Jeff Miller/UW Madison
Gov. Tommy Thompson signs the 1999-2001 state budget while UW Chancellor David Ward (left) and UW System President Katharine Lyall (third from left) look on. During his tenure, the state broke ground on 4,025 campus buildings.
Much to my surprise, the UW Board of Regents, still controlled by Scott Walker appointees, did a smart thing. They chose former Gov. Tommy Thompson, 78, to be interim system president for at least the next year.
This came after a mess of a process to choose a successor for Ray Cross, who announced his retirement last year. After an opaque search and closed-door discussions that included no faculty or staff, the regents announced only one candidate, University of Alaska President Jim Johnsen. Amid a hailstorm of criticism, Johnsen took a look around and decided the frozen tundra of Alaska was friendlier (even with the hits he’s taking there) than what he was about to step into here.
Now back to square one. I figured the Walker appointees would press their advantage and try to slam through another candidate before the Evers appointees assume a majority next spring. Instead, they did something brilliant. They tapped Tommy.
This is significant in more ways than one. The obvious importance is that Thompson is the quintessential elder statesman. Time has healed most partisan wounds from his 14 years as governor and, let’s face it, Scott Walker made him look moderate in comparison.
For some reason, Thompson gets a pass even from liberals on being a relatively early supporter of Donald Trump. I’m not sure why that is, but I’ll credit it to the sheer force of his personality. People just like the guy and so they’re willing to look the other way.
Tommy is also a natural born cheerleader for anything he decides to cheer about and he seems to have genuine affection for the UW, where he earned both his bachelor’s and law degrees. After years of disinvestment and disrespect under Walker, the UW badly needs somebody with the former guv’s status to make a strong case for why it’s important to support higher education. In that context, I was surprised that in the initial reports of Thompson’s hiring, Evers’ office offered no response. They should be all over this, praising it to the hilt.
But there’s a less obvious significance to the Tommy hire. He’s the first system president who is not an academic. He doesn’t have a doctorate (outside of a law degree) and he didn’t spend a career as a professor and university administrator.
This is maybe the best part of his appointment. Running a university system requires a skill set that has little or nothing to do with earning a Ph.D. A system president has to be able to oversee a vast (too vast) bureaucracy, navigate the demands of student activists and always surly professors, deal with crazy legislators (I mean state Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) here), raise money from corporations and rich alumni, and present a compelling case for support to average Wisconsinites all over the state.
Most importantly, a president needs to make the UW more efficient. You can’t ask the Legislature — much less go over their heads and make a plea to the general public — for a lot more money until you can show that you’re spending what you’ve got wisely. It has been amazing to me that with all of the calls to just forgive student debt (a terrible idea, by the way), and make public college tuition-free, there has been relatively little discussion about why the cost of college has risen so sharply in the past few decades. The evidence suggests that it isn’t professor pay, but compensation for an increased number of administrators and the cost of fancy campus buildings.
Having an academic background is not only not going to help a university leader tackle these problems, but it’s likely to be a hindrance. A career steeped in the academy is likely to create a point of view and personal connections that make it harder to ask tough questions about what all those colleagues are actually producing.
The pandemic and resulting budget crisis create an opportunity for a really skilled president to go hard at trimming the fat. Do that first. Create confidence that public dollars are being used responsibly and then, eventually, you’ll get more public dollars.
If Tommy is successful then the grip academics have on the UW’s top jobs may be broken. That would mean that the next permanent UW president could be selected not only by Evers’ appointees, but also selected from a broader pool of applicants.
