What would Tommy do?

In early January, UW-Madison economists Steven Deller and Tessa Conroy released a study on Wisconsin job creation that sank beneath the waves with barely a ripple, despite its insight into the Badger State’s sluggish economy.

The duo, in a report for the UW-Extension, found that new businesses created the largest share of new jobs in Wisconsin. Roughly half of those jobs “come from the smallest businesses, namely those with fewer than 20 employees,” Deller and Conroy wrote.

At the Capitol, their nuts-and-bolts recommendations didn’t get the time of day from policymakers. Deller, who has been studying Wisconsin’s economy for 23 years, laughed out loud when I asked if lawmakers or the governor’s office had met with him.

Chalk it up to the ruling Republicans pursuit of an entirely different strategy. In a nutshell: Support Wisconsin’s legacy businesses. Cut their taxes. Reduce regulatory oversight. Drive down the cost of labor. Stress job training. Problem is, after five years of road-testing this classic conservative strategy, Wisconsin’s economy is stalled.

People are hurting.

Thirty-one states had a better job-creation record than Wisconsin, according to federal data. Compared to the national rate of 11.2%, Wisconsin’s private-sector jobs increased by only 7.6% in the five-year period. The Kauffman Foundation ranked the Badger State dead last in entrepreneurialism. According to a Pew Charitable Trusts analysis, Wisconsin led the nation in the loss of middle-class households between 2000 and 2013. And poverty in Wisconsin has hit a 30-year high, according to a UW-Madison study.

Deller and Conroy’s policy recommendations for growing the Wisconsin economy (see related story, "Class dismissed") are hardly radical. But they are decidedly different from the Republican program. What’s striking and perhaps even more worrisome: UW experts like Deller and Conroy aren’t being pulled into the crucial policy deliberations at the Capitol.

Too many decision-makers “have made up their minds and are not open to what the research is telling us,” says Deller.

It’s not as if lawmakers were always receptive to research-based advice. But there has been a serious breakdown in the campus-Capitol relationship. For sure, it’s not a complete rupture. Good things still happen off on the side. But trust and mutual respect are strained to the breaking point.

“It’s just different than it was before,” says Tim Smeeding, a veteran UW-Madison economist who tries to bridge the ford.

The disharmony stems in part from the tensions of a generally liberal-minded university working with a decidedly conservative state government. Further exacerbating the relationship is the obliqueness of UW System bookkeeping and the Republican belief it hid a huge slush fund. (This became a key factor in the GOP-enforced tuition freeze and UW budget cut.) Add in the troubling geographic complaints that the UW System is Madison-centric and shorts the rest of the state and Milwaukee in particular.

UW advocates, in turn, are reeling from the $250 million UW budget cut, the four-year tuition freeze, the stripping of tenure protection from state statutes and Gov. Scott Walker’s surprise attempt in an earlier budget to bowdlerize the “Wisconsin Idea” that guides the UW’s mission to the citizenry.

All this makes for an unpleasant stew of missed signals, aggravation, suspicion and wheel spinning. Not to mention a nagging sense that the state as a whole is grievously hurt by the failure of the pols and profs to make nice.

Once upon a time it was different. Governors, Democrat and Republican alike, would tap top UW talent to serve and help run their administrations. Over the past 40-plus years this included Govs. Patrick Lucey, Lee Dreyfus, Tony Earl and Tommy Thompson deploying such UW luminaries as David Adamany, Walter Dickey, Ralph Andreano, Charles Cicchetti, Steve Born, Kenneth Lindner and Donald Percy in government service.

But under Jim Doyle, a Democrat, and now Scott Walker, a Republican, a new dynamic has emerged — governors ignoring the UW’s best and brightest to rely almost exclusively on their loyalists and apparatchiks to set policy and run the huge army of state employees.

 More than one UW person I talked to spoke approvingly (if not longingly) of the Tommy Thompson era. That’s when an activist Republican governor with Hamiltonian ambitions for a greater Wisconsin found common ground with the university to unleash a major expansion of the UW System, including several billion dollars in campus construction. 

