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin budget over two years while freezing tuition. In addition, he pushed to remove protections for tenure and shared governance from state law.
Those proposals set off a storm of controversy within the state and led to head-shaking from higher-education advocates across the country. With the cuts, Wisconsin became one of just a handful of states planning to reduce its spending on higher education. The plan for autonomy, which came with a high price, smelled too much like part of the governor’s privatization agenda, which had already made many observers in the state wary.
The kicker came when it was discovered that Governor Walker’s budget proposal would have gutted the “Wisconsin Idea” — the university system’s mission statement, ensconced in state law, that had long been a point of pride in the state. The Wisconsin Idea sets the system’s goals to “extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society.”
“Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition,” reads the state law. “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” The proposed budget sought to excise “knowledge,” “truth,” and “public service,” while adding a goal for the system to meet the state’s work-force needs.
Mr. Walker quickly backtracked on those changes, but the episode made the governor’s position seem clear: The value of a college degree, in his view, can be measured largely by the job that a graduate gets, and colleges are spending too much money and time on things that do not serve that mission.
Thanks to his presidential bid, Mr. Walker’s take on higher education — and the policies that accompany that position — is now coming under scrutiny from a wider public audience. In a crowded presidential field, and among sitting governors, he is perhaps the strongest proponent of such a utilitarian view. He is influential, but he is not alone.
Peter A. Lawler, a conservative scholar at Berry College, says the governor’s treatment of higher education as a career-preparation service is a bipartisan problem, based on the exaggerated ideas that colleges are inefficient and that the liberal arts are not valuable on the job market.
“The personal element of education is under attack,” says Mr. Lawler. “Walker is doing that, but so is the U.S. Department of Education.”
No Surprises
Like his political hero, Ronald Reagan, Governor Walker has routinely taken aim at higher education in both policies and public statements. In 1967, Reagan, who was then governor of California, rationalized budget cuts in higher education by saying that taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing “intellectual curiosity.” Governor Walker has suggested that “maybe it’s time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work.”
Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, says that Governor Walker uses lines like his comment about faculty members’ not working hard enough as a familiar trope to garner support from conservatives. “I think he’s interested in higher education from an ideological aspect: cutting tenure, making life miserable for liberals in Madison,” Mr. Heck says.
To a certain degree those lines have worked, says Mr. Heck, both in Wisconsin and in Iowa, a key battleground for presidential candidates.
As governor, Mr. Walker has made some faculty members miserable too. In 2011, shortly after he was elected, he introduced a bombshell bill eliminating collective-bargaining rights for state employees, known as Act 10, without having discussed it during the campaign.
The element of surprise has been a hallmark of many of Governor Walker’s main policy proposals: There was also no advance notice of this year’s higher-education proposals, for example. But look back at the arc of the governor’s tenure, and it’s hard to be shocked by his latest attempts to overhaul the university system.
The idea of cutting regulatory red tape for higher education — a common refrain that has been taken up by influential Republicans like U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, leader of the Senate education committee — was part of the governor’s first legislative session, in 2011. At the time, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, then chancellor of the system’s flagship, in Madison, argued that granting the university more freedom from state regulations would save money over the long haul. That proposal was roundly rejected by state legislators, and a few months later Ms. Martin resigned her post to become president of Amherst College.
Even before the most recent economic downturn, higher-education leaders in Wisconsin and across the country argued for cutting regulations as a means of operating more efficiently and saving the institutions money. In Wisconsin that cause has also been taken up by libertarian activists, including several of Mr. Walker’s key political supporters, says Noel Radomski, director of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a right-leaning think tank, has produced several papers since 2001 arguing that the university system should face less centralized control from the state, and even its own Board of Governors, in order to spur economic development, make it more accountable to the public, and allow the flagship to join the ranks of elite public universities.
Jon Hammes, a member of the institute’s Board of Directors, is now co-chairman of Mr. Walker’s fund-raising efforts for the Republican nomination.
