Source: Governor's Office of Budget and Program Planning
[The Montana Professor 16.2, Spring 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Keith Edgerton
History
MSU- Billings
In the last two years The Montana Professor has conducted interviews with the current chair of the Board of Regents, John Mercer, and the Commissioner of Higher Education, Sheila Stearns, focusing primarily on the current state of higher education in Montana from their unique perspectives. Continuing in this series, Keith Edgerton from MSU Billings, recently sat down with Governor Brian Schweitzer for a wide-ranging discussion of his particular view of higher education in Montana, his strategies to address what he terms "the lost years" of funding for higher education that occurred in the 1990s, and several other issues that have recently been in the news with respect to higher education in Montana.
Schweitzer first appeared on Montana's political stage in 2000 when he unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Conrad Burns for the U.S. Senate seat Burns has held since 1988. In 2004 Schweitzer, a Democrat from the Whitefish area, ran for governor against his Republican challenger, Bob Brown, after the incumbent governor, Judy Martz, decided against seeking a second term. Schweitzer surprised party-insiders on both sides by choosing a moderate Republican, John Bollinger, as his running mate. The pair ran an energetic campaign and scored an impressive victory in what most political pundits consider a solidly conservative (or in the current parlance, "red") state. His popularity remains high (a 64 percent approval rating in a December 2005 Lee Newspaper poll) and his folksy political demeanor has captured attention outside of Montana. At the time this article goes to press, CBS's 60 Minutes was slated to air an interview Lesley Stahl conducted with Schweitzer in early January of this year.
The governor is a physically imposing figure, standing well over six feet, with a commanding voice and a no-nonsense approach in answers to questions. His normal attire is jeans, cowboy boots, and a bolo tie adorning a western shirt. His two-year old border collie, Jag, accompanies him to nearly every official and unofficial state function and has the run of the east wing of the state capitol. (During the interview Jag sat beneath the table, occasionally soliciting attention from anyone who would accommodate him, including this interviewer.) Schweitzer's popularity and his unconventional style have, understandably, provoked the ire of the state GOP leadership as the party has found itself out of power in the governor's office for the first time since 1988 and a minority in both houses of the legislature for the first time since 1995. What follows is an interview conducted on January 17, 2006, in the governor's office in Helena.
TMP: Could you tell us a little about your background, how you came to Montana and about your own higher education?
Gov. Schweitzer: Well, I came to Montana by virtue of my immigrant background; German Russian grandparents homesteaded in Box Elder in 1909, the same year my other German Russian grandparents homesteaded north of Rudyard, about thirty miles north of Rudyard, at a place called Goldstone. So that's how I got here; my parents continue to farm and the year I was born they already had three children. They sold the ranch on the Hi-Line where my grandparents had homesteaded and where we were married and they moved down to Geyser so we could be close to the school because my parents never graduated from high school. In Valier they were thirty miles from the nearest high school, but they were concerned about what they were going to do when their kids got high school age, were they going to live out on the farm and try to commute back and forth with dirt roads or were they going to move into town like some do on the Hi-Line and have two homes? And so they decided to sell their farm and move into the town of Geyser. The year I was born, 1955, was the year we bought that farm and if you can imagine they moved their family--they only had three children and then they had the baby--they moved us all into that home, a one-bedroom home. And to describe what the home was like, upstairs was the kitchen, downstairs was the bathroom and the bedroom.
That was the house. By downstairs, I mean basement. They built onto that house a little bit; it was still a small house but then they had two more kids. And they sent all six off to college and that was a plus of theirs because they just recognized that they didn't have the tools to get us to the next step along the way. I don't ever remember ever having an option or even the thought process that we wouldn't go on to college. I'm fourth of six. I have two brothers who are physicians and a sister who has an MBA from a prestigious business school and a couple of other brothers who have degrees as well. I have a bachelor's degree in international agronomy from Colorado State and a master's degree in soil science from Montana State in Bozeman. And so that's my background with Montana and Montana higher education.
TMP: What kind of books do you like to read?
