A Wisconsin Idea

Kathy Cramer connects town and gown at the Morgridge Center

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For the past seven summers, UW professor Kathy Cramer has visited rural gas stations, small cafes and bait shops on off-the-beaten-path county highways that snake their way around the state. In those places, she interviews the locals who gather on weekday mornings.

While she considers herself an introvert, Cramer has forced herself to go into these rural communities to learn more about Wisconsin public opinion.

“I was getting up early in the morning, walking into some gas station totally out of the blue, a lot of times sitting down with a bunch of guys,” says Cramer, a political scientist. “I learned how to put myself out there, meet people I didn’t know, and communicate quickly and hopefully in a genuine fashion that I was there to listen.”

Cramer’s work focuses on how environment influences people’s perceptions of political power. Her research has shown a stark divide in the political opinions of rural versus urban residents as well as public versus private employees, with rural residents viewing cities as the places with all the power, and private employees viewing public employees as being privileged. Her research provided important insight when Gov. Scott Walker unveiled his controversial plan to eliminate collective bargaining rights for most public workers.

“In a lot of places in the state, public employees are the wealthy ones, the only ones with healthcare,” says Cramer. “That’s not the case in Madison, so sitting in Madison that may seem a little odd, but unfortunately there is this resentment towards public employees.”

To understand the complicated relationship between Wisconsin’s rural and urban populations, Cramer knew she had to meet people where they were coming from. In a way, it made her less of an outsider, less of an “ivory tower” educator, and more of a typical Wisconsin townie.

Now Cramer — a Wisconsin native and UW-Madison alumna — is turning her sights on connecting UW-Madison students and faculty with people around Wisconsin and beyond. Cramer is the new director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service, whose very purpose is to tie campus with community. It’s a critical time for the center as both the UW and the venerable Wisconsin Idea — the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond the classroom — are targets of conservative politicians. The threat demonstrates to Cramer that it is more imperative than ever for the Morgridge Center to put the Wisconsin Idea into action.

“Everything we do is the Wisconsin Idea.”

Cramer began a five-year term as director of the Morgridge Center in April. She has served as interim director since June 2014.

These are challenging times for the university and the center. Last month, the Joint Finance Committee approved a $250 million budget cut to the UW System.

Earlier this year, when Gov. Scott Walker introduced his budget proposal, he included a radical rewriting of Wisconsin Idea. Walker reimagined the university’s mission as one strictly to “meet the state’s workforce needs.”

The outcry against this was swift and fierce. The governor’s office quickly withdrew the proposal, calling it a clerical mix-up. That explanation has been disputed.

“The uprising around [Walker’s proposal] showed that a lot of people care, but as with anything, if you take it for granted, it will be yanked out from under you,” she says. “We can say it, we can put it on posters and bumper stickers, but unless we actually put it into practice all the time, we can’t assume it’s always going to exist.”

The Morgridge Center has been a staple in connecting campus to the community since it was created in 1996.

The groundwork was laid in 1994 when Chancellor David Ward sent then-Dean of Students Mary Rouse to ask John and Tashia Morgridge for two gifts. A Wisconsin native and UW graduate, John Morgridge at the time was the chairman of Cisco Systems. Rouse asked the family to supply the bricks and mortar for the Red Gym to be historically preserved. She also asked for an endowment to build upon and strengthen UW-Madison’s public service initiatives.

The Morgridges agreed to fund both projects. The center was named and opened in 1996, and in 1998 it was relocated to the newly restored Red Gym.

One of Cramer’s favorite Morgridge programs is one she credits Rouse with spearheading.

A former Morgridge Center director and current community liaison, Rouse is a regular blood donor. She met LaTyna Lewis and her son Isaiah during a routine blood donation. Isaiah, then 7 years old, has severe sickle-cell disease, a hereditary blood disorder that disproportionately affects African Americans.

While a single pint of blood can save up to three lives, regular blood donations often aren’t a correct match for people with sickle-cell disease. Certain blood types are unique to racial and ethnic groups but, according to Rouse, while African Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population, they only donate 1% of the blood.

LaTyna raised Rouse’s awareness of the striking lack of African American blood donors in the Madison area. Rouse was inspired to act. “Five years ago we started the first sickle cell blood drive,” says Rouse, who is retiring this month. “We thought we’d only do it for the Morgridge Center’s 15th anniversary, but it was so successful, and people were so pleased, that we’ve done it every year since.”

Cramer is intent on seeing the program grow. “I love this program because the need clearly came from the community,” says Cramer. “Mary put student energy to work making sure these blood drives happen and this important community need is met.”

The Sickle Cell Blood Drive is just one of four types of programs that the Morgridge Center oversees.

The first fosters community-based learning courses where students work in the community as part of their curriculum. Cramer has been teaching a service learning course since 2001 called “Citizenship, Democracy and Difference.” When she discovered the opportunity to teach a course connecting students to the community she thought, “As a political scientist, what better way to learn about civic engagement than to actually be engaged?”

The second area of focus is creating volunteer experiences for students — including programs like the Sickle Cell Blood Drive. Each semester roughly 700 students give their time to Badger Volunteers, volunteering once a week in teams of five to 12 students each.

Badger Volunteers work with a variety of community organizations across Dane County, each falling somewhere in the areas of education, health and sustainability.

