Michael Hiltzik: Red-state efforts to dumb down their universities will provoke a brain drain
Back in 2015, Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker thought to burnish his culture warrior cred in advance of a bid for the presidency by taking arms against the University of Wisconsin.
Walker cut the state university's budget. His hand-picked board of regents gutted tenure protections for its faculty.
He and his legislative allies disdained the university's traditional role of producing broad-based academic scholarship to deepen its students' understanding of the world and talked instead as though the university were a glorified vocational or trade school — "connecting students and workers with the skills needed in today's workforce," as a university spokesperson put it at the time.
Critics predicted that Walker's policies would exacerbate a faculty flight caused by the university's low pay compared to that of its
