The Wisconsin Idea

Where I work, the University of Wisconsin—Madison, there is a long and proud tradition of conceiving of this land-grant university as serving the broader public good. Since the early twentieth century, this mission has been called “The Wisconsin Idea.” The University of Wisconsin was founded in 1848 and expanded as a land grant in 1866 using the authority of the Morrill Act. Like other land grants, it was intended to equip citizens with a broad variety of competencies. But the people of Wisconsin developed an even deeper meaning of the land-grant mission. By 1911, the state government and the state university were working together to grow the state of Wisconsin and to develop policy such as railroad regulation and workmen’s compensation. ^{Footnote 8} In other words, many people believed that the university and the state government were public institutions that ought to work together to help create a new society.

Along the way, that sense of connection between the state university system and self-governance has been eroded in Wisconsin. Take, for example, the Wisconsin Idea and its most common current definition: “the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.” That is a provocative idea in itself. The notion that there is an imperative that the work we do should serve people well beyond our campus or disciplinary borders goes against the grain of much of the contemporary culture of academia. Our main audiences are located on university campuses, not off of them. We tend to publicize our ideas in specialized journals, not in mass media.

But the original meaning of the Wisconsin Idea was even more provocative. The motivation behind it was not just that university research ought to benefit humankind, but that it should be directly applied in the process of developing policy. It was also expected that citizens would use this knowledge as one input among others as they exercised their role as participants in the broad project of self-governance. ^{Footnote 9}

As The Crucible Moment report and the Kellogg Commission have warned, the question of what purpose do universities serve with respect to democracy is not the key question driving policy on most campuses. Instead, the question has become what purpose do universities serve with respect to the economy. The recent dominance of this economic question has been shaped by and has reshaped public opinion about universities, with profound consequences for their future.

In the minds of citizens, higher education is often out of step with their needs. In Wisconsin, I have found through my fieldwork with Wisconsinites that although there is a great deal of fondness for the University of Wisconsin—Madison and the entire University of Wisconsin System, ^{Footnote 10} many people also feel a great deal of distance from it. ^{Footnote 11} This fieldwork involved inviting myself into conversations with 39 groups of people who meet regularly for social reasons across 27 different municipalities in the state. I visited them repeatedly between May 2007 and November 2012. ^{Footnote 12} What I observed is not necessarily representative of all people in the state. (My purpose in doing the research was to understand how particular perspectives lay the groundwork for stances on policies and candidates.) However, the perception that the University of Wisconsin—Madison is out of reach in terms of admissions, tuition, and lifestyle for most Wisconsinites was pervasive, particularly among people living in smaller, more rural communities throughout the state. People who viewed the university through this lens of distance were generally viewing it through an identity as rural folks who were not getting their fair share of resources, power, or respect in their state. ^{Footnote 13} In this perspective, the university was like other institutions of authority in their lives—remote, and not interested in the lives of people like themselves.

That might sound overly dramatic, but national-sample survey data do not give us much reassurance about the public’s attitudes toward higher education. Such data suggest a widespread view that higher education is driven by something other than a desire to serve the broader public. For example, a December 9–13, 2009, Public Agenda poll of 1,031 U.S. adults found that 60 percent of the public perceives that “colleges today are like most businesses and mainly care about the bottom line,” as opposed to “colleges today mainly care about education and making sure students have a good educational experience.” ^{Footnote 14} That same poll found that 33 percent “agree strongly” and 27 percent “agree somewhat” that “colleges could take a lot more students without lowering quality or raising prices.” With respect to public higher-education institutions in particular, the poll found that 49 percent believed that “your state’s public college and university system needs to be fundamentally overhauled” came closer to their own view than “your state’s public college system should be basically left alone” (39 percent). Across the United States, there is a sense that institutions of higher education are not in tune with the needs of the broader public.

The Civic Mission of Higher Education Is Not Dead, But It Is in Danger

Today, many people are advocating a revival of the civic mission of higher education. Campus Compact is a national organization that was created to promote this civic mission, and is now in its thirtieth-anniversary year. As I write this, over 250 college and university presidents have already signed a pledge to rigorously pursue this mission and to create a campus civic action plan by March of 2017. This push exists among research universities, as The Research Universities Civic Engagement Network within Campus Compact promotes community-engaged scholarship among scholars at the top research universities in the United States.

But the context in many of our states is such that promoting the civic mission of higher education is politically risky. Take Wisconsin again for example. In our last state budget cycle, our governor’s administration proposed eliminating the civic mission of our flagship university altogether. ^{Footnote 15} Here is the mission statement as it appears in state statute with changes in editing marks, as they appeared in Governor Scott Walker’s budget proposed in early 2015:

These proposed edits suggested fundamental changes to our mission. Had the revision passed, we would no longer be expected to improve the human condition. We would be expected to bolster the economy.

