The Wisconsin Idea
Near Madison, Wisconsin
Somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century, a phrase entered Wisconsin political life that has not left it since. The Wisconsin Idea. It is the proposition that the university's purpose does not end at the campus gates. It reaches every home in the state.
The phrase was crystallized by Charles Van Hise, who became president of the University of Wisconsin in nineteen-oh-three and announced that service to the Commonwealth would be the motto of his administration. But the intellectual roots go back further, to a university president named John Bascom, who led the institution from eighteen seventy-four to eighteen eighty-seven and preached relentlessly to his students about the obligation that an educated person has to society.
Two of those students were Charles Van Hise and Robert La Follette. They sat in the same classrooms. They took Bascom's lessons seriously in different ways: Van Hise through the university, La Follette through politics. When La Follette became governor in nineteen-oh-one, the two men put the Wisconsin Idea into practice. At one point, fifty-seven University of Wisconsin professors were simultaneously serving on state commissions, drafting bills, and administering the regulatory bodies that La Follette's progressive reforms had created.
The university designed a railroad tax law. Professors helped write the workers' compensation system, the direct primary statute, and one of the first modern state income taxes. The state was, in the language of the era, a laboratory of democracy.
The Wisconsin Idea was later given its name in a book published in nineteen twelve by Charles McCarthy, who ran the state's Legislative Reference Bureau, a free research service that any legislator could use to draft good law. The Bureau itself was an expression of the Idea: expert knowledge made available to the public.
Critics then and since have questioned whether university experts should have that kind of power over policy. The Idea has been contested ever since it was articulated. But the phrase, and the ambition behind it, remain the unofficial motto of a university that still measures itself against something more than rankings.
