The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Guest Post: A Master Plan for Higher Education in the Midwest

Professor Duderstadt is the author of The Chicago Council’s forthcoming Heartland Paperreport on “A Master Plan for Higher Education in the Midwest: A Roadmap to the Future of the Nation’s Heartland.” The report will be released at an evening public program on Thursday, March 31, in Chicago where a panel featuring Professor Duderstadt; Michael Hogan, president of the University of Illinois; and Jerry Sue Thornton, president of Cuyahoga Community College, will comment on the findings and recommendations. This event is open to the public, and registration information is available online here.

by James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus, Professor of Science and Engineering, and Director of the Millennium Project at the University of Michigan

The Libya of the Heartland

All of a sudden, the Midwest has joined the Mideast as one of the world's hot spots.

From Madison to Columbus to Indianapolis, protesters are out in force to try to stop governors or legislative leaders from enacting sweeping anti-union laws. As in the Mideast, the protests seems to ripple from state to state, in a sort of political domino effect. If the Midwest is not exactly in revolution, neither is it seeing politics as usual: in each state, the middle ground has vanished, and nothing short of capitulation, by one side or the other, seems likely. 

Cities On Their Own

The mid-term elections last month have transformed time-tested relationships between the federal government, states and cities. Many details will become clear in the new year, but the overall pattern is plain to see -- cities that have always counted on federal and state money are suddenly on their own.

Both federal and state governments, including Midwestern state governments, are in deep deficit. Partly as a backlash against these deficits, voters handed power to congresspeople, governors and legislators pledged to cut those deficits.

This means two things: (1) the money isn't there, even if governments were inclined to spend it, and (2) they aren't inclined to spend it. Government funding to cities won't come to a halt, by any means, but it's going to be cut back severely. Cities that had looked to Washington or state capitals to maintain or increase funding for schools, infrastructure, economic development and jobs are going to have to look somewhere else -- mostly to their own resources.

Another Way To Work

For Midwesterners viewing the post-industrial collapse of their region's economy, one big question has to be: how do the Germans do it?  

Germany has all the ingredients of a Midwestern-style economic catastrophe -- a reliance on heavy industry, big health and pension costs, especially unionized workers. Partly because of the unions, Germany has those "rigid labor markets" that have convinced a generation of American economists that the German economy is doomed to obsolescence.

So, once again: how do the Germans do it? German industry is booming and, unlike American industry, it's still in Germany. The global recession, being global, has hit Germany, too, but unemployment there now is 7.6 percent -- not great, but a lot better than the American rate of 9.5 percent. Unemployment among young people aged 16 to 24 in Germany is 10.5 percent. Again, not great. But the U.S. youth jobless rate is 26 percent, which amounts to the economic massacre of a generation.

German labor costs and social costs -- all those pension and health programs -- are high. Its currency, the euro, also is high. This means it should be uncompetitive on world markets, leading to a big trade deficit -- right? Wrong. Germany, as usual, runs a trade surplus and that surplus ($98.7 billion so far this year) is actually up 26% over last year. Meanwhile, the United States, as everybody knows, runs a trade deficit and that deficit in the first five months of this year is up 37%, to $197 billion, over last year. (Don't blame it on on China: $12 billion of that U.S. deficit is with supposedly uncompetitive Germany.)

So yet once again: how do the Germans do it? A new book just out tries to tell how. The answer is not that the German succeed despite their heavy industry, their high costs and their unions. It's that they succeed just because of all those supposed handicaps, including unions.

A Midwestern Energy Program

Anyone who has stood beside a Great Lake on a winter's day, with the cloudless sky overhead an icy blue and the wind pelting down from somewhere in Manitoba, knows the power of elemental nature. The water, the wind, the frosty sun -- this is energy, pure but untamed.

Recently, advocates of alternative forms of "green" energy have looked at this abundance of nature and seen something just as basic -- dollars, jobs, a new economy for the Midwest. If green energy is the energy of the future, and if the Midwest is so richly endowed with these elements, how can we miss?

The only problem is getting there from here. So far, we don't have the science to make this happen. We don't have the money to pay for the science. The Midwest is not exactly alone in seeing riches in the green economy, so the competition with other regions will be fierce. Private industry seems unlikely to make the huge investment necessary in an industry that may or may not pay off. Midwestern states should do it but these states, hard hit by the recession, are having trouble paying current bills and seem unlikely to make this investment in the future.

A valuable new paper, published by the Brookings Institution, tackles these issues by calling for federal investment to "launch a region-wide network of collaborative, high-intensity energy research and innovation centers." 

It Plays in Peoria

I spent some time last week in Peoria, a central Illinois city that deserves a good look from any Midwestern factory town trying to reinvent itself in the age of globalization. Not that Peoria has all the answers or has solved all its problems. But it's asking the right questions and coming up with a few answers.

While I was there, I had the chance to talk with some civic leaders and visit a very impressive community college -- time well spent considering the importance of community colleges to the Midwest's future.

