This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/uw-madison-losing-one-of-few-conservative-professors/

Wisconsinites concerned about the flagship university should heed the words of Ryan Owens

Ryan Owens, 48, grew up in Kronenwetter, earned undergraduate and law degrees from UW-Madison and then practiced law for few years before earning a doctorate in political science from Washington University – St. Louis. A Supreme Court scholar, he is currently a Professor of Political Science and Affiliate Faculty in the Law School at UW-Madison but is leaving this summer for Florida State, where he will direct a new Institute for Governance and Civics. He talks here with Badger Institute President Mike Nichols.

Mike: You do self-identify, I guess is the verbiage nowadays, as conservative. Is that right?

Ryan: [Laughter] I am.

Mike: You ran for attorney general at one point.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s correct. You know I have always been a Ronald Reagan conservative, and I believe in limited government. I believe in individual responsibility.

And that’s not to say that government has no role, right? I mean I think government should do a few things. But what the government does do, it should do efficiently.

So, yes, I’m a strong believer in the separation of powers, individual rights and liberties, and the Constitution. I think we need to do more to celebrate the Constitution. It’s the greatest freedom-generating document that we’ve ever seen in the history of humankind. And it is frustrating to see so many folks, particularly in academia these days, running it into the ground. It’s not perfect, but it’s very, very good.

Mike: When you say, “Celebrate the Constitution,” do you in some respects mean at least acknowledge the goodness of America and what this country stands for?

Ryan: I think it’s very easy to look at flaws and criticize. It’s tougher to point out all the successes that we’ve had. I think there’s an effort really to shine a spotlight on everything that has gone wrong in this country because I think, underneath some of these efforts, is just the attempt, the motivation to try to remake the country in a fundamentally different way. 

Mike: Have you seen, on campus in Madison … that there’s some type of overt, maybe intentional, indoctrination — if that’s not too strong a word — of kids into a less than objective ideology, into a leftist ideology?

Ryan: It exists. That left-wing, dogmatic orthodoxy exists. It’s omnipresent. You can feel it in the air. … The question that you asked is where does it come from. …  It comes from many sources: I think outside interest groups, I think the administration, the students themselves. It’s tough.

Mike: Does it come from faculty to some extent?

Ryan: It depends on the faculty. You know I have had students tell me that they had faculty who have told them, for example, that abortion is a human right. And if you are a pro-life student, what are you supposed to do when you hear that? 

I’ve had students tell me, “You know I’ve been here for four or five years as a senior. I’ve never had any professor other than you show me both sides to the issues.” And I suspect that some of that is overblown.  

I do have some very, very good colleagues, even on the left, who I think can represent a conservative position in a dialogue. But the fact of the matter is, when you have so few conservative faculty members on campus, students aren’t going to be exposed to the real thing.

I had a colleague of mine who recently did an analysis on contributions, political contributions, among UW-Madison faculty …  And he looked at donations (I think maybe in the last four or five years — I don’t remember precisely the number). But he found that in terms of dollars donated, 99.9% of all faculty donations went to Democrats.

Mike: No kidding?  

Ryan: Yep. And it was something like 0.2% or 0.02% went to Republicans and the same to Libertarians. So, it’s just… It’s crazy how one-sided academia has become, particularly at UW-Madison.

We wouldn’t tolerate that kind of monopoly. We wouldn’t tolerate that kind of exclusion if we were looking at race or sex. But for some reason, when it comes to political ideology, so many people on the left just accept it as a truism.

And that’s not right. It’s not good for our students, and it’s certainly not good for the future of higher education in Wisconsin.

Mike: Why is it so monolithic? How does that happen? 99.9?

Ryan: It happens for a few reasons. First, because faculty hire other faculty. And once you reach a tipping point where everybody – or at least the strong majority – thinks one particular way, now they’re able to hire only those who also think that particular way.  

When I first came to UW-Madison, in 2011, there were a number of conservative faculty members. And if they weren’t conservative, they were maybe center, center-right, and they could pump the brakes on things before they got out of control. 

Well, through attrition, retirement, departures, whatever, we’re down to three in a political science department right now. And after I leave this year and my colleague Rick Avramenko leaves to go to Arizona State, they’re going to be down to one next year.  

Mike: How many are there total in the political science department, professors?