The immediate uproar in response to these changes caused the administration to reverse course and restore the original language. We should not discount that response, which reveals that the civic mission of the university is still widely valued. But I sense other threats to higher education’s ability to contribute to the maintenance, if not improvement, of democracy. One is the very access that university communities have to participate in democracy. As political scientists, we take it as a basic fact that the fundamental act of citizenship in a democracy is voting. It follows then that we might, at a minimum, have a duty to help our students develop the civic competency of voting. But ongoing efforts to expand voter ID legislation present some challenges. In Wisconsin, recent voter ID legislation mandates that voters show a WI driver’s license or other valid state ID card. ^{Footnote 17} Out-of-state students are eligible to vote in Wisconsin if they have resided in a ward for at least 28 days. But if they do not have a WI driver’s license or other state ID that is valid for voting purposes, they must obtain a special ID card. UW—Madison student IDs are not currently valid because they do not include a signature and a 2-year expiration horizon. University officials have decided to not change the current student ID so that it would be a valid voter ID, due to cost and security concerns and the uncertain future of the voter ID given pending court cases. ^{Footnote 18} Even more recently, the state legislature has passed legislation eliminating special registration deputies, citizens trained to register others, who have historically done much of the work of registering students to vote. These pieces of legislation were not necessarily designed to disenfranchise students. But the problem is that in the current context, in which the reigning party is Republican, and the student body leans Democratic, encouraging our students to vote is a delicate issue.

Indeed, encouraging student involvement in democratic processes in general is risky. The University of Wisconsin—Madison has a campus center devoted to public service, called the Morgridge Center for Public Service. I currently serve as the faculty director of that center. Since starting that job in the summer of 2014, I have been struck by the wariness with which we approach the notion of “public service.” As a political scientist, I think of “public service” as service in government and government-related activities. But our precarious relationship with the state government in recent years suggests it is not in our interest to get anywhere near government, for fear of appearing partisan. There is a strong sense that behaving in a way that is not consistent with the goals of the party in power (currently, the Republican Party) runs the risk of further erosion to our funding, our mission, and our ability to do our work. At the Morgridge Center, this means we have more ardently pursued connections with nonpartisan organizations than with government agencies, and we avoid working with advocacy organizations.

I agree that public resources should not be used in service of advocating for particular personalities to win office. Universities ought to be places in which the goal is creating knowledge and nurturing broad and informed debate, not using taxpayer resources to win elections or convincing students that one ideological view of the world is better than another. However, our original civic mission includes enabling people to develop the competencies necessary to ensure democracy persists. These competencies include a range of skills and practices, including voting, but also an appreciation for active participation and passionate advocacy for causes.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison does have a variety of important connections with governments of all levels. Our political science department has a thriving internship program for undergraduates in state and federal government. A faculty member in our School of Human Ecology, Karen Bogenschneider, runs a Faculty Impact Institute, which provides policymakers with research relevant to current policy debates. Individual units on campus consult with government agencies. Our LaFollette School of Public Affairs places students in policymaking internships and community-based learning. Next year a UniverCity Year program will marshal the skills of researchers and students in the efforts to solve problems identified by a particular municipality. Our Wisconsin Collaborative for Education Research Network is embedding graduate students in state legislative offices. I could go on. But my personal perception is that we are all treading softly in this work.

There is a strict line in the sand when it comes to using taxpayer dollars for partisan activity, but in reality the line between self-governance and politics is very difficult to distinguish. Providing information about how to register to vote and where to vote seems allowable, but what about registering students to vote? On a predominantly Democratic-leaning campus, in a stridently Democratic city in a state controlled by Republicans, the latter runs the risk of appearing partisan. Playing it safe means avoiding voter registration, and frankly, erring on the side of keeping our distance from government. ^{Footnote 19}

On a national scale, we have experienced this chilling effect with respect to federal funding for social science research. In recent years, members of Congress have argued that National Science Foundation funding should only go to research that benefits the economy or improves national security, rather than to (perhaps more controversial) topics that pertain to issues in United States democracy more generally. ^{Footnote 20}

This is what I mean by the turning away from government. At the same time that democracy seems broken, a set of institutions originally designed to ensure that democracy persists are now hampered in their efforts to revive their original mission and encourage people to participate in their democracy.

Reducing funding for higher education is more palatable to the public when higher education is portrayed as the enemy, and not a set of institutions that function in service of the broader public good. Advocates for smaller government have an easier time pursuing that line of argument when they argue that employees of colleges and universities are elitist and out of step with the rest of the population and are misusing public funds for partisan purposes.