Peoria has a reputation as the epitome of Middle America ("If it plays in Peoria..."), a one-time whiskey capital (Hiram Walker), and the headquarters of the giant Caterpillar heavy equipment manufacturer, which once employed 40,000 people in the Peoria area and absolutely dominated the town.

Like many Midwestern factory towns, Peoria has been through crisis -- in Peoria's case, two devastating strikes against Caterpillar in the late '80s and early '90s. The strikes were a byproduct of globalization, specificially overseas competition from companies like Komatsu. Caterpillar fought this competition with outsourcing and cutbacks. The United Auto Workers struck back. The union lost big, but the strikes split the town. Many people predicted the departure of Caterpillar and the slow death of Peoria.

Instead, Caterpillar stayed, if much reduced. And the town fought back.

The Real Challenge at Illinois

A native Iowan named Michael Hogan has just been named the new president of the University of Illinois, replacing the ill-starred B. Joseph White, who was driven from office by an over-blown furor over admissions. Hogan will need a lot of luck and the hide of a rhino, for reasons that the dust-up over Joe White made clear.

Hogan's jurisdiction includes the three U of I campuses in Champaign-Urbana, Chicago and Springfield. But the problems he faces affect every state university in the Midwest. They are short-term and long-term both, and the solutions include both some tactical cost-cutting now and a total strategic rethinking of the relationship between the university and its state.

Basically, at a time when higher education is more vital than ever, each Midwestern state is cheaping out its universities. If Hogan's struggles are shared by other university presidents, the sheer outrageousness of Illinois politics guarantees that the spotlight will shine particularly on his success or failure.

The Deniers of Globalization

I was up in Madison about a week ago, to give a lecture at the University of Wisconsin. At first, I thought that the folks at UW must be in trouble if they needed a shoe-leather journalist to tell them about globalization and its impact on the Midwest. But when I talked with some professors, I realized I should have got there sooner.

What I heard was, basically, that there's no such thing as globalization or a global economy. Instead, what's really happening, I was told, is that people with the most education and the most skills are getting the good jobs. If everyone else is losing out, it's pretty much their own fault -- not the fault of the economy itself. Because of that, there's not much we can do about it, except to encourage these laggards to get more skills and education.

On top of that, what's happening in the Midwest is said to be really no different from what's happening in the rest of the world. And besides, economies have gone up and down over history: if we're in a bit of a dip now, not to worry, it will all come right in the end.

This argument tends to come from classical economists and, to a lesser degree, some business circles. It strikes me as wrong-headed but dangerous, in that it misdiagnoses what's going on, so gets the policy response wrong, too. When this happens, the Midwestern recovery becomes even more far away.

Olden Gophers

Not long ago, I wrote a post on a task force at the University of Iowa which had reacted to the economic squeeze on that school's budget by suggesting that at least 14 of its weakest graduate programs be shut down (The Ax Comes to Academia, posted Feb. 18). I suggested that one obvious solution would be to merge these programs, and other less distinguished disciplines, into stronger departments at say, the University of Minnesota. "When the University of Minnesota gets around to rating its graduate programs," I wrote, "it's going to find some weak ones that should be merged with programs at Iowa."

Rather sooner than I'd expected, that Minnesota moment seems to have arrived. A task force at the U of M's College of Liberal Arts (CLA) has looked at the realities of funding in the 21st century and issued a report concluding that "this will entail a reduction in the number of programs," both graduate and under-grad.

"Creative reorganization is our only hope," the CLA committee said. "Calculation with any reasonable set of minima will lead to the conclusion that the college should have fewer than half the degree programs than it has now." (Italics in the original.) Unlike the Iowa report, the committee didn't say which programs should be cut -- presumably that's a chore for a later report, or the dean -- but it did imply that some professors and other faculty at the CLA, like other employees across the Midwest, will lose their jobs.

The report, like the one at Iowa, also didn't consider the obvious solution -- merging weaker programs into stronger departments at other Midwestern universities, especially the Big Ten and other major research universities. It noted that CLA is the only full-service, PhD-granted liberal arts college in the state of Minnesota. But if big departments exist outside Minnesota, across state lines, the report didn't deign to notice them.

Friday Night Blight

To rebuild the Midwestern economy, the first thing we must do is outlaw football.

Oh, come on. I can't be serious. It'll never happen.

Well, yes, I am serious. Nothing would free the Midwest to get to work on the problems of the 21st century like getting rid of football -- especially high school football.

Or more accurately, what football symbolizes. Here's what I mean:

It seems ludicrous, but the Midwest is sliced and diced into thousands of rivalrous units -- towns, counties, school districts, states. All these little entities have two big things in common. First, they're caught squarely in the path of the global economy and, second, they're too small to cope by themselves. Cooperation and collaboration is the only rational key to a better future.

But would they even dream of cooperating with each other? Fat chance. Each insists on its own independence. Each begrudges anything good that happens to its neighbor. Each promotes its own superiority, its own uniqueness.

They are, of course, not independent at all. Nor are they unique. All, in fact, all bailing from the same sinking boat.