cc >> Sara Goldrick-Rab: This is
appropriately titled The Future and the Challenges Faced
by Public Higher Education. We have a distinguished panel of
four folks who are going to offer some remarks, and then
we're going to have a discussion.
The first speaker is Bettsey Barhorst, the president of
Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wisconsin.
She's been president since November 2004, and prior to
being named president at Madison College, she was president at
Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo, Iowa, and also served
in leadership positions during her 25 years with Illinois
Central College in Peoria, Illinois.
Then we're going to hear from Bill Tracy, professor and chair
in the Department of Agronomy at UW Madison.
He was interim dean of the College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences from January 2011 through March 2012, during a
tumultuous period that's been referenced so many times during
the conference. He received his PhD in plant
breeding from Cornell University, and his research is
in the area of corn breeding and genetics.
Kathy Cramer Walsh is an associate professor in the
Department of Political Science and the Morgridge Center for
Public Service Faculty Research Scholar.
Her work focuses on deliberative democracy, public opinion,
political communication, and civic engagement.
It was her work that was referenced repeatedly by Todd
Berry yesterday in the discussion about the Wisconsin
Idea. So she's that Kathy Cramer
Walsh. And we have Adam Gamoran who's
the John D MacArthur Professor of Sociology and also a member
of Educational Policy Studies and former chair of the UW
Madison Department of Sociology. He is an elected member of the
National Academy of Education and was appointed by President
Obama to serve as a member of the National Board for Education
Sciences. He is the head of the Wisconsin
Center for Education Research. So each of our panelists is
going to speak for, I think I said, five to eight minutes or
somewhere in there. Hopefully leaving plenty of time
for discussion amongst the panelist members as well as with
you, the audience. So thank you for sticking with
us for the two days, and let's go ahead with Dr. Barhorst.
Bettsey Barhorst: Okay, thank you.
Future and challenges of public higher education, of course my
expertise and my experience is mostly at the two-year level,
and that's what I'm going to talk about today, the community
colleges across the country and also in Wisconsin where we have
a sort of different system than the rest of the world, I think.
And here I would talk more about the technical college system
rather than a community college system, even though our college
is a community college. So, if you can follow that.
First of all, what is the biggest problem in the future,
the biggest challenge? It's the same as for every one
else. It's the lack of resources.
It has been very, very important the last couple years,
especially during the great recession, because, as you know,
states experienced tight budgets for a number of reasons, many
reasons, as in lower taxes and things, but also healthcare took
a bigger chunk of what the community colleges get from the
states. K-12 education expenditures have
taken more. Not to mention the proliferation
of prisons that also comes from the area that money for the
community colleges would come from.
So that's one thing. And then another is the housing
bubble and the fact that most community colleges, and it
depends upon the state, but most of them rely a lot on property
taxes. And so as the valuation of
property went down, then that caused more resource issues for
those community colleges. And then, of course, at the same
time, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later, at the
same time that the resources were diminishing, the enrollment
was growing and growing, in many cases because of the recession.
So that caused a problem. In fact, just this morning I was
reading about in the Chronicle this morning, Santa Monica
Community College, which is well known as one of the, just a
really top school, and it has tremendous facilities.
It is, however, in California. And in California they are
closer to the idea of community colleges, which came from the
Truman commission in the 1940s right after the GI bill that
community colleges, the idea was that they would be free and have
open access. And Truman's idea was really
that there would be, the first two years of higher education
would be available across the country within an hour of where
people lived. And that made all kinds of
things occur, especially in the '60s when they were building a
community college, one a week, in the middle of the '60s, I was
told. And so California kept to the
idea that tuition was supposed to be free or very low.
And they're right at $37 a semester hour right now, even
today. So this morning I'm reading in
the Chronicle about Santa Monica which has decided that for
summer school and for the classes that people really want,
they're going up to $150 an hour, which is close to, that
isn't even as high as we are or will be by this summer.
But, nevertheless, it's more like the rest of the country.
So I think that's just another example of how the lack of
resources kind of changed the idea of open admissions and
accessibility for everyone. So, it's been really tough to
take in more students without additional resources.