How did he do it?

“I realized the university had to be my ally,” Thompson, 74, explains matter-of-factly, as if he were addressing a Poli Sci 101 class. “I had to make the university much more responsive to the needs of Wisconsin. And I said to myself I have to do it in a collegial way, because I don’t have the political power to do it alone. I’ve got to make sure the university understands I’m going to be its best friend. And for that friendship — quid pro quo — they’re going to help me build every part of this state.”

You don’t hear talk like that anymore in Wisconsin. An obvious question calls out: What would Tommy do to improve the sad state of campus-Capitol relations?

Yes, indeed: WWTD?

Perhaps bracelets could be distributed at the Capitol and Bascom Hall for inspiration.

Brett Healey, president of the conservative-minded John K. MacIiver Institute for Public Policy, suggests that the Capitol’s regard for the UW System plummeted in 2013 when Republican lawmakers ferreted out that the campuses were carrying a combined $1 billion-plus program balance, including $648 million in funds that the UW had some discretion in spending, i.e., “a slush fund.”

“It shocked the Republicans and called into question the credibility of the UW leadership,” Healey says. “I do think legislators felt betrayed.” For years, UW officials had argued they had no financial choice but to raise tuition, he adds.

He describes UW leaders as “clueless” and “isolated from reality.” But State Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R-Brookfield), one of the GOP bird dogs who dug into the UW books, is more forgiving. He thinks relations between the Capitol and Bascom Hill have improved in the last few years.

He also argues the UW is no worse off for budget cuts and tuition freezes. “If you look at outputs [such as the number of graduates], the UW is just as strong today as it was five years ago,” he says.

Kooyenga, however, faults the UW for political posturing on the Wisconsin Idea. He points out that it was the Assembly that restored the wording that the governor tried to change. And it was in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea and the dispersal of knowledge, he adds, that Republicans approached UW-Madison about empowering it to authorize charter schools to focus on improving minority academic performance. Chancellor Rebecca Blank declined.

Kooyenga is still irked.

“At the same time that Republicans were getting their ass kicked for being against the Wisconsin Idea — which was the governor’s problem, not ours — here was UW-Madison saying it didn’t want to spread its knowledge through a charter school.”

(The Legislature dealt with the reluctance, Kooyenga notes, by ordering the UW System through a budget measure to create a special office to authorize independent charter schools in Madison and Milwaukee.)

To be sure, faculty involvement in frontline political issues can be a double-edged sword. A year ago, Deller infuriated state Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) for issuing a UW Extension fact sheet that unfavorably compared the economic performance of “right to work” states to states that recognize collective bargaining rights. Nass, as Isthmus first reported, ripped the Deller report as one-sided “garbage research” — a waste of resources and a product of a professor “hiding behind academic freedom.”

Nass did not respond to a request for an interview about the state of UW-Capitol relations. Neither did Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau). A staffer for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) refused an interview request. Laurel Patrick, Gov. Scott Walker’s press secretary, said via email “our administration has a long history of partnering with the UW System.”

Patrick cited the governor’s support of a three-year degree, the UW’s flexible online degree and certificate program, and the unsuccessful effort to create a UW System Authority. “Therefore, it would be absolutely incorrect to assert that there is a ‘breakdown in communications between the Capitol and the university,’” she wrote, citing my query. “However, don’t let the facts get in the way of your narrative.” 

Michael Sussman, a star UW-Madison biochemist and director of the UW Biotechnology Center, is unnerved by the current situation. His unease is palpable in an interview. He’s been at the Madison campus for 34 years. “I love the university. I love the state. There’s no better place to do science,” he professes. “But things are getting worse.”

He cites budget-caused layoffs in his center and legislative criticism of stem cell research. “I’ve put up with it because in the past I’ve felt the state wanted me here. Many of us [in my situation] are wondering if that’s still true. I don’t know how else to say it: It’s shocking how this administration is treating the university compared to previous governors irrespective of their parties.”

