Four years ago I wrote a cover story for Isthmus detailing how former four-term Gov. Tommy Thompson’s strong support of the UW System grew out of his own experience as a small-town kid whose life had been transformed by attending UW-Madison.
Now that Thompson has been named the interim UW System president, the story has new resonance. Here’s a chunk of what I wrote in 2016:
More than one UW person I talked to spoke approvingly (if not longingly) of the Tommy Thompson era. That’s when an activist Republican governor with Hamiltonian ambitions for a greater Wisconsin found common ground with the university to unleash a major expansion of the UW System, including several billion dollars in campus construction.
How did he do it?
“I realized the university had to be my ally,” Thompson, 74, explains matter-of-factly, as if he were addressing a Poli Sci 101 class. “I had to make the university much more responsive to the needs of Wisconsin. And I said to myself I have to do it in a collegial way, because I don’t have the political power to do it alone. I’ve got to make sure the university understands I’m going to be its best friend. And for that friendship — quid pro quo — they’re going to help me build every part of this state.”
You don’t hear talk like that anymore in Wisconsin. An obvious question calls out: What would Tommy do to improve the sad state of campus-Capitol relations?
Yes, indeed: WWTD?
Perhaps bracelets could be distributed at the Capitol and Bascom Hall for inspiration.
Stories by Marc Eisen 