Ryan: I don’t know the exact number. It’s probably upwards of approximately 30.

Mike: Do I dare ask who that one single person is who is left, or would I be targeting them?

[Laughter]

Ryan: You might be able to guess who it is…

Mike: Does the fact that you’re a conservative contribute at all to your decision to leave Madison and go to Florida?

Ryan: Yes.

Mike: In what way?

Ryan: Well, for starters, Florida State has committed much more to an intellectual pluralism. They value different opinions, different beliefs. It’s clear that they’re not afraid to have conservatives on the faculty at different places.

They ultimately want people who are going to be there to do good work, good research, and that’s what motivates them, not some view of social justice or something else. So, that appeals quite a bit to me.

Second, the city of Madison itself and the Madison area. I’ve lived in a number of places, and this is the most intolerant place I have ever lived — without question.

People assume things about you politically. It doesn’t matter where you are. You’re on a flight back to Madison. You’re at a park. You’re at a restaurant. Somebody just assumes that, because you’re here, you hate conservatives — or something.

The university has got some tremendous problems. This is the third thing. The university has some tremendous problems that it seems unable to recognize.

The minute people start to criticize the University of Wisconsin, folks either label them as anti-education or somehow wrong, or then they’ll just say, “Well, we have academic freedom,” not recognizing that half of this state is highly skeptical of what the UW is doing these days, not recognizing that this institution is built in large part on goodwill — on the faith of the people who support it… that what it’s doing is worthy. And the UW has become so distant, I think, from the population of Wisconsin and so self-righteous that it’s forgotten that it can err, that it can ignore things that are important to people.

We’re seeing these kinds of debates and culture war issues becoming more pronounced on a daily basis, and the UW (for its part) just cannot seem to get out of its own way and recognize that it’s doing long-term damage to the legitimacy of the institution.  

Mike: Is it a free speech issue for conservatives or is it more that what dominates the academics and the culture of the campus is so leftist that it somehow detracts from the real value of a university?

Ryan: Look. I mean there are free speech issues. I think they affect the students, the conservative students, perhaps more than they affect the faculty. You know conservative students who want to put on an event, they’ve got to make sure every i is dotted, every t is crossed. You’ve got to engage in multiple meetings with university administration and UW PD to make sure events don’t get hijacked and things like that.

Whereas I think liberal student groups just get a pass, right? You know the procedures are sort of dealt with very loosely for them.

So, my conservative students talk to me about double standards that apply to them. Within the faculty, I’m not so sure there’s much of a free speech issue. I certainly don’t want to wave that. But it’s more that all of the levers are controlled by people who are committed to a left-wing ideology. And I shouldn’t say all the levers. Many of the levers. Probably most of the levers.

Mike: Does it extend to, for instance, the type of class that might be offered?

Ryan: Well, the first place you look is policies and procedures, not so much courses. I mean obviously, if you have very few conservative faculty available to teach courses, the kind of course offerings you get are going to be skewed. You’re not likely to get a class on the Founding Fathers. Instead, you’re likely to get a class on how slavery undergirded the entire formation of the United States.

So, then you have students who are exposed to a particular perspective in their classes, and then they have programming put on by the university, and they’re exposed to that same view there. Now pretty soon you’ve got the students hearing one point of view over and over and over and over again. And not having that other view, well, there’s a vacuum there.

Mike: Are you worried that most kids at a young age, 18, are unable to resist that type of pressure and, therefore, subvert their innate conservatism or underlying conservatism? Or that they even, at some point, just figure, “I’m wrong. I should be progressive. Everybody else in the world is.” Does it concern you?

Ryan: Well, what I have noticed is that many of the students actually yearn for an exchange of views. I taught a class last year called “Conservative, Liberalism, and the Idea of America.” I co-taught it with a colleague of mine. And we looked at American political history over time, looking at it both through a conservative and a liberal perspective. And we had primary readings where students would read, you know, Reagan’s address one day, and then they would read Obama’s the next and sort of grapple with the two, what the perspectives were. 

And we found that students really, really enjoyed that. Even those who were dyed-in-the-wool progressives or dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, they appreciated that. And so, that tells me that students are amenable to listening to other views. So, I’m not worried that we have a whole generation that’s just lost now because of this.

