David Michael Miller
Gov. Scott Walker seems to genuinely enjoy antagonizing his perceived opponents, which has earned him a good deal of political currency outside of Dane County. But his move to gut the Wisconsin Idea has perplexed many. He has passed it off as a drafting error in his proposed budget, but we've since learned the cut was on his administration's docket since at least December 2014. Why would Walker, given his presidential ambitions, risk such a politically brash move with nothing tangible to gain?
There are, in fact, concrete, practical benefits to gutting the language, related specifically to the proposed expansion of school choice and the transformation of Wisconsin's technical colleges into wholly vocational schools. Conservatives have backed these causes for years in Wisconsin and, in the process, taken whacks at the Wisconsin Idea. The Walker administration is just the latest to do so.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Wisconsin Idea is a mutual partnership between the state and UW System. The System is charged with conducting research that enriches the lives of Wisconsinites "beyond the boundaries of its campuses." This includes initiatives not generally associated with the UW System: the 4-H program, small business grants and the Social Security system. It is one of the key policies that made Wisconsin, as President Theodore Roosevelt put it, "literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation, aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole."
The Wisconsin Idea's enduring popularity made it a politically risky target for conservatives, and some even attempted to claim its mantle. A well-oiled Republican political machine controlled the governorship and both houses of the Legislature for nearly 30 years beginning in 1939. Despite the state GOP's extremely conservative leadership and vocal anti-progressivism during those years, the Wisconsin Idea persisted. Jumping ahead to the 1990s, the first president of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation promoted the group's school voucher initiative as a "fresh and genuinely progressive" educational reform in the vein of the Wisconsin Idea. "Is it misleading to call school choice progressive?" Michael Joyce, dubbed the "godfather of compassionate conservativism" by George H.W. Bush, asked in a June 1992 Milwaukee Journal op-ed. On the contrary, he continued, it was "a fulfillment -- not a usurpation -- of that distinguished tradition."
For Joyce and the conservatives he represented, Wisconsin's greatest threat was no longer political corruption and money in politics, but the ivory tower professionals and career bureaucrats in public education. Only the "private initiative" of school choice offered the solution to defeating the special interests of "well-financed teacher unions, environmental extremism...[and] virulent feminism."
Paying public homage to the Wisconsin Idea was a useful rhetorical device for advancing school choice, a testament to its popularity. In private, Joyce was substantively opposed to the concept. In the transcript of a December 1992 speech to the Heritage Foundation's Board of Trustees (found in the personal archives of Milwaukee researcher Joanne Ricca), Joyce fumed that "Americans are sick and tired of being treated as passive clients by arrogant, paternalistic social scientists, therapists, professionals, and bureaucrats." His solution was a return to a robust civil society, where people were "willing to make their own critical life choices...based on their own common sense and folk wisdom." The return to "folk wisdom" meant discrediting the "professional pseudo-scientists eager to preserve their own intellectual hegemony."
Perhaps emboldened by the Bradley Foundation's entrenched role in state and national policymaking, Joyce abandoned the public attempt to link Progressive era nostalgia to the foundation's agenda. In a 1994 issue of Wisconsin Interest, the organ of the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, Joyce penned an article titled "The Legacy of the Wisconsin Idea: Hastening the Demise of an Exhausted Progressivism." In it, Joyce criticized former UW-Madison president John Bascom (1874-1887) for transferring "moral and spiritual authority away from civil society into the hands of the modern centralized state."
Joyce argued that Wisconsinites must take authority "away from corrupt intellectual and cultural elites in the universities, the media and elsewhere."
"To put it bluntly," Joyce summarized, "progressivism is a lost cause intellectually [and] destined for the dustbin of history." In its place, Joyce pictured a Wisconsin "resembling Ohio," with "small sectarian schools" rich in "religious and ethnic diversity." While the big university problem, or as Joyce put it, the "institutional manifestations" of bankrupt progressivism remained, he was "sanguine about our prospects" of rendering them obsolete in short time.
Given Walker's well-documented relationship to the Bradley Foundation (his 2010 and 2012 campaign chair was Joyce's successor, Michael Grebe), it becomes slightly more understandable why Walker would risk political blowback in attempting to fulfill a longstanding aspiration of one political godfather. The "drafting error" is the latest in a much longer, richer project of purging what remains of progressive policy in Wisconsin. It appears the buttressing language of the Wisconsin Idea will survive its 55th biennial budget, but the System's ability to carry out its charge may very well be crippled by Walker's ruthless and unprecedented defunding of public institutions.
Matt Reiter is a Ph.D. student in history at UW-Madison and a member of the Teaching Assistants' Association.
