I didn’t want to write about it for a couple of reasons: The
New York Times had come out two days ago with an
op-ed piece about Governor Scott Walker and his attempt to reinvent the
Wisconsin Idea, which is often expressed by the maxim, “the boundaries of the
university are the boundaries of the state.” Walker proposed changing this with
some gag-inducing talk about meeting the needs of the work force, with the
clear implication that it was time for all of those dreamy-eyed professors to
set aside Plato and Shakespeare and get to the real job at hand: Teaching
coding, perhaps, rather than the theoretical mathematics that would allow for
the creation of a computer, or artificial intelligence. And so if the Times had spoken, what had I to
add?
But it nagged at me, since I had grown up very much with the
Wisconsin Idea, which in our Madison home came in the form of radio waves.
Wisconsin Public Radio, it now is—in my day, it was WHA, and the slogan, “the
oldest station in the nation,” still rings in my years. Was it? Perhaps not,
but it was among the first, and a very improving and wonderful thing it was. On
the coldest of winter days, you had the consolation of hearing directly from
the weatherman or the station manager in Brule, Wisconsin, that Madison was a mere climatological skip away from Miami Beach. You had concerts broadcast at you by
University of Wisconsin faculty, and lectures as well. Books were read at noon,
and the opera arrived on Saturday afternoon from the Met. And was anyone
listening? Well, I was, and I can tell you that someone else in the state was
too, since Milton Cross, the announcer since forever for the Met, once had a
question from a listener in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The problem? I never heard the
question, since I was laughing too hard at the wonderful—and most
operatic—change in pronunciation from the Wisconsin “BARE-a-boo” to
“bar-AH-boe.” I swear, Cross even rolled the “r.”
So the Wisconsin Idea was something very much around—no idle
talk, for all the “sifting and winnowing” that got thrown about. Some of the
fruit took a while to ripen: I heard the soprano Bettina Bjorksten analyze Die Winterreise years before I was
strong enough to listen to it and appreciate it, but that didn’t matter. It was
on my list of music I was going to get to, even decades later.
What I didn’t know, until Walker tried to gut it, was how
much more the Wisconsin Idea was, nor how widely it travelled and how extensive was its impact. It was the intellectual foundation of the Progressive Movement, and
Robert La Follette, Sr., took many of its ideas and made them reality. Here I
give you Wikipedia’s summary:
• Primary
elections, allowing the rank-and-file members of a political party to
choose its nominees rather than caucuses usually dominated by political bosses.
• Workers' compensation, allowing workers injured whilst working to receive a
fixed payment in compensation for their injuries and related expenses rather
than forcing them to go to court against their employers, which at the time was
extremely difficult and had little realistic chance of success.
• State regulation of railroads in addition to
the federal regulation imposed by the Interstate
Commerce Commission.
• Direct election of United States
Senators as opposed to the original method of their selection by the
state legislatures,
eventually ratified as the Seventeenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution.
·
Progressive
taxation, where the wealthier pay a higher rate of tax than the less-affluent, made possible
on the federal level in part by the adoption of the Sixteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution.
For a Wisconsin governor to wage war on the Wisconsin Idea,
then, was to go much further than to change the mission of the university: It
was an attempt to rewrite the state’s history, to deny it, and ultimately to
reject it.
So the Times had weighed in on Walker, the Washington Post
as well, even Bloomberg,
which was an eye-opener, since it revealed that:
In the late 1980s, eight public universities ranked in the
top 25 nationally, according to the admittedly imperfect U.S. News and World
Report assessment. The top one, the University of California at Berkeley, came
in fifth. Today, Berkeley remains the top-ranked
public university, but it has fallen to 20th place overall; two other public
universities barely made the top 25.
And where is the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the
flagship of the system? We are a shameful 47th nationally.
So what are we seeing? Can anyone really believe that this
is an assault on state universities, and a cynical one at that?