What I worry about is the habits that are formed during this time of their lives. Do you expose yourself to different views one way or the other? And if you’re not beginning those habits right now, it’s unlikely that you’ll begin them later.

Mike: Do you feel it’s a disservice to many of these kids that they graduate, they get out into the real world where, yes, we’re in Wisconsin, we’re a purple state, there are many progressives and liberals, but there sure a lot of conservatives as well, especially in certain fields, businesses, things like that? Do you worry it’s a disservice to those kids, Ryan?

Ryan: Oh, I absolutely do. … When I was on the campaign trail, I had a guy tell me one time, “You know some of my recent workers, my recent hires, they can’t screw in a lightbulb but they sure can tell you whether that lightbulb company is racist.” 

Mike: [Laughter]

Ryan: It’s a real problem. I would be very upset if I were spending the kinds of dollars that UW-Madison charges its students to come away with what I think a lot of them are coming away with. It’s troubling to me.

I have students who just don’t have basic writing skills. I have students who don’t have basic sort of public speaking skills.

I mean civics is about knowledge and skills, and I really worry that we’re not providing them the skills. And we’re certainly not providing them the best knowledge that we could be.

Look. I don’t want this to come off as, like, 100% negative either. I believe very, very strongly in higher education and its ability to move people up the social and economic ladder. I think there’s so much that we can do.

So, some of the irritation that you hear in my voice is irritation born from frustration at our inability to achieve what we could be achieving. We could do so much better but we’re not right now because the universities are one-sided and need to have more people to engage in a robust dialogue over what it is that we should be doing. We just don’t have that right now, and I think, as a consequence, we’re suffering, our students are suffering, the taxpayers are suffering, and the long-term success of universities is suffering.

Mike: Is there anything we can do to change that in short order? 

Ryan: Well, there are a handful of things that we can do. I think, number one, students need greater First Amendment awareness.  

We’ve got to inculcate a culture of free speech appreciation. And so, I think that’s something that the university could do. I mean it could make a First Amendment class or a dialogue class a requirement to graduate. I think we would see some results pretty quickly with that.

I think, additionally, universities should open themselves up to a little bit more transparency. Why not have syllabi listed publicly so anybody can take a look at them if they want?

Why not open up higher education to people with private-sector backgrounds? Deans, chancellors, provosts: we should be considering having people with private sector experience in here to try to break that sort of monopolistic behavior.

I think hiring practices need to be reformed (one way or another). I don’t have the solution to that but that’s clearly something that needs to be done.

A handful of other things, I think, as well. I mean one of the problems that we see is at research institutions like UW-Madison and others like it is the focus for tenure faculty is publication . . . I think publication is useful. But the problem is we are incentivized almost exclusively based on our publications at the exclusion of things like service and teaching, right?

The other thing that can be done here is the  Boards of Regents can get involved.

That’s a frustration that I’ve had with our Board of Regents. For a very long time, Republican governors appointed regents to the board who were friends or sort of mildly interested in the UW but didn’t really get engaged and deferred in large part to what the chancellors wanted or what the administration wanted.

It’s time for Republican governors, when they put people on Boards of Regents, to make sure that those people are there for more than just football tickets. To make sure that they’re there to oversee, to analyze, investigate, figure out what’s going on and what needs to be changed. Wisconsin could stand to learn from some of the other states that have engaged in this, like Florida, like Tennessee, like North Carolina.

Mike: You’re a young man. Can we ever get you back? 

Ryan: [Laughter] Um… Well, you know, as a conservative, I don’t ever like to forgo options, but I think it’s incredibly unlikely. 

Mike: I’m sorry to hear that (on both a personal basis, Ryan, and for our state). I’m very sorry to see you go. Let me just say that we conservatives here are going to miss you and I hope we can, from time to time, get you back here so we can remind people what needs to be done to implement some of these reforms to strengthen our universities and once again make them accessible to all. So, thank you for everything you’ve done for our state. 

Ryan: Well, as I say, I love the state of Wisconsin. I’ve always loved the state of Wisconsin. I hope very much that UW-Madison is able to effectuate some reforms to get it back on track. It’s got a very strong and solid history behind it, and I really, really hope that it continues to protect that legacy and do what’s right for the state of Wisconsin.

Mike Nichols is the President of the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.

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