The Politics of Resentment

I referred earlier to the sense of distance many people in small town Wisconsin feel from the UW—Madison. That perspective is part of a broader view that I have called “rural consciousness,” which is an identity as a rural resident combined with a perception that rural communities do not get their fair share of resources, power, or respect. ^{Footnote 21} In our current context, political leaders are capitalizing on that view in an overarching politics of resentment. ^{Footnote 22} They are making policy arguments and waging election campaigns by emphasizing divides between “us” and “them”—with university faculty, public employees, and urbanites among those cast as “them.” Officials have encouraged citizens reeling from pervasive economic uncertainty to blame particular social groups rather than structural causes.

In Wisconsin, this dynamic has manifest in arguments against accepting federal funding for a high-speed train on the basis that the train would only serve people in the major metro areas, not people in “outstate” Wisconsin. ^{Footnote 23} It has also been used to argue against funding for public employees and public higher education, and in favor of legislation that has crippled public employee unions. During my fieldwork, I heard from people in small towns struggling to make ends meet, noticing rising tax bills alongside declining communities and personal situations. At the same time they perceived that the good jobs, the wealth, and the growth are in the cities. In that view, why would they be willing to pay higher taxes to increase government spending? People with resentment toward the cities had no confidence that paying more into the public coffers would in any way benefit themselves or their community. In this way, the politics of resentment is fertile ground for support for smaller government, including support for cutting back funding for public higher education.

Even if larger government—more government social programs in particular—is not the answer, it is not straightforward that dismantling government and dismantling trust in it is beneficial to democracy in the long run. Even if people believe that “the less government, the better” and “the free market can handle [today’s complex economic] problems without the government being involved,” ^{Footnote 24} it is in their interests to learn about governance and to gain experience in government itself to be able to advocate for their preferred society. Civic skills are needed by conservatives and liberals alike. The United States needs a nonpartisan civic renewal. ^{Footnote 25}

Higher education is caught in a difficult situation. There is a need for a renewed focus on educating people for citizenship, but the forces necessitating that revival are preventing it. At the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the more that the university intentionally encourages engagement in political life, the more it opens itself up to complaints of partisanship. However, the more that we play it safe and keep out of public debates, the more detached and less relevant we seem and the more we further the perception that we are not an institution that exists for the broader public good. ^{Footnote 26}

The Treatment of Knowledge and the Threat of Elitism

One of the contributions of the Progressive Era was the notion that democratic self-governance requires a scientific regard for knowledge. The idea was that in order to move forward we need to base legislation on evidence, particularly evidence that is discovered in processes that are not the product of political corruption or favoritism. Many of us perceive that we are creating knowledge free from the taint of partisan bias. But as long as academics are portrayed as people who are out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, the more possible it is for lawmakers to move away from a tradition of evidence-based policymaking and to discount the value of higher education in self-governance.

To combat these trends and restore higher education as a public resource, we need to confront head on the claim that we are elitist. First, we would do well to acknowledge that there is a fair amount of elitism in academia in a socioeconomic sense. To what extent are our lives as academics out of touch from the lives of average Americans? By definition, we have a higher level of education. And those of us in tenure-track jobs also have relatively high salaries, not to mention health care and pensions, compared to many others in the population.

Institutions of higher education are privileged institutions and attending them is a luxury. What must it seem like to people struggling to make ends meet that others in society can afford to pay a large amount of money and not work for four years in order to spend time studying subjects whose connection to job training is not always obvious? What does it sound like to first-generation college students when those of us in academia ridicule the idea that we are in the business of job training? Training for work and training for democracy should not be mutually exclusive things, but we run the risk of feeding the misperception that they are when we deny that we exist in part to enable people to pursue a lifetime of meaningful work.

There is a fair amount of elitism amongst us in a different manner as well—in what we count as knowledge. Obviously, one of the main things that we have to contribute as academics is knowledge. As the Kellogg Commission put it, “the application of knowledge is a unique contribution our institutions can make to contemporary society.” ^{Footnote 27} So how do we justify our existence without claiming that the type of knowledge we hold is superior? We are uniquely situated to sift and winnow through evidence. And yet, to the extent that we reinforce the perception that we are the keepers of the only or most valid or valuable knowledge, we fuel public resentment against us.

As academics, we have the luxury of long-term study. We have the luxury of taking the time to learn research methods and existing bodies of knowledge, and the time to collect new information that enables us to extend that knowledge. However, an important input to our understanding of the world ought to be taking the time to learn from “common knowledge” or “folk wisdom” or “experiential knowledge.” That is true of scholars of all disciplines—from zoology to art. But it is especially the case for social scientists. We have something to learn from listening to people who are not academics. When we are outsiders to the communities that we study, we ought to take the time to understand the lived experiences and knowledge of the people within those communities, in addition to other forms of knowledge and rigorous scientific analysis. ^{Footnote 28}

Let me address this with respect to political knowledge in particular. It has become part of our conventional wisdom as political scientists that ordinary citizens do not have the levels of knowledge necessary for a healthy democracy. ^{Footnote 29} Even the “Crucible Moment” call to arms to renew our civic mission relied in part on evidence of ignorance of civic facts to make its plea. ^{Footnote 30} One of ten pieces of evidence cited to signify “anemic U.S. civic health” was a reference to the results of a civic knowledge test conducted by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. ^{Footnote 31} ISI declared that only 54 percent of graduating college seniors in 2008 could “pass” a 60-question multiple choice test measuring knowledge of history, international relations, and market economy.

