What happened to putting people first?

In an insightful and intelligent VTDigger.org commentary yesterday, John Margolis put his finger on an important public policy struggle going on in Vermont: people vs. money.

While he doesn’t frame it that way, Margolis points out that Gov. Peter Shumlin, in a speech at the University of Vermont last week, urged the school to focus on preparing students for business, without mention of the arts, culture, or philosophy. The governor didn’t use the word “citizen” once in his speech about the “better results” the state should expect from its university.

The governor’s remarks reflect a perspective that runs deep these days among members of both major parties—in the Vermont State House, in this administration, and in the last administration.  It’s a money-first, people-second view that underlies policies that affect Vermonters’ lives every day.  As we pointed out in a report last year and in an op-ed last month, the state budget process now focuses on doing what we can for Vermonters with available revenues, instead of starting with a vision of the kind of state Vermonters want and need and adopting fiscal policies to achieve that vision.

Tax policy has become a mindless mantra of “no new taxes” even in the face of greater human need, the greatest income disparity in 80 years, and a declining middle class in Vermont. Economic development has come to mean more business tax breaks rather than public investment in a society that produces widely shared prosperity. Now the governor wants to bring this thinking to education.

The irony is that Governor Shumlin’s liberal arts education did not have the narrow focus he is encouraging Vermont’s university to adopt. Buxton, where the governor spent his high school years, educates each of its charges “to live a fully conscious, responsible life” — not exactly job training.  And his alma mater, Wesleyan University, boasts “[f]reedom, rigor, intellectual experimentation and the desire to make a positive difference in the world” as the Wesleyan Experience.

These institutions are focused on developing human beings to be productive members of society.  While that might involve a life in business, it might also be in the arts or public service or politics, but always as a critical thinking, participating citizen.

Occupy Wall Street has rightly demonstrated to the world how the current focus on money is leaving people behind.  The balance between money and people is tilted toward money in Vermont as well.  And while philosophers still argue about it, we can be confident that the purpose of life involves a lot more than cash.