If you made this up for a story, no one would believe it.

Derek Draplin reports at the College Fix.

Michigan Gov. Who Drove Up Unemployment Now Teaches Job Growth at UC Berkeley

The former Michigan governor whose leadership oversaw a severe economic downturn, skyrocketing unemployment, Detroit’s emerging bankruptcy, and the meltdown of the automotive industry, is now a professor specializing in job growth.

This fall, Michigan’s former Democratic Gov. Jennifer Mulhern Granholm is teaching a graduate course focused on “creating jobs through better government policies,” the class description states, adding “it is designed to help to launch the American Jobs Project at UC Berkeley.”

Yet as governor from 2003 to 2011, Michigan’s unemployment rate soared from 6.6 percent at the beginning of Granholm’s term up to 14.2 percent in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

When she left office, the unemployment rate languished at 11 percent. The national average at the time was 9 percent.

Michael LaFaive, director of Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative and economist at the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, told The College Fix that “creating American jobs is not what she did during her tenure.”

“In fact, she presided over one of the largest economic declines in Michigan history and herself fled the state in search of employment,” LaFaive said. “Michigan, during her tenure, had the distinction of one of the highest unemployment ratings in the nation, one of the highest population declines, and being the only state in the union with negative economic growth.”

Granholm did not respond to requests by The College Fix on Wednesday and Thursday seeking comment.

The course description states “the American Jobs Project will focus on a bottom-up strategy of stoking jobs policy in the states, designing the road-map for each state to create innovative energy job clusters in the advanced energy and manufacturing job sectors.”

LaFaive said he questions her ability to teach successful job growth strategies.

“I wonder if she will be able to get up and talk about her tenure as governor and support her assertions with anything approaching empirical evidence,” LaFaive said in an interview with The College Fix. “In fact, you could argue that her participation in this class would be as the counter-example of what not to do.”