[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Montana Professor interviewed Sen. Mary Sheehy Moe (D-Great Falls)1 about the recent legistative session
I'd give the legislature a grade of B- on the Montana University System (MUS) issues. On the plus side, we funded the system sufficiently to allow for another tuition freeze while supporting the employee pay plan. We added an additional $15 million in one-time-only funding to leverage university-based research for strategic advancements for Montana's economy. Those were big-ticket items and the highest priorities for the system.
The 64th legislature also continued the investment the 63rd session made in WWAMI slots for medical students. In 2013 legislators expanded the number of WWAMI slots from 20 to 30, the first expansion in 40 years. This session we provided additional base funding to support the full four years of the program.
Unfortunately, we did very little to address the issue of student debt and, most unfortunately, we failed to pass the bill allocating over $34 million to infrastructure needs on Montana campuses. With just one more legislator pushing green, you would have seen an $18.4 million project in Bozeman, a $10 million project in Missoula, a $3 million project in Great Falls, and a $2.65 million project in Billings. Not modernizing/expanding these facilities is a huge disservice to students and faculty, as well as hundreds of construction workers and associated businesses in those communities.
As scholars and lovers of Montana, you should also decry the failure to fund the renovations to the Montana Heritage Center (nee, the Montana Historical Society), Virginia City and Nevada City, and the Lewis & Clark Caverns. All for the lack of one more vote!
I worked closely with legislators as part of the university system for 10 years, but I've followed the legislature pretty closely for the past 25 years. Over that time period, the prevailing perspective of legislators with regard to the university system has been consistent: pragmatism.
Legislators, particularly those who serve on the committees that wrestle with funding requests, want to be persuaded of a return on their investment in higher education. In 2001, that pragmatism manifested itself in the legislature's emerging interest in two-year education. That interest was partly the result of a certain antipathy toward "pointy-headed intellectuals" and the perspective of some legislators that many of the majors students were pursuing led to nothing but tedious exercises involving angels dancing on the head of a pin. Partly it was the result of a political reaction to some university programs, faculty, or students. Partly it was their sense that Montana's two-year colleges were the red-headed stepchildren of the university system.
But mostly this focus resulted from their pragmatic view that students who go to two-year colleges spend less money and time in college and emerge with a credential that leads directly to a job. From 2001 through 2011, I'd say that priority remained a high one for legislators.
We're seeing a shift in focus now, especially in the area of research. The $15 million allocation this session for strategic deployment of the universities' research capacity is a big win for the system—and the state. That happened because legislators are seeing how research fits into their pragmatic mindset. They see its connection to agriculture and its impact on economic development.
OCHE deserves a lot of credit for this shift, especially Dr. Sylvia Moore, the former Deputy Commissioner for Academic and Students Affairs and Research. Sylvia added the word "research" to her title and during her years at OCHE she tilled the respect for research that has led to this harvest. She was tireless in promoting the research assets of our universities and her legacy should not be forgotten.
One other gradual shift in priorities should also be mentioned. Most legislators directly involved in setting education policy and funding feel very strongly about the importance of tying funding to performance metrics. I'm not as keen as they are on this issue (see later question), but again it's a reflection of the very pragmatic mindset that most legislators have about higher education.
Most of the bills were minor in impact, but two reveal important themes that your readers should be aware of. We once again saw a bill allowing students to carry firearms on our campuses. I've participated in this debate for several sessions now, so for me it's become somewhat enervating. Underlying it, however, is an age-old attempt by the legislature to undermine or overtake the authority of the board of regents, and that's a fight I'll always show up for.
Amazingly (at least to me), I was actually around when our current state constitution was ratified and, as a student of that process and a relative and friend of many who participated in it, I'm pretty well-grounded in the experiences and perspectives that led to the establishment of the board of regents. After 15 years of controversy, in 1972 Montanans were sick of legislative interference with intellectual freedom and student expression on Montana's college campuses. They were tired of having professors harassed and programs imperiled because of some legislators' political, religious, or life views. They also saw that having one board of education, charged with oversight of both K-12 and higher education in Montana, served neither sector well. The result was the creation of two separate boards, one of which was the board of regents, whose decisions about how the campuses would be run and what programs they would offer could not be dictated or even trifled with by the legislature.
Of course, that doesn't mean legislators won't try. Legislators rightly view themselves as representatives of the people, but some of them wrongly believe their office empowers them to tell the campuses and the people on them what to do. This in turn puts the regents and the commissioner in the uncomfortable position of simultaneously asking the legislature for a lot of money to fund the system while insisting that the legislature butt out of management and control issues.
