Faith in higher education is a family legacy
UW official inspires board
Madison — To fully appreciate Freda Harris’ belief in access to college, consider that her late mother was a civil rights activist with a sixth-grade education who fought for a way out of poverty in the 1960s.
Harris quietly and meticulously provided behindthe-scenes analysis over the past 30 years to help guide the University of Wisconsin Sys- tem’s multibillion dollar budgets. A couple of weeks ago, as she prepared to retire from her post as associate vice president for budget and planning, she stood before the UW Board of Regents and did something seemingly out of character.
She revealed a compelling personal story and publicly urged the UW leaders to keep fighting for higher education.
Harris was born in 1960 — the 11th of 14 children — to Leroy and Lena Stanford in Marks, Miss., she told the regents. The small town on the Mississippi Delta was racially segregated and hard-hit by joblessness and hunger as farm implements replaced farmhands in cotton fields. The town also owns a place in civil rights history — the Mule Train, the centerpiece of the Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., started there in the summer of 1968.
Freda’s mother owned a cafe. She took part in the Mule Train and before that, in 1963, participated in the March on Washington where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Lena Stanford met the civil rights leader.
Leroy was a sharecropper and worked at a farmer’s co-op. He put food on the table by fishing, hunting and gardening. He didn’t want his children to “hope too much, believe too much,” his daughter recalls. He didn’t push for their education, believing instead that farm work was their only destiny. Freda’s mother believed she could do just about anything she set her mind to do. At one point, she packed up and moved her nine children from the farm to town, where her cafe was located. She wanted more for them, and Leroy would eventually come around to joining them in town.
“Because of my mother and her beliefs, my family was one of only four families to integrate public schools in my hometown,” Freda Harris explained.
Those were difficult times, Harris told the regents, “but because of my mother’s dreams and federal financial aid all of my brothers and sisters from that time forward had the opportunity to go to college.”
9 grads in family
Nine of the 14 Stanford children, including Freda, earned college degrees.
Without a scholarship
and a federal grant that covered her tuition and living expenses, Freda Harris never would have gotten the education that led her to become the go-to person for the UW System’s $6.19 billion budget.
“Kids need hope,” she explained during an interview in Van Hise Hall, where the UW System’s offices overlook the state Capitol. “Families need hope and opportunity.”
Congress authorized federal student aid programs in the mid-’60s, recognizing that education was crucial to fight the nation’s War on Poverty.
In the 1970s, as baby boomers came of age, the college population increased significantly and limited campus-based funds were unevenly distributed, which meant many needy students were unable to attend college. That’s when the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program — now known as Pell Grants — was started.
That was the grant that made it possible for Harris to earn a bachelor’s degree in banking and finance at the University of Mississippi in the late 1970s, when college was much less expensive than it is today. A family in the 1970s could send three children to UWMadison for the price of sending one today, adjusted for inflation.
One of every three Wisconsin resident undergrads got a Pell Grant in 2014-’15, at an average of $3,876. The current cost of attendance, including books, fees and living expenses, is between $20,000 and $25,000 for a state university in Wisconsin.
Harris ended up in Wisconsin and took graduatelevel courses at UW-Madison because of another program that her family became involved with while she was growing up, called Project Self-Help and Awareness. The organization matched seven rural Wisconsin counties with rural sister counties in Mississippi to help improve race relations through a summer student exchange program and other assistance.
Freda’s brother Larry got to know the priests from St. Vincent De Paul in Wisconsin who drove busloads of children between Wisconsin and Mississippi. The priests encouraged Larry to apply to UW-Madison, and Larry encouraged his siblings to join him there in the years that followed.
One sister who followed, Carolyn Stanford Taylor, now holds a cabinet-level education position in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She is assistant state superintendent in the Division for Learning Support.
Harris said that even in poverty-stricken Mississupport sippi in the 1970s, every child who graduated from high school knew they had an opportunity to continue their education.
Now, the focus of paying for education is on loans that must be repaid, rather than grants, Harris said in the interview.
“I think college is a public good and not a personal good. It does change your life, but it also benefits the community and the state. We need people who are able to go out and create jobs and who can help the rest of the community. We know that people who have a college education participate more in the community. We also know there is less crime associated with it, so you don’t have the instances of people going to jail.”
The way the daughter of a 1960s civil rights activist sees it, “If you don’t put funding in on the front end, you end up paying on the back end. You could provide some funding up front for people to build their lives and make them better, or you could provide the funding on the back end when people aren’t able to
themselves and their families. One you have to continue over and over and over again. It is definitely a cost on society.”
Need for stability
From a budgeting viewpoint, Harris said she’s also concerned that funding for public higher education is decided by two-year state budget cycles, rather than a longer-term commitment to students who enroll in college for four to six years.
“If you don’t have that, you’re basically shortchanging the students and their families and the state,” she said, referring to cuts that lead to fewer course offerings or reduced services. “There’s a certain level of stability that you need.”
When the UW System was founded in the 1970s, the state covered 75% of the cost of a public university education, while students and families covered 25%. Now it’s closer to 30% from the state and 70% from families, Harris said.
“As you look back in time, you see that families have been able to make progress and improve their lives, and this is the first generation where that’s not necessarily going to happen,” Harris said. “If a kid has the ability, then they should be able to go to college, and I don’t think we’re making that a priority.”
While she didn’t live to hear her daughter’s parting words to the UW Board of Regents a few weeks ago, Lena Stanford’s legacy was there:
“As I leave I ask you, the board, to continue to fight, as you have today, for the students, staff, and all of education,” Harris said. “The future of our state and its citizens depends upon it.”