On the Politics of Non-Politics at the University of Wisconsin

Avoiding “university politics” is under normal circumstances a wise move by non-tenured professors because of how vicious such politics can be. Perhaps if more scholars who take on administrative positions with considerable power were more passionate about learning more in their respective fields of knowledge, the power itself would not be used so much to settle scores (i.e., retaliate). As Jesus says in the Gospels concerning God and money, a person cannot serve two masters. When the president of a university system is a lawyer rather than a scholar holding a doctorate, a passion for acquiring academic knowledge cannot be relied upon to keep the occupant of the high office focused on the essentials rather than on “extracurricular activities.” When the Board of Regents fired Jay Rothman, a lawyer who had been the presiding officer of the University of Wisconsin system (i.e., the main and branch campuses) on March 7, 2026, the fact that he was not oriented as a scholar—he had earned two undergraduate degrees—was arguably part of the reason for the firing, given the salience of politics both in his conduct while in office and his firing.  

Rothman’s informing the press after the Regents’ vote that his dismissal had “blindsided” him points back to the salience of politics between him and the board.[1] So too does the testimony of the two regents who later stated in a committee hearing at the Wisconsin Senate that Rothman was not caught unaware because “there were ‘substantial’ reasons for his being fired, and Rothman was aware of them.”[2] “Rothman lacked urgency to address critical issues like AI, was not fully aligned with the board, tried to limit public board discussions and open records, limited board members’ interactions with lawmakers and took credit for accomplishments that were part of a ‘massive team effort,’ Regent Timothy Nixon said.”[3] The implications are that Rothman was lying to retaliate against the board for having just fired him, and that politics between him and the board had been salient while he had been in office. Perhaps less obvious from Nixon’s accusations, from Rothman’s preoccupation with non-academic political brinkmanship, a lack of focus by Rothman on his scholarship and on how well the tenured professors are teaching can be inferred. Put another way, the opportunity cost of playing politics is time that could have been spent doing research, teaching, and supervising the teaching of the senior faculty members and department chairpersons.

Soon after I founded the Management, Spirituality, and Religion academic group in the Academy of Management, for example, I simply walked away from a fight when the Academy’s president succumbed to pressure by the New-Age “scholars” of business who wanted to run the group. At the time, I was teaching and conducting research at Yale soon after having graduated there so I consciously put learning more, given the opportunities at Yale, above fighting a political battle to retain my chairmanship. Besides, by then I had shifted from business to the humanities in academia, and the academic knowledge in business-academia had by then had questionable legitimacy in my opinion. As one example of the decadence, the New-Age dominated group at the Academy of Management hosted meditation sessions in addition to the research-paper sessions.  But I digress.

The University of Wisconsin had a long history of bad, retaliatory politics. At one point in the twentieth century, the provost office took control of the classics department because its chair had been using power of that office to retaliate against faculty not to his or her liking. Also, the dean of the university’s business school was caught fabricating the result of the tenure vote of Denis Collins, whose radio interview had incensed the holder of the banking chair at the school. A decade after that scandal, I asked President Wiley on “the hill” whether the university having committed the felony of fraud in a tenure vote was justified. “Denis was a problem,” Wiley replied. I had known Denis back in graduate school, and although I found him to be a contrarian (who liked pointing out to other people years later that I was by then bald), I knew him to be a serious scholar and hardly a problem.

Not long soon after my brief conversation with Wiley during his smoking break, a staffer of Rep. Ness, who chaired the education committee in the Wisconsin Assembly, told me, “Here in the statehouse, it is an open secret that UW is run like the mob.” That employee was not at all surprised when I told him that the chairman of the political science department had just given an interview to the Wisconsin State Journal to make fun of Patrick Riley, a renowned political theorist who had been educated at Harvard. In fact, the jealousy and sordid departmental politics had been so bad that Riley had moved back to Cambridge, Massachusetts and commuted by air to UW weekly during the semesters for many years, and he returned to teaching at Harvard as soon as his UW pension came through. Sadly, Riley fell down stairs in his colonial house in Cambridge just eight years after having rejoined his alma mater, so he was not alive when I was a visiting research scholar at Harvard, where the faculty, although too “closed shop,” highly valued acquiring academic knowledge. Riley had once remarked to me that few if any of the faculty in the liberal arts at Wisconsin could be seen doing research at night in their offices or the library, and perhaps it was such a pedestrian vantage point that jealousy was directed at Riley, especially as he “took his carriage back to Cambridge” every weekend, as per his chairman’s remarks to a journalist. Of course, the “scholars” at UW would deny how they abuse and extenuate the politics of position when they could otherwise be invested in acquiring knowledge. By the way, Nietzsche has an excellent discussion of such “herd animals” who “seek to dominate.” Their bad politics stem from their inherent weakness. Nietzsche urges the strong to develop a “pathos of distance” from such vitriolic creatures, and Riley did so by moving back to Cambridge so he could have some affiliation with Harvard more than a decade before he retired from Wisconsin.

