Murphy's Law

You could search the archives for interesting quotes from Marquette University's president, the Rev. Robert A. Wild, and probably come up blank. No one ever described him as a scintillating intellect or fascinating personality. So how did a guy who seemed well, kind of boring, have such surprising success?

For most of the 20th century, Marquette was mired in debt and plagued with failed fund drives. It was almost as though the entire university had taken a vow of poverty. All that began to change under the Rev. John Raynor, president from 1965-1990. Raynor was a wily fox who worked with civic leaders behind the scenes to dump Marquette’s money-losing medical school (it’s now the independent Medical College of Wisconsin) and then raised unheard of amounts of money in a city whose institutions had almost no endowment dollars. Raynor raised funds for many new buildings, built an endowment of $75 million, by far the biggest in town at the time, and established a very effective development office to keep the momentum going.

But Raynor’s successor, the Rev. Albert J. DiUlio, lacked Raynor’s political skills. He enraged alumni by unilaterally deciding to drop the school’s nickname, the Warriors, and changing it (by a vote of students and faculty that some claim was rigged) to the Golden Eagles. He angered city and county officials by pushing them to close off Wisconsin Avenue and reroute traffic from the city’s main street. The effort failed. By the time DiUlio left in 1996, enrollment was declining, staff morale was down, and the university had a budget deficit. Many believed he was asked to resign.

Wild was the antidote to DiUlio: nice rather than edgy; modest rather than arrogant; blandly diplomatic rather than outspoken; collaborative rather than autocratic. Wild’s only mistake was a committee-led decision to change the school’s nickname to the “Gold.” He quickly retreated in the face of widespread scorn, admitting “we were not winning hearts and minds” with the choice. Marquette soon went back to the Golden Eagles.

Meanwhile, Wild steadily worked to build up Marquette with a new dental school, an expanded library, the Al McGuire Center, a new law school and an ongoing project to build a new $100 million engineering school. Wild raised an astounding $725 million for the university, and saw the endowment rise to about $300 million. Last year, MU opened a development office with five staff in downtown Chicago to raise donations from the estimated 30,000 alumni, students and friends in the Chicagoland area. Marquette’s decision to join the Big East Conference has helped attract more students from the East Coast, and total applications to the school have jumped. So has the university’s prestige (it’s now ranked 84th among universities nationally by U.S. News & World Report).

Meanwhile, Marquette has been very savvy about bringing prestige names to the university. When longtime TV newsman Mike Gousha left Channel 4, Marquette offered him a job. More recently, longtime Journal Sentinel reporter Alan Borsuk was picked up. (Both Gousha and Borsuk are senior fellows at the law school.)

It’s all part of making Marquette a pillar of the city’s civic establishment. Critics might question if a university doing so can ever provide any moral leadership when it comes to challenging the community. But what Raynor and Wild accomplished was to create all kinds of university institutions in the heart of the city, with much of the funding coming from alumni who don’t live in the metro area. That’s good for Marquette, but also good for Milwaukee.

When news came that Wild would be resigning this June, I was shocked that he'd served as president since 1996. His tenure had been so controversy-free, so lacking in big headlines, that you barely noticed he was there. He seemed so

By contrast, the magazine did a 1994 feature on DiUlio that was packed with controversy (and probably helped lay the groundwork for his departure). When the history of Marquette is written, DiUlio will get short shrift, whereas Wild “will be recognized as one of the greatest presidents,” as Marquette athletic director Steve Cottingham told the Journal Sentinel. Being bland, it seems, can be the path to success.

Will Tommy Challenge Feingold?

On Sunday, Republican Bill McCoshen, a former aide to Tommy Thompson, appeared on Mike Gousha’s Sunday interview show to tout Tommy’s chances against incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold. Gousha noted that Tommy has threatened many times to enter some race in Wisconsin without doing it.

Ah, but this is different, said McCoshen. “This is the most serious I’ve seen him. … He’s going at this the right way. … I wouldn’t be surprised to see [Thompson form] an exploratory committee in the next couple weeks.”

Republicans clearly lack a strong candidate to go against Feingold, so they are pushing the idea he is vulnerable to a challenger like Thompson, in hopes Tommy will get enticed to run.

My guess is it won’t happen. Sure, Tommy may do some exploring, some huffing and puffing. But does he have a fire in his belly? He would have work like crazy to have any chance against Feingold. And even then his odds of winning are not good.

Feingold is a strong campaigner. He’s not just hard-working, he’s a very able debater who would be very difficult for Tommy to handle. Democrats are already rehearsing the incumbent’s likely approach: Thompson has been making millions “working on behalf of wealthy D.C. and out-of-state special interests, including health insurance and pharmaceutical companies and the finance industry.” Feingold put it this way: "I've spent years and years taking on the special interests. And Tommy Thompson spent years taking them on as clients."Ouch.

Tommy has had the best of both worlds: He’s raking in easy money and still gets media attention – but he doesn’t have to work very hard for it. Once you’ve gone that route, it’s hard to go backwards, hard to go back into the trenches and work the endless hours necessary to beat an entrenched incumbent. If it was a sure thing, he might be tempted to run. But it’s not, so he won’t.

The Buzz:

-In my column last week on the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute study of the state pension, I wrote that WPRI leader George Lightbourn was considered “one of the smartest people” in the state capital. Not so, claims one former Democrat officeholder. “Lightbourn held jobs in budgeting and administration that were considered egghead jobs, but George was often referred to as George Lightbrains. He worked for Jim Klauser, who was shrewd and projected a powerful image. Maybe it reflected on Lightbourn,” the source says, but George himself didn’t originate much of the light. Interestingly, Lightbourn is still sort of working for Klauser, who is a board member of WPRI,

-Hey, folks: Next week Monday, Milwaukee Magazine will launch a unique new daily journalism Web site. The goal is to create a one-stop site for all local and state news and politics. The site will feature original reporting and editorial cartoons, will aggregate state and local stories from all other print publications in the state, and will also feature a full range of political bloggers. We’re going to have a lot of fun with this new online publication, and we think you will, too.

-And the Sports Nut proposes a radical idea: Trust Packers GM Ted Thompson? The nerve.