Gov. Schweitzer: I love Montana History. I love reading about the rascals of Montana history. I like all history and I like politics, especially Montana history that has to do with the rats and rascals that have run this state for the last 140 years; it's good stuff.
TMP: Over the last several years, prior to your arrival in the governor's seat, the Board of Regents has taken a very active role when managing the university system, some might even say micromanaging the university system. For instance, and this might seem trivial to you, but in an interview the MP conducted with John Mercer two years ago, he claimed that it was under the authority and purview of the Board to change a student's grade if he or she petitioned the board, a prerogative that at nearly all American universities rests exclusively with the academic professionals. What is your philosophy of how the Board of Regents should govern the MUS, and to follow up, do you think the board currently is effective in the various strategies and agendas it has been pursuing?
Gov. Schweitzer: I think the Board of Regents ought to take a very active business role in running our universities. I don't think they ought to be changing grades. But I do think they ought to be challenging the administrators at every one of our colleges to deliver their programs more efficiently. I think they ought to continue to challenge them to prepare themselves for transferability of credits. What we've got going right now in my mind is an outrage. I think that whatever the reasons we have found ourselves in this position--some of it is academic snobbery, some of it is just inefficiency, and some of it is incompetence--we have similar courses offered all across the state and I hear anecdotally from students weekly that they will have a package of classes and they will accept them out of state at some university and they can't move them from one college in Montana to another. Now until we get that right, the acceptability and affordability of higher ed in Montana is going to be beyond the means of a lot of families because we no longer have a university system where--I don't know if we ever did--but the classic norm is you graduate from high school, you kiss your mom on the cheek, you go off to college, you study for four years, you maybe find your spouse, and then you go on to graduate school or get a job.
What more likely is occurring out there is you pick up a few credits for a few years in Kalispell at the community college and then you move down to Bozeman and you switch majors and you study for awhile there and maybe get a degree or not and then you go out and get a job and find you don't have the tools to get to where you need to be so you start picking up some classes at the College of Technology in Great Falls and, ultimately, you end up back at Montana State University with an engineering degree.
Now we have done a very poor job in managing the transferability of those credits--in terms of affordability of our colleges--this runs hand in glove with transferability. So if these colleges aren't able to get it together, I think that the Board of Regents not only has an obligation but a responsibility to get that done. Somebody has to oversee this umbrella and bring the cousins together within single families. I think the Board of Regents need to be good business managers. I think they need to challenge every one of our institutions to do a better job in delivering programs for as little money as possible so that we can create a situation so that folks can begin affording a college education. What's happened during the last fifteen years is that we have priced middle classed families like the one I grew up in here in Montana out of the dream--away from the dream--of being able to obtain a college education. 24 percent or so of Montana's population are college graduates. Let me show you something here. [See chart 1.]
This is the real world and this is why unless Montana changes very quickly where we are in relation to the world we are going to continue losing ground. This is 1950. This color [blue] is unskilled labor percent. 60 percent of the workers in Montana [were] unskilled. In other words, either high school graduate or not even, sacking bags, maybe driving the tractor, pushing things around. Then this would be the skilled [purple]. And then this [white], of course, would be the professional. Now look what's happened by 2005. Okay, so, understanding that in order for Montana to be competitive with not just Idaho but India, not just South Dakota but Singapore, we have to lead in creating a skilled work force. So now let's just show how we've done it in this process. This is how visionary we've been. This takes [us] back to 1993. Do you know what happened in 1993, something very significant relative to the current Board of Regents?
Do you know who in Montana's government--even more than the governor--who has the greatest amount of power relative to prioritizing the money that we spend in our state government, what individual, what elective position? I'll give you a hint. When we are considering bills in our legislature the most important person is the Speaker of the House.
We started in 1993 with a term of the longest period of time in history of the Speaker of the House serving. Speaker of the House sometimes serves a session, two maybe maximum. But we had a Speaker make a run of four consecutive sessions of Speaker of the House, at a time where the Speaker's party controlled everything. So the priorities that the Speaker of the House set were the priorities that we have. So do you know who the Speaker of the House was and you know who, during this period of time, was the Speaker of the House?