Sussman praises Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat who promoted stem cell research, but his voice rises with passion when he mentions Thompson, who served as governor from 1987 to 2001.

 “Tommy was a true leader,” Sussman says. “He certainly valued knowledge and education. And he knew how to get things done.”

He recalls how in the 1990s UW-Madison Provost John Wiley brought him to the Capitol to meet Thompson, and how he spent two full hours explaining to a fascinated governor how DNA works and how biotechnology could transform medical research on campus and elevate UW-Madison as an international leader.

Thompson, he says with a note of awe, sought further briefings and responded with extra funding for a cluster faculty hiring in human genomics and for a huge biotech building program, BioStar, and related projects, that have transformed the Madison campus.

“My experience with Tommy was amazing,” he says. “I had never worked with a Republican in my life — I come from a family of die-hard liberal-socialist Democrats, like Bernie Sanders.”

Even after Thompson left for Washington to serve in President George W. Bush’s cabinet, the former governor still worked to keep the UW strong. Sussman says out of the blue Thompson even called him at home one night to say he’d heard a rumor that the biochemist was being recruited by the University of California, Davis (at twice his UW salary and with other inducements, notes Sussman).

Thompson urged him to stick with Wisconsin, and Sussman did. “I owe him a lot. The university owes him a lot,” he says. But today, he says, the climate is very different on campus. Faculty doesn’t feel valued. Even their research is under attack. Sussman spearheaded an open letter to the Legislature, signed by 700 or so faculty members, defending stem cell research from a proposed state ban promoted by Republican lawmakers.

“It’s greatly worrying to many of us,” he says, adding that sticking with the UW these days may not be the best career decision for a professor.

That point was underlined recently with Education Policy Studies professor Sara Goldrick-Rab blasting UW tenure changes when she announced her departure for a friendlier home at Temple University. Even more revealing was a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report that the Madison campus paid out nearly $9 million in raises and research support to retain 40 top faculty being courted by rival universities.

Their departure for greener pastures, in the face of Wisconsin’s turmoil, could have cost the UW even more — $18 million in federal research grants were in play, the paper reported.

Terry Shelton, who spent 23 years as the outreach director at the UW’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, speaks of the parlous relationship with the candor of a retiree. “There’s a lot of blame to go around,” he says.

He recalls what now seems like a golden age of faculty engagement. Heavyweight professors like Andy Reschovsky advising policymakers on the budget, Don Nichols on the Wisconsin economy, Graham Wilson and Dennis Dresang on government structure, Don Kettl on state-local government relations, John Witte on education, in addition to a series of ground-breaking economic summits led by a forceful UW System President Katharine Lyall.

“That kind of engagement is what I don’t see anymore,” says Shelton.

A small but telling example he cites is the Commission on Government Reform, Efficiency and Performance that Gov. Scott Walker appointed in late 2015. It is neither staffed by UW personnel nor has any UW members.

The irony, Shelton says, is that two La Follette Institute professors — Susan Yackee and Donald Moynihan — are consulting nationally on government reform for the Volcker Alliance, which was created by the former Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker to “address the challenge of effective execution of public policies and to help rebuild public trust in government.”

 Shelton says that the breakdown in communications isn’t just a one-way street. Academia has changed too. Young professors aren’t as willing to specialize in Wisconsin issues like those of an earlier era. They’re more likely to pack up, move on and advance their careers than spend 40 years at the UW, he says.

The problem “goes both ways,” he says. “Does this administration want to ask anybody for help? Are these professors willing to go the extra step and think about Wisconsin?”

Smeeding, a poverty and income-distribution researcher at the La Follette Institute, says UW faculty is quietly working with state officials on many issues, but not on critical economic or politically charged matters. “I don’t know if the other end of State Street always wants to know what we have to say,” he says.