The research institute receives much of its financial support from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, whose chief executive, Michael Grebe, was chairman of Mr. Walker’s 2010 and 2014 gubernatorial campaigns and is now chairman of the governor’s presidential campaign. The foundation has been a longtime player in the state’s higher-education politics. In the late 1990s, for example, it gave $100,000 to a group of faculty members challenging a speech code at the Madison campus.
Neither the institute nor the foundation responded to requests for comment.
Despite that backing, the Wisconsin Legislature, which is dominated by Republicans, eventually rejected all of the governor’s proposed regulatory freedoms for the university system, fearing that tuition would soon spiral out of control. At the same time, lawmakers pared the proposed budget cuts by just $50 million, agreed to the tuition freeze, and removed protections for tenure and shared governance from state law.
‘Command and Control’
Many faculty members opposed the regulatory autonomy and were not sorry to see it fail. But over all, they considered the legislative session a disaster: the result not only of misperceptions about the university’s operations but also of a highly polarized political environment in the state. Many professors and observers say much of the blame for that polarization lies with a governor who is more interested in a narrow ideological victory than a broad bipartisan consensus.
Despite fears of privatization, Governor Walker’s proposals weren’t meant to privatize the system, says Mr. Radomski. Instead, he argues, they were intended to gain more control of the system through the Board of Regents, which the governor appoints, and a cooperative system president. “A lot of it, when you boil it down, is command and control,” Mr. Radomski says.
That is a big change for a state considered the birthplace of the modern progressive movement in the United States — a place where the university system had broad bipartisan support and Republicans had to be centrists in order to win elections. But the political dynamic began to change during the late 1980s, says former U.S. Rep. Steve Gunderson, a moderate Republican who was elected to Congress in 1980 after defeating an incumbent Democrat.
The economic challenges of that decade led many conservatives to seek out candidates seen as more ideologically pure, says Mr. Gunderson, who is now president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. “People wanted to build walls around themselves and blame someone else.”
And that is the style that Governor Walker has embraced for his political career, Mr. Gunderson says.
“I watched him in his first term when he went after public-retiree programs, and I wondered why he didn’t declare an economic emergency,” Mr. Gunderson says. “Instead he polarized the state: You cannot have a discussion with family and friends who might have a different opinion.”
When it comes to polarization and fierce debate over higher education, Wisconsin is hardly alone. Governors across the political spectrum are now looking to higher education as a way to bolster their economies. Several have criticized degree programs and faculty members who, they complain, are not contributing to the economy, often as the rationale for cutting higher education’s budget.
Gov. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, has questioned the value of majors like anthropology and began an effort to examine faculty pay and productivity.
In North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory, also a Republican, has suggested that state support for higher education be overhauled to promote majors that create jobs and not the liberal arts, and has specifically criticized gender studies as a field that should not be subsidized by the state.
At the same time, campus leaders have for more than a decade touted the income benefit that comes with a college degree, usually as a way to prove their economic value to the state.
We’ve gotten to this point because the nation’s only broad economic-development strategy is to send more people to college, says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which advocates for the liberal arts in higher education. While that makes a college degree essential, it also puts higher education on the hot seat for the success or failure of the nation’s economy, she says.
And Governor Walker has been as happy as any political leader to keep colleges on that hot seat. Doing so may have helped him establish his conservative credentials, and it has certainly influenced the national debate over the role of public higher education.
But Common Cause’s Mr. Heck predicts that the governor’s divisive style and policies are too narrowly tailored and may cost him in the presidential election. Even though Mr. Walker has won two gubernatorial elections and survived a recall attempt, Mr. Heck says, he has never run in the same year as a presidential election. During those years, a broader slice of the electorate comes out to vote, and Wisconsin hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984.
We may soon find out if Mr. Walker’s aggressive utilitarianism plays in a national context. Mr. Heck has his doubts. “If you look at everyone who’s running for president,” he says, “Governor Walker has very little crossover appeal.”
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.