TMP: Yes--the current Chair of the Board of Regents.
Gov. Schweitzer: And so is there a tiger who changed from stripes to spots or a leopard who changed from spots to stripes or none of the above? I'm asking. I don't know. But I can tell you that when given an opportunity that these were the lost years of education in Montana.
I can show you K-12 but it is interesting because in real dollars we decreased the amount of money we were putting into higher education all the way up to 2003 where it continued at more or less the same level. In inflationary adjusted dollars, we now have a 35 to 40 percent cut. So what happened here in 2004?
TMP: The Democrats took over control of the House and Senate.
Gov. Schweitzer: A new sheriff in town. And we made one of the largest increases--maybe the largest dollar increase investment in higher ed--in history. And the Board of Regents responded by taking all of that money and increasing tuition. We gave them money and they increased tuition. Thank God we created the scholarship program, because if we would have taken the couple million dollars that we had to invest in the "Best and the Brightest" scholarship program and we would have added to this line, they still would have increased tuition by 8.5 to 10 percent. So we wanted actually a scholarship program that we proposed. That money, where did that money come from? The previous budget that had been proposed, the Martz budget, that had been handed down along to us.
The Board of Regents had passed along what their priorities were and they included all of this stuff where they were going to now be the "Office of Economic Opportunity." They were going to be the business gurus, and they were going to be involved in all kinds of disciplines here, there and everywhere, and increase tuition. So they wanted that money. So the money we put into the scholarships, where did that come from? We just got rid of that stuff. We said, "You, Board of Regents, you have a job to do. Your job is to make Montana's college and university system not only one of the best in the world, but the most affordable for a middle class family."
Well, that isn't the job, they thought they'd take over the world. These folks who sit on that Board of Regents, they suddenly are responsible for commerce, transportation, health and human services--you name it--in Montana. We want these folks to be taking care of our college system and making it affordable and accessible to Montana students. Get off of this track of taking over effectively all of state government.
They had an opportunity during this time--you mentioned the name of a speaker--let's talk about some other people on the Board of Regents. For the first time, not in history, but the Board of Regents since 1973 has been considered sort of a non-partisan area. This is the place that governors do get an appointment to make but they selected people who are business community leaders that have a passion about higher education and are respected in the community and maybe even statewide but not necessarily partisan politicians. It's happened before but what we've got right now--and I'm not going to blame the Board of Regents, I'm going to blame two former governors--I'm going to put it right on the laps of Judy Martz and Marc Racicot, who said, "You know what I want on the Board of Regents, I want extremely partisan Republicans. I don't care if they support higher education. I don't care if this speaker of the house was the one who destroyed the funding for higher ed or that Mike Foster was in the Senate voting right along cutting this or Lila Taylor was there right along with him. I don't care about that. And when we choose a student regent, we're not going to choose the one that the students are interested in, we're going to choose a partisan Republican so we can count on another vote." And that's what we got.
I'm just laying it out; these numbers don't lie. These are the lost years. We recognize that.[See 1993-2005, Chart 2.]
In fact, I noticed here, ten days ago to two weeks ago (early January, 2006) the same guy who did this [then Speaker of the House Mercer] criticized this administration for not putting more money in higher education. You know, I'm thinking we've done a fair bit in a short period of time, like more than has ever occurred in history, turned the trend around that had gone on for a dozen years, and for that, he criticizes us?
I don't think so. Again, knowing that in order for us to change our work force so that we're competitive with the rest of the world, we've got to invest in higher education, that's what we have already done. We threw more money in higher ed than at any time in history and they raised tuition anyway.
Here's the rest of their legacy. [See Chart 3.] Let's go back to the beginning of the legacy of these folks. What you've got here is the ability to pay by Montana families and the cost of tuition. The GEP (Gross Economic Product) just grows 3 percent--there's not much you can do about that--and the wage growth just kind of ticks along but during these years they clearly had priorities that were outside the boundary of investing in higher education and making tuition affordable. Now what we have--and this is what I've been handed--is this gap between affordability and a dream. Now how do we turn this thing around? Well you have to put more money into it.
