OPINION:
Scott Walker, in hot pursuit of the Republican nomination for president, knows no fear of sacred cows. He is attempting to reform the concept of permanent faculty appointments at Wisconsin’s publicly financed universities. The governor wants to repeat his earlier surprising victory in which a conservative chief executive in a very blue state took on the increasingly powerful and increasingly political teachers’ unions, and trimmed their empty sails.
Mr. Walker’s successful campaign to put a rein on the teachers’ unions — to eliminate the obvious corruption of unions contributing to politicians’ campaigns and getting in return raises in salaries — focused national attention on him. No other governor, with perhaps the exception of Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio (who’s also running for president), has been capable of such feats. Can lightning strike twice?
The rising cost of academic tuition, increasing much faster than inflation or the depreciation of the dollar, has become a national crisis. Only professors, as the faculty lounge wit observes, can afford to send their children to college. But it’s no joke. One “solution” talked up by some politicians is that maybe it’s not so important for everyone to go to college. But perhaps the place to start the discussion is the proposition that maybe it’s not so important for the professors to get lifetime guaranteed employment. It’s rarely available in state and federal judicial systems. Volkswagen mechanics, body-and-fender men, truck drivers and motel housekeepers rarely get it. What’s so special, except to themselves, about professors?
Tuition costs on campus have been rising for a century. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that the cost of tuition fell behind the rise in household incomes, and there’s the rub. Higher education costs have increased more than 500 percent since 1985. Even the rise in medical costs jumped less than half that, and the consumer price index rose only by 121 percent. It’s even more dramatic in inflation-adjusted dollars, from an average cost for all institutions in 1981-82 at $3,489 to $19,339 in 2011-12.
To the consternation of critics, this is true in no small part because the demand for education has risen at a phenomenal rate, far beyond the ability of expanding college enrollment to satisfy it. The GI Bill of Rights sent 8 million students to college after World War II, many of whom would never have thought of going to college before the war. Since then government and private student loan programs have encouraged still other families to think of college for the first time.
Paul F. Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, makes the point that contrary to myth, government spending for higher education is greater today than in “the halcyon days” of the 1960s. But that money is not all going into the pockets of actual teachers. The big salaries are going to administrators. Their salaries have often doubled. Mr. Campos observes that “there are no valid arguments to support the recent trend toward seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university administrators.”
Tenure may be a good place to start with reform of university costs precisely because it is the most sensitive — how, when and with what is the reward for a good teacher? It’s a debate the nation needs.
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