The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Liberal Arts and the Post-Industrial Midwest

For more than a century, the Midwestern landscape has sparkled with small educational gems, private colleges devoted to the liberal arts. Most of them are located in small towns and cities which boomed in the Industrial Age but have seen better days.

What is the relationship now between these small colleges and the towns that surround them? Can the colleges and the liberal arts help their towns recover their economic vitality? Can these schools ignite the revival of their towns, or are some of the towns so far gone that they might pull their colleges down into the wreckage of the post-industrial Midwest?

These thoughts were front and center last week when one of these colleges, Albion, inaugurated a new president, Mauri Ditzler, who has been president of another one of them, Monmouth, for the past nine years. Ditzler has made it his goal to use Albion College and the liberal arts in the revival of the town.

Albion, in southern Michigan, and Monmouth, in western Illinois, have much in common. Both towns have less than 10,000 people. Both colleges have about 1,300 students. Both the towns and their regions have suffered economically. Albion is probably in worse shape. Its economy was based on steel facilities and foundries that served the auto industry. Most are closed now. So are the town hospital and even the high school, which closed a year ago and now sends its students to Marshall, ten miles away down Interstate-94.

When we talk about economic revitalization, we usually think about business start-ups, high-tech innovations, venture capital. When we think about the role of education in his process, we usually think about the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math), not so much about poetry or philosophy.

But the liberal arts, by their nature, care more about the sweep of history than a moment in time. In personal terms, they deal more with careers than an immediate job. STEM skills are necessary, certainly. But only the liberal arts can deal with the larger sense of community, or rebuilding a society, not just an industrial park.

Ditzler has experience with this. Once, no college or university in the Midwest even taught a course about the Midwest – its history, economy, people or literature. At Monmouth, Ditzler inaugurated the Midwest Matters Initiative, a series of courses on Midwestern issues, and helped the college turn its region, in western Illinois and eastern Iowa, in a laboratory for the study of issues such as economic development and immigration. 

At Albion, Ditzler’s first job is to let the town know that the college cares.

Albion belongs to the Great Lakes Colleges Association, a grouping of 13 small liberal arts colleges, including Antioch, Hope, Earlham and Oberlin. Monmouth is one of 14 colleges in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, 14 schools further west, including Carleton, Grinnell, Lawrence and Knox. Most of these are first-rate schools set in small towns, with enrollments of about 1,300 to 3,000 students.

Some of these schools play an active part in their communities. But as Ditzler says, too many of them pretend they are misplaced islands of academic excellence, schools that think they belong in the Ivy League but which somehow took the wrong exit on their way to Connecticut. These schools spend their time ignoring the working-class towns around them. The towns sense this arrogance and return it. Most students spend four years there, then grab their diplomas and head for the cities.

Albion the college already encourages its students to volunteer and intern in Albion the town. But the most recent college president lived on a farm outside town. Ditzler’s residence is in town, across the street from the college. The street itself is a dividing line, with the college on one side and a declining neighborhood on the other: Ditzler is living on the neighborhood side of the street. Sure, it’s just symbolism, but it gets noticed, and it counts.

As a liberal arts college, Albion has its historians, to tell the town where it’s been, so it can think about where it’s going. It has its economists, who should leave their equations to explain this strange new global economy that has so battered the town. It has its sociologists, for whom the social impact of global change should be a natural course of study. It has its writers who can describe the town to itself, as Southern writers have been defining Dixie since the Civil War.

All this will take time, and an enormous amount of tact. In almost every Midwestern college town, the town-gown split is real. This is true in Albion, where the school is mostly white and well-to-do, while the town is 30 percent black and largely poor: a recent survey found that 63 percent of Albion residents earn too little to meet basic living needs. The first job may be to decide what the two Albions, town and college, are going to talk about. 

At the same time, the college can use its worldview and outside connections to embed the town in a broader region, to leverage the strength of its neighbors. With 8,600 people, Albion is too small to compete in the new post-industrial economy. It lies along the I-94 corridor with Kalamazoo, Battle Creek and Jackson, all larger industrial cities to which it could hitch its star.

That Great Lakes Colleges Association includes 12 other similar schools in 12 other towns, most of them facing the same problems, asking the same questions and seeking the same answers. That I-94 corridor also houses some fine schools, private and public, including Western Michigan University. Ditzler’s pioneering work at Monmouth on Midwestern regionalism is a natural model.

Albion, like so many other small Midwestern factory towns, already has two strikes against it. It needs all the help it can get. It may take more than a liberal arts college to turn it around, but it’s encouraging  to see such a college emerge from behind its academic walls to take on the challenge.

