The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Thinking About the Future

It's easy to get that neglected feeling, sitting here in the Midwest, surveying the industrial collapse in our own back yard and wondering if anybody out there really cares. The pre-dawn dustup in Zuccotti Park gets more national air time and ink than the destruction of Midwestern towns and cities, even though the same pathology -- an economy out of control -- underlies both. As Willy Loman's wife said in The Death of a Salesman, "attention must be paid."

That may be changing. In the past few days, at least two nationwide broadcasts have looked at the plight of old industrial cities in the Midwest. Both recognized the economic problems but emphasized positive measures to remedy them.

Company Towns, After the Company Leaves Town

Richard C. Longworth appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation today with Mayor Chaz Allen of Newton, Iowa, and Mayor Tommy Battle of Huntsville, Alabama, in a segment called "Company Towns, After the Company Leaves Town." Click here to listen to the discussion.

Jobs, Pay and Policy

In this third year of the Great Recession, jobs -- how to get them, how to keep them, how much they pay -- are the key issue, in the Midwest and across the nation. Two recent newspaper articles focused on this issue and, in the process, revealed what's being done, what's being done wrong, and the price we all will pay in the future.

The Chicago Tribune turned its Sunday business section over to a study of the job retention program adopted by the state of Illinois, focusing on Gov. Pat Quinn's policy of giving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits to companies to get them to stay in Illinois (see articles here, here, and here). A day later, the New York Times singled out Michigan as an example of the states and cities that are firing government workers in veterans' hospitals, prisons and other state-run facilities and replacing them with contract workers making as little as half as much.

We've written here on both issues in the past, so this is an update on two of the hottest topics on the Midwestern economic agenda.

Higher Education Faces Reality

Apparently it's no fun being a plain old garden-variety university, doing nothing except what universities are supposed to do, which is to teach students. Every self-respecting university, it seems, wants to be a research university, churning out research that changes the world and, one hopes, bags a Nobel Prize or two.

It's not going to happen. Nor should it. Shrinking support for higher education will dash some of these ambitious dreams. As it does, it will give these schools -- indeed, all Midwestern colleges and universities -- an opportunity to rethink their real role in education and how they can best serve not only their students but the region.