Amy Bogost, the president of the Board of Regents at Wisconsin, said after the Rothman firing of the unanimous decision, “It was not political. It was not retaliatory.”[4] Her disavowal can be taken as akin to a mob cove-up, however, given Tim Nixon’s admission that Rothman had limited board members’ interactions with lawmakers and took credit for accomplishments that were not primarily Rothman’s own. To claim that individual regents would react neutrally emotionally and vote impartially to fire Rothman based on his administrative accomplishments is incredulous. The claim itself, next to Nixon’s explanation of the firing, points to a long-standing salience of retaliatory politics between Rothman and the board, especially given the reputation of that university in terms of “university politics.”

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1. Scot Bauer, “Universities of Wisconsin Regents Cite Disputes over AI and Other Topics in President’s Firing,” Apnews.com, April 9, 2026.
2.Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Just the Facts: Empirical Social Science Overplayed

Tilburg University in the E.U. is known to have an emphasis on empirical studies in the social sciences (including business). With this bent, the university is typically considered to be closer to the American academic tradition than that of Europa. So when Dr. Diederik Stapel, a psychology professor at Tilburg, acknowledged to having committed academic fraud in several dozen published articles in academic journals, the academic status of empirical research itself was thrown into question. Experts point out that Stapel “took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.” Indeed, it is rare even for peer-reviewers of potential articles to demand to see the raw empirical data supporting a given study’s conclusions. According to Dr. Jelte Wicherts, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, the problem of data being misused by the scholars who collect and analyze it is widespread in the discipline of psychology.
In a survey of more than 2,000 American psychology professors, Leslie John of Harvard Business School found that 70 percent had acknowledged (anonymously) to cutting some corners in reporting data. Add to this the problem of unintended statistical errors and the problem of being able to rely on scientific results becomes acute. Dr. Joseph Simmons, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business says, “We know the general tendency of humans to draw the conclusions they want to draw.”
Indeed, the “academic” field of corporate social responsibility has been rife with “scholars” writing to impose or justify their critical ideology of the modern corporation. For example, at Amiti Etzioni’s conference at Harvard Business School on his theory (or movement?) on socio-economics, one professor demanded that the participants form a labor party. The Harvard professors in attendance pointed out that Etzioni was simply trashing the neo-classical economic paradigm (economic liberalism, or free-market competition) without proffering an alternative theory. This did not stop Dr. Etzioni from continuing to advance his agenda, which I submit was precisely to condemn the neo-classical economic theory. Similarly, “scholars” of CSR tend to presume that corporations have an obligation to share corporate governance with stakeholder groups and give more philanthropically. Never mind that the purported obligation is typically not justified beyond the “scholar’s” own ideology. I would be surprised if the empirical research was not highly skewed in the direction of that ideology.
Of course, the problem of empirical science is not limited to disciplines such as psychology and business & society, which are particularly subject to ideology. Once I sat in on a doctoral seminar on strategy. The professor, who would go on to get tenure at a major business school, advised the doctoral students to check with the managements of the companies they are surveying before publishing the results in case any of the managements do not like the conclusions. Otherwise, the “professor” observed, consulting opportunities might be diminished. That several of the students had been bankers and would be conducting empirical studies of the financial sector ought to concern anyone who has heard of “too big to fail” and the related over-reliance on models designed to manage risk.
So whether in dealing with human psychology or huge financial firms, skewed empirical research can be dangerous. Politically, the CSR agenda could result in too much power being amassed by stakeholder groups at the expense of property rights. Moreover, the discipline of psychology (and that of business ethics) suggests that the emphasis on empirical studies, particularly at American universities, is ahistoric. Before the twentieth century, psychology was part of philosophy. Perhaps the problems with empirical science might lead to a re-consideration of the value of philosophical psychology in terms of knowledge as well as practice. Similarly, the interlarding of business ethics (a subfield of ethics, which in turn is a field of philosophy) with empirical surveys—as if what is counts for what ought to be—can be questioned. Rarely does a business ethicist stop to wonder why philosophers do not send out surveys as part of doing philosophy. David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy provides a good explanation for why they do not.
My overall point is that the value of empirical studies in the social sciences (and applied philosophy) have been overstated, particularly at American universities, while theory development and the historic housing in philosophy have been relegated or dismissed outright. Along with the hypertrophy in empiricism has come a “cubby-hole” mentality wherein Frederick Taylor’s specialization of labor has somehow been applied to scholarship. One could excuse business schools for conflating what they are studying with what they are. The problem is when the academic enterprise itself comes to resemble enterprises that make widgets. It is no accident, I submit, that the twentieth century will not be known for many bright spots in the social sciences or philosophy. One could say that Plato and Nietzsche make good book-ends, with engineers and natural scientists taking over to produce a technological and information revolution. Yet who asks what the opportunity costs have been in reducing progress to the technological variety? What cost was there in the twentieth century in having technicians and ideologues for philosophers, rather than thinkers capable of seeing the big picture and proffering unique vistas? If the case of Dr. Stapel comes as a surprise, it might be because we have become too ensconced with “facts” at the expense of meaning.