Smeeding, who worked with conservative hero Daniel Patrick Moynihan on family issues at Syracuse University, recently addressed Walker’s The Future of the Family Commission. He says his talk prompted a good, vigorous discussion. He pointed out how the declining incomes of the undereducated translated to lower marriage rates and to the dire outcomes of young single women giving birth.

 “There’s a Catholic cardinal [Jerome Listecki] sitting there, and I’m saying, what’s wrong with birth control that works? What’s wrong with long-acting, reversible contraception? It’s much better than abortion.”

Another collaborative effort Smeeding points to is the long-running Family Impact Institute seminars that UW’s Karen Borgenschneider quietly runs for lawmakers and their staffs at the Capitol. It is, however, a closed-door affair with no press and no publicity. He says this is by the choice of lawmakers, who feel it allows for freer conversations.

There are other collaborations underway as well. La Follette has run a briefing series for the Legislature. It also works with the Wisconsin Legislative Council on health policy. And the UW School of Human Ecology, in general, is widely praised for its extensive outreach efforts, including a program-rich partnership with the UW-Cooperative Extension.

But it’s a different story for critical issues like economic development, environmental regulation and other politically sensitive matters. Says Smeeding: If Don Nichols, the state’s longtime economic guru, were still alive, “they wouldn’t want to hear what he had to say.”

Democrats share responsibility for the state of affairs. The estrangement became noticeable during Gov. Doyle’s administration, from 2003 to 2011. While the Democratic chief executive stood strong for stem cell research, he did not pull UW talent into his administration.

“Doyle to me was a great disappointment,” says political scientist Joel Rogers. He directs the UW-affiliated COWS think tank and says as part of his policy advocacy he wrote Doyle’s economic development strategy for the 2002 campaign. “As soon as he got in, I didn’t hear from the guy. It was a total shutdown.”

Rogers had a far better working relationship with the Thompson administration, which he says shared COWS’s commitment to creating industry apprenticeship programs to move young people into good-paying craft jobs.

“Tommy used to say, ‘Joel, you’re so far to the left of me that you go all around the table to sit next to me,’” Rogers recalls.

Bill McCoshen, Thompson’s commerce secretary, says he worked with COWS “with Tommy’s encouragement and because I thought Joel was giving me valuable input. Tommy inculcated that in all of us: Just because someone has a ‘D’ behind their name it doesn’t mean they don’t have good ideas.”

It’s a far different story today.

Rogers and COWS are treated as poison by the ruling Republicans, subjected to sweeping open records requests by lawmakers in search of scandal and targeted in overheated exposés from the partisan conservative press.

COWS still has projects in Wisconsin communities and works in 45 other states, including economically resurgent California, where it consults on transportation policy. In December, Rogers wrote an opinion column for the Journal Sentinel arguing that Wisconsin’s faltering middle class won’t be revived until the voters dump the state’s do-nothing political leaders. One assumes this was coolly noted at the Capitol.

When our telephone interview wraps up, and I’ve mentioned that I have a phoner scheduled with the former governor, Rogers closes by saying, “Give Tommy my regards.”

When we talk, Thompson is forthright: He won’t badmouth the officeholders “who have the job I love.” But when I bring up their relationship with UW leaders, he tells me, “I wish they got along better. “

“You can’t build that university by fighting it,” he says. “You got to work together. Everybody has got to put their shoulder to the wheel and get the job done for the state of Wisconsin.” His advice to UW System President Ray Cross? Invite lawmakers to tour the state’s 13 four-year campuses. Let them see for themselves what fantastic places they are.

“Every time I go to the campuses and see the kind of research and development they’re doing, it makes me proud to be part of it,” he adds.

“That pride has to got to be instilled into the governor and the Legislature. They got to realize they’re only paying around 31, 32% of the cost of the university system. If anybody comes up to me and says ‘I’ll be your biggest job creator. You pay 30 cents and I’ll pay 70 cents,’ who wouldn’t take that offer? When you look at it that way, the UW is a huge moneymaker for the state. It’s a huge economic driver.”