“We’re always looking to make new partnerships while maintaining the ones we have because we really want the organizations we partner with to know it’s a long-term commitment on our part,” says Cramer. “The best stuff gets accomplished when we know each other well and our partners have a sense that we’re coming back.”

While the students are giving back to the community, Cramer is quick to point out that the students are also benefitting from the work. For Cramer, one of the most important things the university and the Morgridge Center can do for its students is to help them become active members of society.

“The great part about this work is that the communities are helping us,” Cramer says. “It really is this bridge between campus and the community where the students are becoming their own citizens, they’re becoming themselves through working with the community, and at the same time they’re helping the organization achieve what they’re trying to achieve.”

The third Morgridge Center initiative supports community-based research activities that fall into two categories: work in Wisconsin and work anywhere else in the world. Each project has a faculty adviser and is always a partnership with a community or organization.

A fourth initiative is fostering community for faculty, staff and graduate students on campus who want to do community-based work. This is one area Cramer hopes to expand as director, because it gets to the root of the Wisconsin Idea.

Cramer asserts that working in a community bolsters higher-quality research experiences. “I really want to help create more of a community of engaged scholarship here on campus,” she says. “Engaged scholarship is just a fancy-schmancy term for people on campus doing their work with one foot in the community.”

Cramer grew up in Grafton, roughly 20 miles north of Milwaukee. Her parents were both public school teachers; her dad was also the Grafton High School football coach. The family spent Saturdays watching Badger football games and reveling in the great state institution that was just a short drive from home.

“My family talked about [UW-Madison] very respectfully, partly about sports, but partly because it was just this great in-state school,” Cramer says. “I always knew I wanted to go to school here.”

After graduating with an undergraduate degree in political science and journalism, Cramer got her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, and secured a job in UW-Madison’s political science department shortly thereafter.

Her 15-year trajectory from new professor to director of the Morgridge Center surprises no one but Cramer.

“If you’ve met her and talked to her, you know that she could be a college president, a senator, she could do anything she wanted to do; she’s one of the smartest, most talented people I’ve ever met,” Rouse says.

Julie Underwood, dean of the School of Education, had worked with Cramer on the search committee for Chancellor Rebecca Blank. Many of the conversations they had during that search focused on the Wisconsin Idea and the importance of having a chancellor who championed the idea that the university exists for the broader public good.

When the Morgridge Center began looking for a new director, Underwood recalled those conversations, believing Cramer would be perfect for the job. But it would take a while to convince Cramer.

“The previous director, Nancy Matthews, received a job offer and had to come up with a short list of people to be nominated. She called me and said, ‘I want to put you on the short list, what do you think?’ And I said, ‘No way! I’m a single mom, my daughter is 7, I just became a full professor, I feel like I’m in the prime of my publishing career. No, nuh-uh,’” says Cramer.

Cramer attributes the nomination to her immense love of Wisconsin. “I guess people were aware just how invested I am in this state and what a total homer I am,” says Cramer. “I just love this institution, I love this state; I’m willing to do a lot for it, I was going to say die, but I’m not quite sure, it just means a lot to me.”

When Cramer turned the job down, Underwood reached out, attempting to change her mind. The two had a long conversation about the pros and cons, including the loss of schedule flexibility and the difficulties of being a single mom.

“That was one thing that she was really concerned about,” says Underwood. “I understand what it’s like to try and raise a child by yourself while holding down a busy job. I raised my children alone while I was an administrator. Administrative jobs aren’t typical 9-to-5 jobs, and they’re not typical faculty member jobs, where you have a lot of flexibility. But I talked to her about the need to balance that and to make sure that your children get what they need, because they come first.”

The phone conversation was enough to get Cramer to reconsider. “Julie was great to talk to on a personal level, but she also just said this is the stuff that you care about, you will flourish in this job,” Cramer recalls. “She pointed out to me what was right in front of my face, this job was meant for you. You need to do this job.”

Now that Cramer has settled in to the position, she hopes to broaden the Morgridge Center’s statewide reach, expanding partnerships and sending volunteers outside of Dane County.

“The idea that the university belongs to the people of the state is pervasive, and the idea that it had better be contributing to its prosperity whether economically or by increasing quality of life is a very familiar idea, maybe even more so in Wisconsin than in other states,” says Cramer.

This year the center will begin a program funded by the Division of Continuing Studies to send in-state students home for the summer to lead community-based programs.

“It’s one small step towards conveying to communities that we want to be involved, we want to help them meet their needs, we want to share the brilliance of our students with them,” Cramer says. “Throughout all of our work we constantly remind ourselves that we are not the experts; our job is to figure out how to collaborate, to listen well enough to know what people are trying to achieve and then match that with resources on campus that can help the community.”

Rouse says this outreach mission can be embraced by people of all political stripes.

“Whether you are a conservative and you think government should be smaller or a liberal and think it should be larger, you don’t have a well-functioning government and working democracy unless ordinary people like you and me participate in public service,” says Rouse. “What we’re trying to do with our students is to not only introduce them to public service but also to set them on a lifelong course of being good citizens.”

Cramer echoes that sentiment, saying it’s important to lead the institute in its pursuit of preparing students to be active members of society. “One of the things we have to offer and encourage in our students is being involved in their community and having the skills to be active, democratic citizens.”