Big Pay for University President, Big Debt for Students

More than any region, the Midwest lavishes seven-figure pay packages on the presidents of its big public universities. At the same time, too many of these universities are trimming full-time faculty while their students run up some of the biggest student loan debt in the nation.

It’s time to ask whether students at the Midwest’s flagship schools are getting their money’s worth.

All this comes from the list of executive compensation at public colleges published annually by The Chronicle Of Higher Education, and a new paper, “The One Percent at State U,” issued by a progressive Washington think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

The Chronicle listing showed that nine presidents of public universities netted more than $1 million in total compensation in 2012-13, and that five of them led Midwestern institutions.

All by himself at the top was E. Gordon Gee, the gaffe-prone and free-spending president of Ohio State, with total compensation of $6,057,615, with a base pay of $851,303 and the rest in perks, including deferred compensation. Gee’s total was more than 12 times the median compensation for public university presidents nationwide.

Hamid A. Shirvani, president of the South Dakota University system, ranked third at $1,311,095. Sally Mason, the president of the University of Iowa, was fifth, with $1,139,705, Michael A. McRobbie of Indiana University was sixth at $1,111,924, and Mary Sue Coleman at the University of Michigan was ninth with $1,037,357.

Apparently, money can’t buy contentment. Both Gee and Shirvani have since quit their jobs, as has the second-biggest earner, R. Bowen Loftin, who left his $1.6 million post at Texas A&M for a new post at yet another Midwestern flagship university, Missouri.

The presidents of the University of Houston, the University of Georgia, the University of South Alabama, and the University of California system rounded out the list of top 10 earners.

University trustees who sign off on these salaries usually say they’re necessary to get top leaders, or to keep their presidents from going to other campuses. Neither is true. Gee, Shrivani, and Loftin decamped, despite their lofty salaries. And the presidents of Wisconsin and North Carolina, both first-rate schools, earn less than $500,000 in total compensation. Robert Easter, the highly-respected president of the University of Illinois, not only earns $450,000 but agreed to a package that was about $200,000 below that of his predecessor.  

None of the top-paying schools may be a diploma mill, but except for Michigan and California, few stand at the pinnacle of American higher education. Most are better known for their football teams than their research.

This comparison between athletics and scholarship isn’t incidental. Most of these schools reserve their really big paydays for coaches. At Ohio State, for instance, the base salaries for football coach Urban Meyer ($4.6 million) and basketball coach Thad Matta ($3.2 million) leave Gee, with his measly $851,000, looking like a street person.

(Gee apparently was popular at Ohio State, although from outside it’s hard to see why. Over the years, he and his wife were regularly criticized for lavish personal spending, and Gee himself specialized in bad jokes that insulted, among others, Poland, Catholics, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. He usually apologized, although it took him six months to say “I’m sorry” to the Catholics.)

As noted, these big paychecks would be easier to justify if they reflected academic excellence. They also would be more acceptable if we knew that they weren’t eating into their schools’ real mission, which is to educate students. This may be in doubt.

The IPS study found a correlation between outsize presidential pay and the growth in student debt. In addition, these schools that paid big money at the top were more likely to cut back on full-time faculty and resort to underpaid adjunct teachers instead.

Again, the chief offenders were Midwestern—led by Ohio State, followed by Penn State, Minnesota, and Michigan.

One of the authors, Marjorie Wood, told The New York Times that high executive pay doesn’t necessarily lead directly to higher student debt or fewer faculty. “But if you think about it in terms of the allocation of resources, it does seem to be the tip of a very large iceberg, with universities that have top-heavy executive spending also having more adjuncts, more tuition increases, and more administrative spending.”

Specifically, the IPS found that:

• The recession didn’t even slow up top executive pay. Average executive pay at all public research universities went up 14 percent from 2009 to 2012 but, at the 25 high-paying schools, it rose by a third.
• At the same 25, student debt increased 13 percent faster than the national average.
• At the top 25, the number of adjunct faculty rose more than twice as fast as the national average. At the same time, the number of permanent faculty in these schools rose only half as fast as the average.

The IPS report said that student debt at Ohio State rose 23 percent faster than the national average from 2010 to 2012. During the same period, it said, Ohio State hired 670 new administrators, 498 adjunct or contingent (non-permanent) faculty, and only 45 permanent faculty.

At Minnesota, it said, permanent faculty went down 9 percent and adjuncts increased 223 percent in the 2010-12 period.