But when we listen to the manner in which citizens make sense of the world we observe that perhaps our models of civic competence are missing something. Perhaps the main inputs to political preferences are not concrete facts from mass-mediated news, but instead lived experience or social identities. ^{Footnote 32} In other words, we assert that what people need to participate in their democracy are facts, but by privileging that type of knowledge over the knowledge people rely on to connect with other people, we are privileging a view of democratic participation that is biased toward our own socioeconomic and occupational perspectives.

We should also consider that when we do interact directly with the public in the course of our research there is a difference between fieldwork and engagement. Fieldwork—immersing ourselves in the lives of people in order to learn about human behavior—is undoubtedly a valuable form of gathering data. But there is something to be said for immersing ourselves in the lives of people beyond our campuses in order to both gather data as well as to contribute to their efforts to improve their lives. In other words, we would do well to revive the notion that we have a duty to engage in service to communities beyond our campuses. I call that combination of learning and service community-engaged scholarship.

One obstacle to doing community-engaged scholarship is entering into it without assuming that what we have to contribute are the answers, or the knowledge, that can fix and solve problems. We need to enter into collaborations with people beyond our campuses with the possibility that our role in these partnerships is something other than providing knowledge and expertise. It just may be the case that these collaborations will teach us something, and will expand our knowledge in ways we can not anticipate.

The key differences between engagement and fieldwork are reciprocity and audience. First, with respect to reciprocity, if we spend time with people in order to collect data, we are taking. If we pursue the additional step of spending time with people to communicate what we have learned from them and share that knowledge so that they can use it (or not) to improve their own lives, that is more akin to reciprocity. This might take the form of writing op-eds, of giving public lectures, of teaching a course for people beyond our own institutions. Ideally, reciprocity is not just the giving back of information. It is an approach to research in which listening and openness to mutual learning are central.

Second, with respect to audience, if we pursue our research with only other political scientists or other academics in mind, and publish our findings in ways and in places that typically only other academics access, that is not scholarship that seeks to contribute to the broader public good. We should not expect public support for our work if we do not think part of its purpose is to contribute to a broader public discussion.

What Is the Purpose of Political Science?

What drives us as individual political scientists, and as a discipline? If we are honest with ourselves we recognize that disciplinary incentives place a premium on publication in top-tier peer-reviewed journals and in gaining visibility among other political scientists. The Kellogg Commission concluded that from the outside it often looks like academics “are so inflexibly driven by disciplinary needs and concepts of excellence grounded in peer review, that we have lost sight of our institutional mission to address the contemporary multidisciplinary problems of the real world.” ^{Footnote 33}

Many political scientists spend substantial time trying to communicate knowledge to the broader public. This very journal was created for that purpose. ^{Footnote 34} The Monkey Cage and the Scholars Strategy Network thrive in that spirit, too. ^{Footnote 35} The American Political Science Association has sponsored task forces charged with communicating what we know about the problems of our democracy and potential solutions to a broad audience. ^{Footnote 36} But what are the rewards within the discipline and within our universities for spending substantial energy producing work whose audience is the broader public, rather than just members of the discipline? By remaining focused inwards, we may be perpetuating the perception that we are elitist and thereby providing fodder for those who see no point in providing public support to our endeavors. We remain focused inward at our own peril. As the Kellogg Commission put it back in 1999, “research and scholarship obviously mean discovering new knowledge. But we must also find ways to reward the scholar who steps back from her investigation or his contributions to a scholarly audience in his discipline and looks for ways to put that knowledge to work.” ^{Footnote 37}

Please note, however, that increasing institutional support for publicly-engaged work is not a relaxing of standards to suit the political winds. Instead, it is a returning to an important, original mission of many of our institutions—to enable democracy to persist. We can also revive this mission through our teaching. We have a duty to help people understand how government works, and also to provide people with the competencies necessary to participate in democracy: a willingness to listen to the “other,” an ability to critically reflect, and an ability to communicate with a wide variety of other people to share what we know in terms that others can understand and relate to. We can help our students learn those lessons by engaging them in the actual experience of doing these things.

We can also revive the civic mission of higher education by engaging in these practices ourselves in our research. Our institutions exist to ensure that democracy persists. We can reinvigorate that mission by the manner in which we do our research, how we communicate our results, and with whom we share our knowledge. We exist for the good of the broader public. It is not sustainable to assume that we are somehow removed or above it.