Source: 

Benedict Carey, “Fraud Case Seen as a Red Flag for Psychology Research,” The New York Times, November 3, 2011. 

An Identity Crisis Grips American Higher Education

In 2012, the average annual cost of attending a four-year public university was $15,100 and a private university was $32,900. The cost had risen 1,120% since 1978—four times the increase in the consumer price index. Student debt had also increased—to a trillion dollars (more than auto or credit-card debt). One in five households had student debt—a third of which was in default. In a poll by the Carnegie Corp. and Times magazine, 96% of senior higher education administrators said the sector is in crisis—40% saying the crisis was severe (as if there were any other kind). Crises, at least in America, have a tendency to go on, even becoming the hackneyed status-quo.

Gene Budig, whom I remember as the chancellor at my first university while I was enrolled as a young lad, points in an editorial to “skill mismatches” and cost-containment problems as the underlying culprits in the crisis. I contend that in doing so, he conflates education with training regarding mismatches and oversimplifies the cost problem in that it could also apply to business just as well. Reading his opinion piece reinforced, or explained, the sense I had had as a student that Budig’s last university was substandard, even marginal, in an academic sense.

 Gene A. Budig, former Chancellor of the University of Kansas (a third-tier school with an understandable inferiority complex)  (Image Source: College Advocacy Board)

Budig claims that colleges and universities “need to synchronize their work with businesses.” For example, Microsoft estimated that between 2010 and 2020, the American economy would annually add more than 120,000 additional computing jobs. In 2012, American colleges and universities produced only 40,000 bachelor’s degrees in computer science. However, it is difficult to construe how full employment or industrial policy is the obligation of colleges and universities rather than governments. Furthermore, the proliferation of professional schools at universities suggests that any mismatch based on skill is hardly behind the crisis in American higher education. In fact, the movement of American professional schools away from education in order to emphasize skills may be a contributing problem. American higher education may have lost its moorings and thus wandered off to functions at odds with itself. To put it simply, education is not vocation. Theory and reasoning do not willow down to critical thinking, as in problem-solving, and praxis.

Not surprisingly, the business school at Budig’s last university was all about skills. Although the skills taught in the auditing class bore little resemblance to the actual tasks in an audit (implying that more of a match would solve the problem), it could also be argued that the business school was in a virtual no-man’s land between vocation and education. In terms of skills, the technical orientation missed the rather obvious matter of how the conflict of interest between CPA firms and their clients is part of the audit itself. In short, the school failed at both rather than being merely insufficient in meeting the firms’ needs.

Notably, the dean at my next business school told the new MBA students on our very first day that we would not use what we learn at his school in business for at least ten or fifteen years. The content of the courses was not geared to the immediate needs of business. Rather, an understanding of business itself, its disciplines, and its relation to its environment comes into play, he explained, only at senior levels of management, where conceptual understanding  may even be more important than skill. That dean’s orientation is in line with a business school being part of a university rather than a vocational training institute. Budig, in contrast, views colleges and universities through the lenses of job training. Accordingly, he misconstrues higher education itself into something it is not. Losing an understanding of what education is permits it to be used in ways that are at odds with what it is. In other words, if universities gravitate increasingly toward providing skills useful to employers, then the provision of knowledge will suffer because other institutions in society are not going to pick up the slack on what is academia's native turf. A double-shot of training (at school and at work) leaves a void as far as higher education is concerned.

As an alternative to trying to be a corporation, law firm or hospital, a university could focus on what only it can do from its own vantage-point. Namely, while other institutions must be oriented to daily tasks, the classroom can afford students with a unique perspective—that of understanding via theory and reasoning. It is no accident that colleges have had scholars on faculty. A person working in a corporation is unlikely to get much on why it is that a human organization functions at all. A person is also unlikely to bet the opportunity to theorize on the history of American constitutional philosophy while preparing for a case at a law firm. Pondering the nature of disease is thankfully sidelined at a hospital as physicians try to save lives. Understood rightly, a college education is a luxury.

Indeed, we have lost touch with the historical role of a college education as a respite (i.e., break) from the office during which one can satisfy one’s intellectual curiosities in becoming educated. Budig’s claim that universities should do more to satisfy business skill flies in the face of the basis of higher education. It is no wonder that it is foundering under its own weight.