I don't think professors can be very effective in straddling this duality of purpose either. That leaves it to the public and to members of the legislature themselves. Over the years, Montana professors have been very fortunate to have the likes of Bob Ream, Harry Fritz, and Frankie Wilmer speaking truth to power on this issue. Today, you're very well-served by senators like Mary McNally of MSU-Billings and Dick Barrett, former UM professor. Again, it isn't the particular legislation—in this instance, weapons on campus—that is important. It's preserving the apolitical and insulated oversight of the system guaranteed by our constitution.
A second bill that seemed OK on the surface but was troubling underneath was a bill changing the mission of the state lottery to generating STEM scholarships for Montana students. I've got nothing against majors in science, technology, engineering, and math...although Sen. Dick Barrett and I sometimes share Kleenexes over the poor billing we economics and English scholars get. I don't believe, as some do, that the lottery is like a gateway drug for more addictive forms of gambling. I do think its financial impact is regressive in nature and it plays to a kind of "magical thinking" that is the antithesis of wisdom and prudence. Mainly, I just get queasy about the lottery using Montana kids to sell its wares. That's exploitive and I wonder what truly motivates it. Whatever the answers to that question are, ultimately such exploitation makes the system look bad.
A lot of bills advance a lofty purpose to justify a not-so-lofty practice. We were able to amend this one to mitigate my concerns, but not eliminate them. Ultimately, I held my nose and voted for it because the lottery was first established to benefit education and this would do it in a tangible way that won't be backfilled with cuts elsewhere.
On the whole, yes. I've always been impressed in particular by the student lobbyists; they reflect so well on the system. This year the system effort to emphasize research prior to the session was very effective. Legislators mentioned it throughout the session.
OCHE does a good job of tracking bills and keeping in touch with individual legislators. However, as I mentioned earlier, asking for substantial sums of money from people you are also trying to keep at arm's length with respect to control of the system is a difficult position to maintain and unfortunately you have to do both as commissioner of higher education in Montana. This commissioner seems to me to be too conciliatory when he needn't or shouldn't be, but the proof's in the pudding and the university system has fared well during his tenure.
My only caution would be to your readers as Montana professors. This is the first commissioner's office in my memory in which only one person on the entire cabinet has ever been a tenured professor and that one handles budgetary, not academic, issues. That means legislators don't have direct access to the perspective and breadth of experience that come with years in the faculty ranks. Although I have high regard for the commissioner and his cabinet, that deficit concerns me.
I'll focus on three.
Student debt. In 1992, the state paid 77% of the cost of a student's education; today, Montana pays only 39%. Not coincidentally, today nearly 2/3 of our bachelor's degree graduates leave college with an average of $27,000 in debt. Nearly 3/4 of Montana's associate degree graduates leave with an average debt load of $17,000.
Yet the only debt-related bill we passed was one eliminating jail time and licensure revocation as penalties for failing to repay student loans in a timely manner. As for need-based scholarships, the lottery scholarship would have been a good opportunity to advance the system in this much-needed area. Instead, the scholarship is merit-based. High GPAs are positively associated with students of means, just as we do with dual enrollment, we're using scarce resources to give financial breaks to a great number of students who don't need them.
Performance-based funding. It's all the rage, I know, but performance-based funding will lead to mischief. Most metrics don't capture either the causes or the results of a college education with anything approaching precision. The more you simplify the factors to legitimize the calculus, the less informative and/or valid the result is. Probably the best thing about performance-based funding is that it emphasizes campus-wide innovations on the important subjects of remediation, retention, demographic achievement gaps, and post-graduate employment and engagement. But I fear that oversimplified formulas will lead to overly simplistic conclusions on the part of legislators.
K-12 and "the Common Core." The battle over "the Common Core" standards for English language arts and mathematics, feverishly fought in other states, has now spread into Montana. At the lengthy hearing on the bill to repeal Montana's core standards in English and math...well, suffice it to say that many of the proponents failed to meet those very standards.
If you think this issue has nothing to do with higher education, think again. Montana's common core standards are the most important step we've ever made in ensuring that students leave high school college- and career-ready. Nothing would be more helpful to the current debate than the presence of college professors saying, "We need standards at least this comprehensive, specific, and rigorous." I've been disappointed to see so few professors so far. It's not too late. This issue is not going away, and its seemingly peripheral issues—dissatisfaction with the Board of Public Education, confusion about the difference between standards and curriculum, misinformation in general—could ripple into higher education.
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[The Montana Professor 25.2, Spring 2015 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]