TMP: At the last full Board of Regents meeting in Bozeman in November of 2005, the Board approved substantial salary increases for the commissioner, the two presidents, and the four chancellors in order to bring them in line with those salaries made by top administrators in neighboring states. Yet this comes in the wake of a number of successive and substantial tuition increases approved by the Board. So what are your feelings about these raises? Faculty and students are concerned primarily on the campuses about where the money is going to come from to fund this.
Gov. Schweitzer: I heard part of the message they describe that in order for us to attract talent to these positions they needed to raise the salaries by $60,000. Didn't they go from about $125,000 to $200,000? So they said that in order for us to be competitive, in order for us to attract the kind of talent that Montana deserves in running our higher ed system, we've got to pay these salaries, right?
TMP: That was the basic argument.
Gov. Schweitzer: So it seems to me that they are proposing to keep the people that we have right now. Are they saying that we have incompetent people running it right now and that if we pay $60,000 more we'd get somebody else? I don't think they talked about sending anybody down the road, did they? Did they say "We are now opening this position up competitively, George Dennison, Geoff Gamble, Sheila Stearns, we would like your résumés because now that we have created a position that effectively pays 30 percent more we think that we could get a big pool of talent in here and maybe you can keep your job and maybe you won't?" Did they say that? No.
Okay, so what did we get for our money? In other words, if I've got somebody who is delivering my cattle for me and he is doing a very good job and he has not said to me that he plans to go anywhere--he is not going to quit--maybe I'll give him an increase in salary like the pay plan has. I think I got an increase in salary of 3 percent--so did the rest of the employees of state government, 3 percent. We're happy to get it, right? It was a nice thing to get--we like our job--we didn't threaten to leave--but we like to get that additional money in there. But they [the Board of Regents] are saying that instead of paying these people six times the average wage in Montana we need to pay them ten times the average wage. So I was surprised--and I say this almost tongue in cheek--that corresponding to these historic increases in salary I didn't see an advertisement requesting new talent to come to Montana. What are we getting for it? I don't understand.
TMP: Part of the argument that was posed at the Regents' meeting was that when the various top administrators retire and we need to hire replacements for them that we've lagged so far behind for so long in not raising the salaries that at some point we are not competitive any more. And when we have to hire somebody in a national search we simply will not be able to attract the best people to come administer our system.
Gov. Schweitzer: Let me give you an example. The last major big hire [among the presidents and chancellors] was Geoff Gamble. I think Geoff Gamble is one hell of a great president of a university. I'm more critical of that particular university because it's my alma mater and I watch it a little closer. I think we have a great guy as president of Montana State University. He only came here a few years ago and he knew he was earning less than he could make some place else, maybe he even came here for less money than the job that he had before. Now, how long has Sexton been at MSU-Billings?
TMP: Since 1994.
Gov. Schweitzer: Dennison at U of M?
TMP: Since 1990.
Gov. Schweitzer: Very long-term serving. But I don't think they were talking about increasing the salary after these folks left. These folks are still staying and I'm not suggesting that they are not good--I'm not making that point--but clearly we are paying enough money to keep them so I guess my problem with this is what do I say to middle-class kids of Montana when they remind me of this? They remind me: "Brian, you gave more money to higher ed and what are they spending it on?" Well, they're giving big raises to big shots. I'm concerned. I think it sends the wrong message.
TMP: It hasn't sent the right message to the rank and file in the university system--to the staff people who are just barely getting by and for the faculty. Many of the faculty believe that we can't compete on a national level to attract and retain top faculty and we yet we give the top people massive increases. I think the hope was that at some point at least somebody will acknowledge on the Board of Regents or the Commissioner herself that the faculty and staff are underpaid too, and if we are going to use regional comparators for the top administrators, then let's use regional comparators for the rest of us too.