Running a big university is hard work that demands coping with faculty egos, student hormones, parental nagging, and donor fatigue. But the skyrocketing pay at some schools seems more similar to that at corporations, where CEO pay often has more to do with friendly boards than with actual performance.

And a winning football team sure helps.

It seems a clear-cut cause for a taxpayer revolution. Except that, as we’ve noted before, tax-payers have pretty much stopped paying for these big state schools. As state aid to these schools shrink, these institutions rely ever more on contracts with corporations, on philanthropic giving—and on student debt.

The Midwest: New Homeland of Inequality

Inequality, a growing social and political issue in the United States, has become particularly acute in the industrial Middle West.

This makes sense, considering the transformation of the industrial economy that once supported millions of middle-class jobs across the region. But new statistics show that this perception is reality, with inequality growing particularly fast in such states as Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan.

The statistics come from the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), the Toronto-based home of urbanologist Richard Florida, and they appear in one of the articles that Florida writes regularly for The Atlantic Cities website. The site, and Florida’s thoughts, contain some of the most useful writing on urban issues today.

Much of the growing inequality in the Midwest can be blamed on the usual suspects—the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, the 1 percent is outpacing the 99 percent, the uneducated are out of luck, and the middle class is vanishing. All this is true, the MPI says, but it’s pretty much true everywhere. So they ask: why is inequality growing faster in some places than in others?

A Grab Bag of Good Reading

Once upon a recent time, most of what we read appeared in our local newspapers, or maybe the Time magazine we bought at the corner drugstore. Now the web delivers a daily blizzard of articles, op-eds, blogs, think pieces, and other journalism. One blog leads to another. Friends send email with interesting links. Every day, I read something new and think, “Gee, everybody should read this.”

So, in lieu of a blog this week, here’s a reading list of recent items that caught my eye. Most deal with the economy, or jobs, or globalization. Some are Midwestern, others national. Each deserves a few minutes of your time.

(And if you've got some suggestions of your own, please let us hear about them.)

• John McCarron, Chicago Tribune, on Wandering Corporations
  John McCarron, the Chicago journalist and teacher, writes on The Great Vamoose of so-called American corporations, like Walgreen's, exploring moves to overseas tax havens to save their shareholders a few bucks, and never mind the damage to the country where they were born and grew.
  
  
• William Galston, The Wall Street Journal, on Jobs for Young People
  William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on what this economy is doing to young people who just want a good job, and why so many educated young adults have fetched up as baristas. 
  
  
• Two Pieces on the Middle Class
  Once the US had the world’s largest middle class. We even had the world wealthiest poor people. No longer. A New York Times article reported the news, and Thomas Edsall, one of our best economics journalists, gives one reason why.
  
  
• Harold Meyerson and Thomas Edsall on Liberal Cities
  American Prospect magazine has a piece by its editor-at-large, Harold Meyerson, on how liberal mayors in some cities—not only New York City but Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Boston—are following new policies to close the income and wealth gaps between the classes in their towns. It’s an intriguing idea but Edsall, once again, has his doubts.
  
  
• Brookings on Technology and Cities
  One new wrinkle is the use of technology and big data to deal with the problems of cities. Brookings did a seminar on this and came up with some thoughts. 
  
  
• The Economist and Bloomberg on Technology and Jobs
  Some other articles look at the impact of technology on our standard of living with a more skeptical eye. These include The Economist magazine, usually a drum-beater for open markets and technology, and Bloomberg here and here.
  
  
• Chicago Tribune on the Image of Cities
  When it comes to polishing an image and drawing in foreign investment, some unlikely places could teach Midwestern cities, such as Chicago, a thing or so. So says Alex Rodriguez in the Chicago Tribune, after a visit to Bogota. 
  
  
• The Buzz About Piketty
  Have you read Capital in the 21^st Century, that Thomas Piketty book yet? If not, you’ll have to wait a while. Harvard Press, to its delighted amazement, has a blockbuster on its hands, and is scurrying around to print more copies—a lot more copies—than it had planned. In the meantime, Amazon says it’s out of stock and my local Barnes and Noble says it won’t have any copies for at least a week. In the meantime, there have been some rapturous reviews: a review by Branko Milanovic at the World Bank. Or by the excellent John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Or Paul Krugman’s review from The New York Review of Books.
  
  There will be dissidents a-plenty on this, mostly the classical economists whom Piketty scorns, but most of them have yet to chime in. Tyler Cowan is one of the first, but even he admits that Piketty’s book is a landmark event.

For College Grads, It's a Cold World Out There

My wife arrived at our apartment building at the same time as a young man delivering groceries from a local supermarket. She held the door for him. He thanked her and smiled sourly, almost apologizing for his state in life. “Not much for a college degree, is it?” he said.