Right—so others were saying it, but why was it nagging me
so? Why speak when so many others with louder voices than mine had been raised?
There was something I needed to remember, but what was it?
The back burner came through, or was it hearing the oboe
solo in the Barber Violin Concerto? Because that led to Emily Auerbach,
since before she had emerged as a Professor of English at the University of
Wisconsin, she had been an oboist in the Wisconsin Youth Symphony
Orchestra, which after almost fifty years has enrolled over 5000 kids from
around the state to make classical music, and if that’s not the Wisconsin Idea,
well, it’s damn close. But Auerbach—who could have rested on her laurels after writing
a book on Jane Austin which won praise from, among others, Margaret
Drabble—decided to start the Odyssey Program, which is nationally acclaimed as
a trend setter, since it is more than just a year-long program for thirty
students, many of them mired in poverty, addiction, homelessness, and problems
that Walker and I and too-few others can only imagine. You don’t learn on an
empty stomach, so there’s food—real food—before class. And what about the kids?
Right—so there’s day care.
It’s education—yes—and the students get six credits from the
University of Wisconsin, but it’s much more than that. As you can see below,
it’s a fight for the students' soul, a fight to get the student to believe that
yes, he or she can do it. And so a kid who grew up with his mother addicted to
crack cocaine turns into a cop, and is in turn visiting schools with the
message: You can turn your life around.
And the program seems both academically rigorous and
effective: All 30 students graduated in May of last year. But the telling
detail was—did I imagine it?—thrown away in a clause that went something like,
“the faculty, who donate their time, come from….”
Yes, yes, these are apparently those lazy, do-nothing
professors, about whom Walker suggested that more might be expected of them.
What are they doing on Wednesday nights? Teaching in a library on the south
side of town, since that’s where these people live. And all this home-cooked
food? Why do I really feel that it’s far more likely to have been cooked in a
west-side-of-town kitchen, and brought in in the professor’s car? Mind you—just
a hunch….
In what may be the most telling paragraph of a recent
article on the program, the costs of the program are discussed:
Costs for each student, including tuition and books, while in
the two-semester Odyssey course is about $4,200. Expenses to support alumni are
about $140,000 to $160,000 a year, Auerbach said.
Say what? It costs only $4,200 to give this experience? This
experience that so many of its alums say has changed their lives? Why in the
world aren't we sending 30,000 of these guys into programs like this, all across
the state? But here’s the answer, which I bring to you as a graph:
Right—what’s this about? Here’s the header:
Rates Of Black Male Incarceration By State, 2012
Happily, we live in our electronic age, so I can tell
Governor Walker quite easily what his prison system is costing him: 800 million
bucks in 2012, with an average cost of 37,994 dollars per year per inmate. And I could
tell him to forget ideology, to forget noble principles, to screw any worry
about human cost and suffering and families torn apart and poor women going by
public transportation to visit their sons and husbands and boyfriends. Oh, and
the baby was often on the woman’s lap—I know, since I took in Puerto Rico the same mionivan that stopped at the prison—and so the woman would hand the baby
to a stranger, get out of the car, and we would all matter-of-factly pass the
child—one after another of us in the sweltering van that held 12-if-anorexic or
8-if-normal-sized but that never left until, in fact, there were eighteen. Oh—plus
the baby. All of this, governor, is quite extraneous.
But I could tell you—having worked for the biggest bastard in town, a small company called Walmart—that no businessman would think twice about the numbers: the risible 4,200 bucks that we would have to spend to change somebody’s life around (oh, and by the way, become a productive member of society, thus paying taxes) versus caging them for a year at 37,000 bucks a year. Oh, and what is the average prison sentence, and the rate of recidivism?
Yes, governor, I
could tell you all this, but I ask myself—I who no longer live in the state,
who no longer need to care about the state, who have a beach to visit and a
cello to play—yes, I ask myself. I could certainly tell you, but…
…would you listen?
