This story appeared in the Fall 2022 Letters & Science magazine.
Tucked away below the crest of Observatory Hill, an old, Italianate-style house presents the same dignified façade as it did 167 years ago, when three university presidents (Chadbourne, Twombly and Bascom), as well as the first director of Washburn Observatory (James Watson), lived there. Inside, however, the building reverberates with visions and plans for the future. It’s now the administrative home of the La Follette School of Public Affairs, a public-policy powerhouse, where leaders of one of our most forward-looking schools ponder the future with a watchful eye on the past.
The school, named to honor the legacy of legendary former Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette, also known as the Father of Progressivism, aims to train future generations of leaders in the art of shaping public policy in areas such as energy, water, poverty, trade and public health. It dates its existence back to 1967, when it was called the Center for the Study of Public Policy and Administration and was attached to the Department of Political Science. It became the La Follette Institute for Public Affairs in 1983, when former Wisconsin Speaker of the Assembly Tom Loftus navigated a bipartisan law through the state legislature to create it. In 1999, it upgraded to become a full-fledged school, teaching classes in eight different buildings on the UW-Madison campus.
“It all started with the translation of evidence into the policymaking process,” says Susan Webb Yackee, the Collins-Bascom Professor of Public Affairs who has directed the school for the past ten years. “There has been a real responsibility and mission for the school to be a leader in the Wisconsin Idea, and we have really stepped up our game in the last few years.”
As it prepares to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2023, the La Follette School of Public Affairs is having a profound impact on the campus, Wisconsin, and the world.
Student enrollment in the school’s four programs—two-year graduate training programs in public affairs and international public affairs, and undergraduate certificate programs in public policy and in health policy—has more than quadrupled since 2019. The number of undergraduate classes taught has leapt from two to 22, with more than a thousand students expected in 2022–23. Meanwhile, the number of faculty members has doubled, and seven new staff have joined the ranks in the old house on the hill.
The stunning growth is due to careful planning, strong leadership and the Kohl Initiative, a $10 million donation from UW-Madison alumnus and former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl. It’s designed to support students, research and outreach (see sidebar on page 29).
“Good things happen to organizations that are ready for those good things to happen,” says Yackee. “We had done the work to think about who we are, what we want to do, where our talents could be best directed in the future. You can’t have this degree of growth and success if you don’t have a really strong sense of who you are.”
“Who they are” encompasses many things. The school’s 22 faculty members are involved in researching and shaping nearly every imaginable hot-button issue at the national and international levels. Christine Durance, an economist by training, studies the causes and consequences of the nationwide opioid crisis. Menzie Chinn, who’s also a member of the Department of Economics, is an expert on trade and currency manipulation, U.S.–China relations and inflation. Tana Johnson, one of the school’s newer hires, studies the ways international organizations like the World Health Organization structure our society—and how people have increasingly come to distrust them.
“It’s important that we share the evidence, the findings and the conclusions of our research, as well as be very transparent about how we got there,” says Yackee, explaining the school’s approach to research and outreach.
“In classrooms, in the media and in public meeting settings, we’re not just talking about the statistics around opioid use here in Wisconsin but also about how we collected those statistics and what they imply—and also what they don’t mean.”
The La Follette bench also includes rising stars like Manny Teodoro, an associate professor whose hiring was made possible through the Kohl Initiative. Teodoro studies water policy through an environmental justice lens, examining questions such as why so many members of the public are opting to buy bottled water from corporations instead of trusting in the public water system. In the spring, he will lead the school’s annual signature event: a full-day public forum that brings state and national experts together to discuss a central topic. Last year’s event was focused on democracy and elections; this year’s will center on trust in government.
Outreach has always been a part of the school’s charge, but under Yackee’s extroverted style of leadership, those efforts have redoubled, coalescing around something dubbed the Main Street Agenda, a partnership between the school, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Wisconsin Public Radio, facilitating discussion of public-policy issues in the lead-up to the November 2022 midterm elections. La Follette faculty members like Yackee and Professor of Public Policy and Political Science Mark Copelovitch have contributed regular editorials in the Journal-Sentinel’s Opinions page, and recently, the school conducted a statewide survey of Wisconsin voters to determine the public-policy issues that are most on their minds.
Greg Nemet, a professor of public policy with the La Follette School who researches energy and climate policy, is one of the school’s most public faces—he contributed policy recommendations to the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report.
“One of the aspects of the school that I think Susan, more than anyone, has really championed is this idea of providing objective information in a bipartisan way,” says Nemet, who frequently serves as a national media expert. “And that is really important, because the politics are so polarized.”
Yackee and the La Follette School are doing their part to break down the walls of polarization. Earlier this summer, the school hosted a four-day training session with staff members from both sides of the aisle in the Wisconsin Assembly. Experts like Nemet and Chinn presented their research on energy policy and inflation, while other experts spoke on social policy and polling. While many of the topics might be categorized as contentious— particularly in Wisconsin’s current political environment—Yackee says reviews from the participants were glowing.
This fall, the school will host Nate Silver, the pollster/statistician who founded FiveThirtyEight, as its annual public affairs journalist-in-residence; in the spring, Paul Ryan, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, will be at the school for a short residency.
Many graduate students come to the La Follette School having worked in Washington, D.C., or for a private or public nonprofit organization. Undergraduates, meanwhile, have recognized the value of adding public policy to their degree portfolio. A biology major who hopes to someday become a doctor, for instance, could benefit tremendously from learning about insurance risk and Medicare through the school’s new undergraduate health policy certificate program.
Graduates often go on to law school or become public servants or public-policy experts. One recent La Follette grad works as the scheduler for U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris; another works as a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Others work in the offices of prominent Wisconsin politicians, have founded nonprofit organizations or landed in other levels of city and state government.
“The students that are attracted and come to the school, they’re taking these ideas, they’re learning statistical techniques, how to work with data, how to graphically show information,” says Nemet. “They’re learning how to communicate and how to write, how to get ideas into policymakers’ hands. That, to me, is the Wisconsin Idea.”
Each year, Nemet asks the students in his policy analysis course to pick a public-policy topic out of a hat —such as health care, climate change or education—to research and learn about, so they can begin developing their own potential policy alternatives.
“One of the best things we teach our students is a set of structured techniques that can be used to apply to any policy problem,” he says.
Student projects often have significant real-world impact. Yackee cites a former graduate student who produced a report for the City of Milwaukee that offers policy solutions to the emerging problem of failing sewer laterals. Milwaukee’s aging housing stock has resulted in decaying laterals, and homeowners, many of whom are low-income families, were shocked to learn they are responsible for the expensive cost to replace them.
While she looks forward to growth and change, Yackee says there’s at least one thing she wants to stay constant.
“The informed and evidence-based approach of our school is a real testament to its faculty, who put in the work to generate the research and synthesize our best understanding and to translate it in the classroom and in our broader public outreach,” she says. “That is a part that I never want to change.”
Pivotal Support
Susan Yackee makes no bones about it: The Kohl Initiative has been “pivotal” to the transformation of the La Follette School of Public Affairs. What Yackee once thought of as a small yet successful boutique school has exploded on the strength of Sen. Herb Kohl’s seven-year, $10 million gift. That donation has helped recruit top faculty to the school and fueled a new wave of public outreach in Wisconsin and beyond.
“We now have the resources to make the connections with citizens who feel differently on policy issues and to bring them together and try to find common ground,” says Yackee.