This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
Gov. Kristi Noem sent a pointed letter to the South Dakota Board of Regents outlining her priorities for the state's higher education institutions.
Jon Hunter, our Dakota Political Junkie, has an analysis. He unpacks the letter paragraph by paragraph to explore how he says it may be heavy on the politics but light on policy.
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Lori Walsh:
You are listening to In The Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. I'm Lori Walsh and joining me now in the studio, Jon Hunter is here. He is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader, a member of the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame, and a member of our rotating panel of Dakota Political Junkies. They join us on Wednesdays. We crack open some of the top national and mostly local stories in South Dakota, but boy it seems to bleed more and more, doesn't it, Jon?
Jon Hunter:
Yes, it's all over the place.
Lori Walsh:
To that point, today we are going to talk about a letter that Gov. Kristi Noem sent on May 25th to the South Dakota Board of Regents. She sent more than one press release about this as well. She sent the letter and she sent, Ian Fury sent, more than one press release highlighting something from the letter that they wanted people to key in on, and that is our topic for today. She's outlining her priorities for higher education, talking about banning drag shows, talking about civics education, graduation rates. There's a lot in here.
So first, Jon, before we get started, why a letter? How does that fit into how a governor leads a multi-page, I think it's like four pages or two pages, front and back. Why a letter? What does it do?
Jon Hunter:
Well, let's start out just by calling this governing style. Gov. Noem has taken a much more public strategy with her announcements and policy initiatives than most other governors. I'd say it would be more normal protocol in South Dakota to go to the Board of Regents, work out some of these things in an office somewhere, and then if you have some disagreements, yes you can go public with those, but basically you want to be at least partway down the road in accomplishing the things you want in this. Now the governor issued this to the public and there was also a column, a weekly column too, besides the press releases. And the regents received this letter at the same time. So this is clearly a different strategy, a different style.
Now, from some ways I don't mind that because it gets the public involved. Guess what we're talking about it here. If this were behind the scenes, we wouldn't have any knowledge of this. But on the other hand, Gov. Noem, again, often eager to make announcements and so forth that affect the national interests. And if you look at the letter the first three out of four paragraphs are all national politics issues. And so she likes to that, it's on Fox News, which she likes. I think to a degree, she did this with the Legislature last year. Things that she announced in her State of the State Address, even the budget address, she had not worked with the Legislature first. It didn't work very well that time because she didn't get many of those initiatives passed. They finally came to the last moment. She went tried to testify with a week to go before the session and those things didn't pass. So I'm not sure it's a great strategy for success, but it certainly is, I think from her standpoint, it gets the national exposure that it's probably intended for.
Lori Walsh:
One of the things I was wondering the other day, I was out to dinner and we were talking about it at dinner and I thought, is anybody else talking about the... You know it's hard to tell when we do this kind of work every day, and if I walked to every table in this restaurant and said, did you hear about this? Would anybody really be tuned into it? And what would they say? Obviously I didn't start anything. I'd get kicked out of the restaurant for that kind of behavior.
Jon Hunter:
Remind me to go to that restaurant sometime when you do that.
Lori Walsh:
So do you know this happened? What do you think about it? But to your point in that first chapter, it's like across the nation higher education is in crisis. Once a hotbed of ideological diversity now they are one-sided, closed-minded, and focused on feelings rather, this is all sweeping political commentary about the state of higher ed in general and then the importance of safe spaces and diversity across the nation. Then she lays out some numbers of how many people graduate from college and whether they're employed or whether they're underemployed. Tell me a little bit about some of the numbers that she laid out, and out of context or within context, what is she saying here about whether college education is worth it?
Jon Hunter:
Well, her letter focuses on a single number and that is graduation rates. Now that's not even an easy number to calculate and for her letter, she quotes one. Here's what the nation is doing. Here's what South Dakota is doing. Those actually were taken from two different sources, so I'm not sure going to be apples to apples in the first place. And there are different ways to calculate that. That sounds disingenuous, but there are different ways of calculating that. But really she is saying that South Dakota is graduating a lower percentage of students who enroll than the nation, and we want want to change this. In fact, she says we want to show the nation, again this national thing. There's in both paragraphs four and five, South Dakota can show the nation that we're doing this and later we want to lead the nation by example.
But my point, Lori, and you probably wouldn't be surprised at this, is that number in isolation is not as valuable as it could be. For example, if you say we want to raise graduation rates, you can do that very simply. One graduate, everybody who enrolls, just give them degrees. So is the point really a graduation rate or is it a learning? Do we want to teach more? Do we want to teach longer? Do we want to teach more thoroughly? Another way to do that is to only enroll students who are likely to graduate, and I'm not sure that is South Dakota's thing either.
So it can't be just taking in isolation. It has to be done with in conjunction with others. Now, she does talk a little bit about working with businesses and employers and so forth. That's part of that too. If we want more workers who can be in particular industries, teaching, nursing, manufacturing, whatever they are, yes you can work with your higher education system to try to target that, whether it's through scholarships or programs and so forth. But a single number, just say here's the number now, here's where we want it to be, by itself is not as useful.
Lori Walsh:
I would be remiss if we didn't also point out that this letter includes, I want to say the word hodgepodge, I don't know if that's fair, but multiple topics that don't seem to hang together. So here is a conversation about graduation rates paired with a conversation about what students know about civics in America paired with a don't make people use the preferred pronouns with don't have any drag shows. It's very, it's almost kitchen sink, throw in everything. Is it cohesive policy? I mean, I don't know how anybody would say this as a cohesive policy.
Jon Hunter:
Right, that's the first thing that struck me when I read the letter. It was you're talking about graduation rates and educational quality and so forth. Then you jump over into safe spaces or some of the other things that you just mentioned. And it doesn't seem... It does seem though that several of these are certainly national issues, and they're Republican issues. Whether it's drag shows or free speech, civics or social studies teaching, those are all kind of national party platform issues that she is putting in there.
Lori Walsh:
So I guess if she were here, she would say the connection is that our colleges have started to focus on those things and not graduating people and getting them jobs. I mean I'm not putting words in the governor's mouth, but if I asked her that question that I just posed to you, she would say the cohesive policy is focus on the academics and not on creating diversity and inclusion spaces.
Jon Hunter:
Right, and we don't want to imply that any of these policies that she's proposing are wrong. There are certainly people who believe in them and there are people who-
Lori Walsh:
We don't imply that they're right.
Jon Hunter:
Right, exactly.
Lori Walsh:
Look at us.
Jon Hunter:
Yeah, I'm curious as to what that means. But yeah, these are debatable topics and she's taking one side. There's going to be people on the other side, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Again, it's out in the open for us to discuss on the radio and other places will do this.
Lori Walsh:
If you were sending a child to college right now, a freshman, and this was coming out and you were having the conversation about, with your student who's deciding whether to stay in state or go out of state, what would that dinner table conversation be like?
Jon Hunter:
I don't think this letter would affect that. I think there are other factors, especially what is the student interested? How would they be treated? I don't think these are, no I think these are not for... High school seniors would not make a decision of in-state or out-state based on this.
Lori Walsh:
Okay. We're going to leave it there for now. We're going to talk about this more in the future, of course.