The heavy weight manifests in one major way through cost increases far beyond inflation. Although Budig urges cost-containment, he treats it almost as if it were simply a business problem. He ignores the sector’s unique aspects. For example, the rather unique ideological culture at colleges and universities enables the proliferation of academic programs, majors, and staff offices geared to particular causes.

Student housing has become uncompetitive in price due in part to the proliferation of programs, and thus staff, that are only tangentially related to providing housing. Insufficiently moored in established disciplines, many schools taking students as customers have created additional majors to satisfy consumer demand. Here again, the concept of student is being misconstrued using a paradigm from another sector—that of business.

Even the concept of scholar is increasingly being misconstrued. At “universities” like Walden and the University of Phoenix, faculty are regarded by administrators as employees whose content can be overseen by non-experts. This essentially de-professionalizes professors. It should be no surprise that the “product” being taught is inferior at such profit-centers. Even at traditional colleges, the distinction between lecturing and research has been blurred or misunderstood.

To reduce senior professors’ teaching loads while hiring adjunct (i.e., part-time, mostly non-academics) to make up the difference on the teaching can be challenged on two fronts. First, far from being a hindrance, giving lectures (literally, “professing”) can be a welcome break to scholars otherwise engrossed in the labors of writing or lab work. To be sure, the grading of large classes should be done by graduate students, given the value of a full professor’s time. To reduce a senior scholar's teaching load is quite another thing. Expanding the lecturing obligation (with assistants handling the administration and grading) to go along with two seminars a year  in the scholar's sub-discipline would effectively capitalize on the mature knowledge on campus  without over taxing it. Promising senior scholars one class per term is at the very least counter-productive from an academic standpoint, as the distribution of seasoned knowledge is minimized. Even if the perk would seem to be necessary to gain "the best and the brightest" according to some human resource calculus, perhaps the applicants wanting to teach only one class per term are not the best and the brightest after all.

Additionally, universities could hire more full-time lecturers (i.e., teaching only) rather than add more higher-salaried professors to fill teaching loads (even assuming tno “teaching credit” is given for research). The lecturer-professor distinction is unique to academia, so it should be no surprise that the identity crisis plaguing higher education has taken a toll in terms of managing the costs of teaching with respect to maintaining an optimal balance of lectuers and professors.

Cost-containment in higher education has also been undone by the artificial (and unique) “market” of guaranteed (and subsidized) student loans. It has been all too easy for financial aid offices to max out the students’ allowable debt as tuition and fees have not coincidently risen. In effect, the increasing budgets of colleges and universities have been enabled by a known pool of debt. It is of no concern that not even bankruptcy can relieve an unemployed alumnus of the crushing psychological and financial burden that comes with de facto default. Lest it be argued that less of a mismatch of skill would solve this problem, one might consider the less-than full-employment equilibrium that has become the default in industrialized economies. Even to link student loans to eventual employment implies the category mistake wherein education is rendered as essentially job training.

Having been the president or chancellor of three universities, Gene Budig can be taken as representative of the perspective of experienced governance in higher education in the United States. From my standpoint, that perspective has succumbed to a dominant value in American society—a value expressed in the works of William James and the orientation of Ben Franklin toward praxis. Americans are known to laud “movers and shakers” rather than philosophers and artists. Europeans are perhaps more balanced in this regard. Rather than contort universities into full-employment engines, as if knowledge has value only to the extent it is useful in someone’s job, vocational training institutes could be created, leaving education to the colleges and universities, where even the professional schools would be free to be knowledge rather than skill-based. This is already the case at the professional schools at the top of the Ivy League. Sadly, the message has not percolated through the system. In fact, most universities actually regard the undergraduate degrees in the professional schools as doctorates!

In conclusion, Gene Budig evinces what is wrong with higher education, rather than how it can be fixed. Fundamentally, to be in line with one’s nature is to permit one to excel, whereas to be something at odds with what one is can spell disaster. This lesson could hardly come from skill and practice. It is ironic that schools most oriented to skills may still be quite distant from what the practitioners need. As much as the schools’ faculties want to pretend to inhabit corporations, hospitals, and law firms respectively, rest assured that the schools are on the university side of the divide and thus considerable distance with respect to “meeting needs” of “the real world” is inevitable. Yet the venture effectively stifles the schools’ participation in the “knitting” of academic life. The result is “crisis” in the sense of an identity crisis. In effect, higher education has lost touch with itself as it has unwittingly swallowed one of the dominant values in American society. Nietzsche writes that a philosopher cannot be a person of his or her own day. Might this also be true of academia—and not as a vice or drawback, but, rather, as a diamond that has been inadvertently covered over in the rough.

Source:

Gene A. Budig, “Beating America’s College Crisis,” USA Today, January 7, 2013.