Gov. Schweitzer: Fair enough. But the other thing I will submit to you is that in nearly every occupation in Montana people earn less money than they do elsewhere. If this would be the parameter then I would say give it the "pickup test." You know, almost everybody in Montana could put most of their possessions in the back of a pickup and pull a trailer and head for Seattle or Denver or San Francisco right now and make more money. I don't care what you do, a janitor could make more money doing what he or she does, I'd make more money doing what I do, but we picked this place, we love this place, this is our community, this is our home, and we take the good with the bad. What the good is: we have the best quality of life of any place in the world. The bad news: we earn a little less money. But the cost of keeping up with the Joneses is less here too. And so, I simply don't buy that we just pick a half dozen people that work in our university system and pay them three quarters of a million dollars more and suddenly, "Eureka!" Montana becomes a world class university center.
TMP: As you recently stated publicly, lack of educational funding and the reprioritization of funding by the GOP during the 1990s resulted in a number of "lost years" in educational funding from the state general fund. The result has been Montana ranking nearly last in the nation in percentage of state support for higher education and its corresponding 10-13 percent annual raise in tuition, making our ratio of tuition to median household income among the highest in the western United States. Yet, given your administration's reluctance to raise taxes and given the many competing needs of Montana's government, particularly corrections, health and human services, and so forth, how will you be able to convince the legislature to reprioritize funding toward higher education?
Gov. Schweitzer: We already have. There's my first budget. There's my first biennium, that's what we managed to do our first time out.
But let me tell you what's at risk here. And this question needs to be asked of every single person who works in the university system and every single politician in Montana because we now have this proposition--the TABOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) amendment--which limits the ability to increase spending in governments. So what they did is created a bathtub of funding that lasted ten years. I call it a bathtub because you can pour water in right here and you can store water all the way across to here. [At this point the governor referred to Chart 3 above, pointing at the year 1993 and moving his hand across to 2003].
So what I've tried to do is in a very short period of time we have many, many years--twelve years--to pick up for so we dumped a lot of money in. I'm saying that in order for us to get even with inflation, to get these lines closer together, [at this point the governor referred to chart 3 above, pointing at the ending points of the two lines in 2004] we've got to put increasing amounts of money in ed and k-12. So when I hear public policy makers say, "yeah, I support that too. I want to put more money in education, higher ed." Good, then you're with me and then they say in the next breath they support this TABOR amendment. TABOR would mean that you could not accelerate, in other words, you would be tied to the baseline spending of those previous twelve years. So if any way you measure us to our neighbors, we could never change. What we've got right now is what we're going to get. The only way you can spend more is if you grow the economy.
Well, my administration is growing the economy. I put great priority in building jobs and higher paying jobs and more industry in Montana. But, in order for me to attract industry to Montana, I have to demonstrate a commitment to higher ed. [Potential business leaders and corporations] want to know: will you train the kinds of engineers that we need for these jobs? So, the next question we need to ask every single public policy maker and, while we're on the topic, everybody who works for the university system and, yes, the Board of Regents: do you support this TABOR amendment? Because if they support the TABOR amendment, they're effectively telling you we will not be able to change in Montana. Where we're at is what we'll have. We can only increase at the percentage that our GEP (Gross Economic Product) increases.
TMP: So what's your solution and strategy for the next biennium? There are going to be a lot of people coming to state government with their hands out.
Gov. Schweitzer: Of course there will be. To start with, I can't spend money I don't have. We cannot run a budget deficit in this state and so we have made an historic investment in higher education and we'll invest more. How much more? Depends on where we are, what our budget projections are going to be a year from now. If I go based on the budget projections we have right now, it means that I cannot accelerate investment in education at the percentage of increase we did in the last five years. I can't. We have to grow the economy to get there. So that's the way it's going to be.
TMP: You've been a very strong advocate of increasing support for two-year institutions, and yet some people would say we have too many four-year campuses to fund everybody adequately. The MP asked this of Sheila Stearns when it interviewed her, and that is, is the possibility of closing some of the smaller units part of the solution?