Thompson’s final “State of the State” addresses in 2000 and 2001 are chock full of UW strategies to grow the Wisconsin economy. There’s “the Madison Initiative,” “the Milwaukee Idea,” “the Chippewa Valley Initiative,” plus the touting of expansive campus projects that began in the early 1990s, including WISTAR and BioStar.

All together, he said in 2001, 4,025 campus building projects — at a collective cost of almost $2 billion — broke ground across the state. The year before, Thompson held a test tube of DNA strands in his hand as he told the Legislature: “Ladies and gentlemen, the face of our future lies in this little tube and many others like it in laboratories across Wisconsin.”

The four-term governor championed “the New Wisconsin Idea. “ He described it as a bold new partnership between the UW and the business community that would produce high-skill, high-paying technology jobs for state residents.

“People were just beginning to understand how our reliance on manufacturing was not pushing the state forward,” says George Lightbourn, a top state manager in the Thompson years. “Here we have a governor who early on saw the power of biotechnology.”

At the spring commencement on May 13, UW-Madison will grant Thompson an honorary degree for meritorious activity. (See related story, "UW to honor Thompson.")

Lightbourn argues that the massive investments in life science faculty, classrooms and buildings will prove to be Thompson’s greatest legacy in the long run, surpassing even school choice and welfare reform.

“Decades from now it will still be yielding benefits to the state,” Lightbourn predicts.

Reasonable people can argue whether the UW accomplished enough with these new resources.

But what can’t be questioned was Thompson’s unique skill to promote the state and forge partnerships with his political opposites on common goals. His teaming with UW-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala — an unabashed Clinton-style liberal who shared his ambitions to build the UW — was one of the great stories of the Thompson years. It was Shalala, with Thompson’s support, who initiated the era of private fundraising for campus buildings.

Thompson also paired with Assembly Speaker Tom Loftus — the brainy and savvy Democratic leader of the day — in his first term as governor. As “a bipartisan committee of two,” they toured every campus in the state to build rapport with the UW students and staff. “We were together so often that in Superior he gave my speech and I gave his speech,” Thompson recalls with a hearty laugh.

Of course, it’s that sort of bipartisan “let’s do it for Wisconsin” attitude that is sorely missing at the Capitol today. Total Republican control of the executive, legislative and judicial wings produces none of the required outreach and compromise that comes with divided government.

When I asked Thompson how he would mend the Capitol’s broken relationship with the university, he offered neither bromides nor magic fairy dust but commonsense steps. Thompson envisions a successful and outward-focused university system at the very heart of the state’s economic strategy for the 21st century.

Build on the strengths of the 13 four-year campuses, plus the Extension. Use them to bring the pols and professors together to work with regional civic and business leaders. Re-invigorate the campus visitor committees to strengthen those ties. UW-Madison, in particular, needs to better showcase the breadth and depth of its research to the broader community. Strengthen UW-Milwaukee. Also, says Thompson, smooth out the campus connections to the K-12 schools and the tech centers to better serve students.

Most intriguing of all, Thompson proposes creation of a special economic zone connecting Madison and Milwaukee, the state’s two largest metro communities and the centers of Wisconsin’s business and educational muscle. Echoing the I-94 corridor strategy advanced a few years ago by retired insurance executive Tom Hefty, Thompson sees great synergy if UW-Madison, Marquette, UW-Milwaukee, and all the tech and private schools are harnessed in a common vision for building Wisconsin.

“We want to develop an economic zone like the Research Triangle in North Carolina,” says Thompson, referring to the Raleigh-Durham region and the collaborative effort of government, university and business leaders beginning in the 1950s to capitalize on the brainpower of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University.

“We’ve never had that kind of cooperation. I started on it, but I left too soon,” he says. “We need to build that — a zone of economic development and educational excellence between Milwaukee and Madison.”

Right off the bat, Thompson envisions an economic summit putting together Madison and Milwaukee area leaders with legislators to work out a strategy. “It could be such a dynamo for growth," he enthuses.

Any takers for a WWTD bracelet?