"Much mischief comes from mixing politics with higher education."

Great Falls Tribune, 14 February 1919

Jim Twiford, President of the Wyoming State Senate, recently asked the state's Legislative Service Office to draft a bill eliminating the University of Wyoming's College of Law. There may well be reasonable arguments supporting such a bill but Mr. Twiford doesn't offer any. Never the less, he seems to be responding to a book (he admitted he hadn't read) by U. WY. law professor Debra Donahue

. Twiford's action exemplifies why my heart goes out to the administrators in land grant universities. Yes, I realize their pay is often twice that of full professors, that they often have assigned parking places near their offices, seats in sky boxes, and little if any teaching or research responsibilities.

But not all good things go together. They also have to perform a perilous balancing act, for they are caught between supporting honest and responsible research and the political reality of state funding.

The ethical quality of and morale within a university depend on the character exhibited when these ideals, the tectonic plates of shifting cultures and economies, collide. The Wyoming case is merely the most current example.

In her book, The Western Range Revisited , Professor Donahue argues that on some BLM lands livestock grazing should be reduced to protect wildlife habitat. Of course, academics operate in one cultural and economic context, ranchers in quite another. Professors live on transfers from the public, but ranchers sell products in open markets. Academics thrive when their scholarly and grant-generating activities are recognized and respected by their peers.

Ranchers, however, survive, and occasionally prosper, when their costs of production are markedly less than the prices received. Ranchers, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times. Hence they are highly sensitive to cost-enhancing threats. The ranchers see Professor Donahue as an especially odious threat. Her book threatens grazing privileges while ranchers' taxes pay her salary.

Although one of Donahue's colleagues, Mark Squillace, was likewise attacked when he challenged timber sales in the Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming has no monopoly on such conflict. Rather, it is inherent to universities which demand research from faculty who write on public policy.

When such situations arise, university administrators are in terrible binds. There is no easy out. Like Civil War soldiers facing a life threatening operation, they must bite the bullet and suffer the ordeal. No anesthesia is available to those responsible for the moral and scientific integrity of academic freedom.

Some years ago, a Washington State University economist, Professor Norman Whittlesey, challenged the economics of damming the Columbia river system to supply subsidized irrigation. After his testimony, then-state Senator Tub Hansen reportedly met with the Dean of the School of Agriculture to have Whittlesey's tenured position eliminated. When that failed, Hansen tried to make Whittlesey's salary into a line item in the state budget so it could be eliminated in committee. The quality of the professor's analysis was not at issue. Rather, the quarrel was with the implications of his results, questioning cheap water for special interests.

To their credit, neither Washington State nor Wyoming caved in to pressure. If they had, the universities would suffer significant reputational damage. The costs of lost academic prestige are huge and long lasting. Here's an example.

After earning my doctorate at Indiana University, I was appointed visiting assistant professor at IU, a temporary position. Although I had offers on the East and West coasts, I wanted to return to Montana. However, my faculty colleagues, formerly my professors, strongly objected. Several warned me that academic freedom there was tenuous at best. They told me of an economist, Professor Louis Levine of the State University of Montana (now the University of Montana), who had challenged the mineral tax policy of the state. As a consequence, he was suspended for "insubordination and unprofessional conduct prejudicial to the welfare of the university".

This event occurred in 1919, and fifty years later it was still a part of academic folklore! The warnings of my IU professors illustrate the damage to a university's reputation when its leaders abandon principle. There is an inherent conflict among narrow economic interests, the ideals of academic freedom, and the multiple duties of university administrators.

The academic rank of a university is materially affected by how its administrators respond to these political pressures and their temptation to defer to power. It takes strong character to resist political pressures and to avoid enduring reputational damage.