Gov. Schweitzer: I don't think so. Remember my passion about accessibility and affordability of schools and transferability of credits? If we're going to retrain adults in Montana, often times that adult has a job. You're 35 years old. You need to get a degree or skill and you need to be trained to do that. And you live...pick any spot in Montana. You just cannot pick up your family and go back to Billings or Bozeman or Missoula for a three-year period to get that degree. It's not functional, you can't do it. If we have entry level classes around the state that are close--those are our community colleges even our colleges of technology--then you can put together your core courses. Maybe it means that you need to go to Billings for the last year and a half of your three years. But the first year and a half is close to the home. I don't think that anyone is able to adequately pinpoint the efficiencies we get by having a single campus or just two campuses.
Many people are always saying, "Look at the Wyoming example. They've got the University of Wyoming and they are in the WAC conference in football and basketball and they're a smaller state than us but they have a bigger university than ours and they are able to focus their talents on that one." That's a better system? The Governor of Wyoming, Dave Freudenthal, has said to me, "I like your system better than ours. You have higher education closer to the population than we have. I like that system."
TMP: How often do you visit the various campuses around the state?
Gov. Schweitzer: Often. I've been in office for a year and my visits to the campuses are dozens. MSU-Billings and the College of Technology, I've been there numerous times; Montana State University, I was there last week; University of Montana, I was there the week before. I've been a couple of times to Dillon; I've been three times to Havre; I've been to all the colleges of technology, tribal colleges, and community colleges across the state. And so I visit them often and they are always the high point of my week. But there's one thing, Jag is welcome most places in Montana. But two or three times ago I walked into the Student Union Building in Bozeman--I was just going to get a cup of coffee, talking with people, visiting with students and faculty--and a lady came up to me and she said, "Hey, hey, hey, hey, no dogs allowed in here," so Jag and I are not going back to the Student Union Building that often. For the rest of the universities and colleges around Montana you'll see me more if you like my dog.
TMP: We'll pass that information along to Geoff Gamble. Last question, if you weren't governor and you had the opportunity to teach at one of our institutions within the MUS what would you like to teach?
Gov. Schweitzer: International Business.
TMP: That was quick. Nothing else? That must be your dream.
Gov. Schweitzer: That's what I've been successful at. As you know, I'm a trained soil scientist but I made my living exporting Montana ideas, equipment, crops and genetics and technology around the world and, you know what, I bet I could walk into a business school across Montana and ask instructors to go through the steps of cutting an international business deal. Explain to the students the pitfalls of a letter of credit, and the force un jour you have in insurance when you ship products on the high seas. In other words, you can buy insurance on your product but in the case of war or climate, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, and war, your product is not insured.
Then I would like to teach the pitfalls of letters of credit where the letter of credit is, for example, a deal for 13,000 widgets. Those widgets will be shipped by such and such a time, they will be such and such a color and size, they will be shipped from Seattle destined for Abu Dhabi, they will arrive by such and such a time and the following documents must be presented to such and such a thing in order to collect your money. That's what a letter of credit is. But there's such a thing--and people in international business where you have two or maybe more languages that you translate back and forth--you get into someone who has translated the original deal that was in Arabic or in French in English and you're negotiating documents in English and you've read through that document and page 2, there's a discrepancy with page 7. In other words, if you deliver on 2 you cannot deliver on 7, so you have to understand. A lawyer doesn't get that job done. You have to be a business man who understands your product and understands what you will be presenting as documents, shipping documents, weighing documents, tax documents, all the documents you need, or you're not going to get paid.
And the person who receives the goods--they will get the goods--the goods will be unloaded and they will be selling widgets all over Abu Dhabi and you delivered your documents to the bank and the bank says its hands are tied, that they can't release the money. Those are some of the pitfalls.
A second pitfall I would like to talk about in terms of international business is the importance of building a relationship, a personal relationship. If you are the president of your company, if you're the owner of your company, you need to go there. You need to be there. You could send your minions. Why would they trust a minion? They want to size you up and they want to know if this is a deal that's going to work and then all kinds of cultural things that go with it. If you're doing business you need to understand how it is that they do business in that area. At least for me, I've done business in South America and Middle East and North Africa; I could give [students] some of the pitfalls in those areas.
[The Montana Professor 16.2, Spring 2006 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]