No indeed. But how typical was he? We hear so much about the parlous job situation for college grads these days. The papers are full of anecdotes of well-educated young Americans emerging with a degree, a lifetime of debt, and no job at all. Nor any place to live for their childhood bedrooms in their parents’ homes. Nor any real idea how to access the adulthood for which their four years on campus was supposed to prepare them.

But how bad is it really? Things clearly are tougher now than they were for their parents’ generation. But is this bad luck for a few, or an affliction that could burden an entire generation?

The False Promise of Eds and Meds

Much of their manufacturing has disappeared, but many old industrial towns in the Midwest still have two things going for them. These are colleges and hospitals, or eds and meds, as they’re called. Most of these towns are counting on these industries to support them in the way that factories once did.

This always sounded a little desperate, even when both education and medicine were fast-growing parts of the economy. That’s stopping now, and towns that have staked their future on teaching young people and treating old people may be in for a disappointment.

Basically, both eds and meds depend heavily on government financing. In an era of tight government budgets at all levels, that financing just isn’t going to be there.

Old Jobs, New Jobs: Do They Match Up?

“To simply measure manufacturing health based on the number of jobs, that’s not fair.”

                                 Todd Teske, CEO, Briggs & Stratton

The transformation of Midwestern manufacturing, from its powerhouse past to its uncertain future, continues to play itself out. Here are some capsule insights into what’s happening now:

• Manufacturing in the Midwest is vigorous, even growing. But the number of jobs on factory floors continues to fall, with no end in sight. The reason is automation.
• High-end or advanced manufacturing is cited by most experts as the wave of the future. But no one knows how many jobs it will create.
• Solid statistics on the number of manufacturing-related jobs are hard to find. If the old-line assembly line jobs on factory floors are vanishing, companies require a new breed of “indirect employees,” high-skill engineers or IT specialists, who don’t show up in the manufacturing jobs figures, as the government counts them.
• Presumably, these “indirect” jobs will pay well. This presumption may be right or wrong. Earnings for college graduates are falling and it’s logical to assume that jobs in a fiercely competitive field such as industry are part of this slide.

I’ve long argued that the only measure of an economy is the well-being of the people who live within it. The quote at the top of this posting says that manufacturing is doing fine but the people who depend on manufacturing for their living aren’t – and that’s OK.

If this is our economic future, we’ve got a problem.    

A Meeting of the Minds in Chicago

Can major research universities use the immense resources at their command – the storehouses of data, the research techniques, the expertise in analyzing problems, mostly their sheer brainpower – to help solve the problems of the great cities where many of them reside? It seems obvious that the answer is yes, but for many universities, this leap from theory to practice remains a step too far.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs held a three-day conference this week to explore what can be done about this. In many ways, the conference – called “Global Urban Challenges: The Role of Research Universities” – was unique. It certainly was useful. Whether it changes the world and the universities’ place in it remains to be seen.

An Inequality Update

Notes from the inequality beat:

President Obama was in Galesburg, Illinois, to urge more spending on education and infrastructure to combat the “inequality of opportunity” that besets America and, especially, its shrinking middle class. Galesburg, a hollowed-out industrial city (and hometown of Carl Sandburg), was an appropriate venue: it never has recovered from the closure of Maytag and other factories since 2000 that destroyed 7,000 jobs (in a city of 32,000) and decimated its own middle class.

Obama seems to feel that all he needs to do to solve a problem is to give a speech about it. He knows better, of course: five years in Washington has shown him that increased spending, even if justified, isn’t going to come.

But a drumbeat of recent news articles and academic reports are making it plain that it will take more than some school reforms to reverse the decline of America and its middle class or close the ever-widening inequality gap between most Americans and the folks at the top. We’ll keep an eye on future articles and reports as they appear. But here’s a grab-bag of recent straws in the wind.

Failing Economies Shorten Lives

A recent study has come up with some shocking news: life expectancy of the least educated white Americans, both men and women, is going down. White women without a high school diploma now live five years less on the average than they did 20 years ago: for white male dropouts, the decline is three years.

This is a calamity matched only by the six-year decline in longevity among Russian men in the waning years of Communism there. But that decline, blamed on rampant alcoholism, has been mostly reversed.

What's going on here? No one really knows, but my bet is that the cause is economic -- the collapse of the industrial, steady, low-wage jobs that once supported even the least-educated Americans. These people once were lower middle-class. Now they're just poor, the losers in the global economy, increasingly cut off from jobs, a steady income and, not incidentally, decent health care.