Now, what happened in Wisconsin? Well, the state support for the
technical college system here, and, again, let me explain that
a little bit. There are 16 technical colleges.
Three of those are the more traditional community colleges.
Two of those can now give more of the transfer courses.
All of them are trying, not all but almost all.
So it's kind of a strange situation here.
But, nevertheless, of those 16, 30% of the state funding was
lowered in this biennium budget. Now, for schools like Madison,
Madison College, we only get about 8% of our budget from the
state which is, as you mentioned, I came from Iowa
which is the opposite. We get 8%, approximately, here.
It's 63% from local taxes, local property taxes, in Iowa, for
example. It's the other way around.
I think it's more like 3%-4% from property taxes, and that's
because of the large farms. That makes sense.
So anyway, but here that's the way it is.
So, that didn't hit us a whole lot, but still, a year ago this
time we were going around searching for about
$10.5 million that we had in between what we thought
we had for a budget. Also, at the same time, again
enrollment in the tech colleges went up dramatically from the
beginning of the recession. So that caused a problem.
Now, locally, here in Madison, as I said, it's not so bad for
us because we don't have as much because we're such a large
school and we have good property valuation, and it did not go
down a lot here. I think last year we were, where
we figured it, just a little below where we had been, less
than 1%. Nevertheless, there were
problems with the local taxes because of the levy phrase that
the governor put on us. And what that meant is that for
our operational funding, there's a certain 1.5 mill rate
that all the colleges have to keep.
That was a cap that was put on years ago.
Some schools, five of them, already are at that cap.
So it actually didn't make any difference to what they could
do. For us, we've been very careful
not to tax locally if we didn't have to.
And so, therefore, we were at 1.34, I believe.
And so because that cap was put on, the money that we could levy
for and we had planned on was capped.
Now, that's supposed to sunset next year, but with the K-12s it
was supposed to sunset in the middle '90s and it's still
there. So we don't know.
So that was a big issue for us is that tax on our operating.
Because it was at the same time that we passed a big referendum
for capital for buildings. So we're in the midst right now
of building nine big buildings, and we had planned on the
operation for that, but then the operation was capped.
So we're in a dilemma, although we'll continue to work on it.
So when people say, what are you doing with those buildings when
you don't have any money, it's that it's operating versus
capital. As I was saying before,
operating over here and capital over here.
So those are some of the big things, and I know that everyone
is facing that. The other one is about the kind
of students and the enrollment issues that we're dealing with.
I can see the time, so I'll make it faster.
Alright, here's the thing, not only are there more students but
they are asking more of our students, both in the technical
fields where we train for people to have jobs right away and also
because so many students come to us to then access a four-year
school, and we've always tried to keep our classes very
rigorous there. So now we have to do both
because the employers are telling us that's what they
want. In fact, if you read the book, I
just happened to reread a chapter last night, and I
thought, boy, this hits, Friedman's That Used to Be Us.
And I'm sure you've been following all of his Hot, Flat,
and Crowded and the other one too, but listen to this.
He says, "So what do employers want today in their employees?"
And I'll end with this quote. "They're looking for workers who
can think critically, who can tackle non-routine complex
tasks, and who can work collaboratively in teams."
And then he goes on to say, "And that's just to get
an interview." After that, they want higher
skills in reading and writing and mathematics and science and
all the things that we've been trying to do for so long.
And what he says, of course, is that we must do this.
We must raise our standards. And so that's the biggest
problems we have. And I'll pass to the next
person.
William Tracy: While Sara is changing the slides,
I want to say that I've been here for the entire time,
and it's really been great. I'm an agronomist.
And as an agronomist, I'm completely over my head here.
Every one in the room knows more about the subject than I do.
So when that happens to you, fall back and be idealistic and
naive. So that's going to be my
approach. So, a different angle than
the community college, the land-grant university.
And UW Madison was created in 1949 for education to the
citizens of the state. In a profoundly democratic
moment in 1862, a lot progressive things happened
then, land-grant universities were created.
And they were created in order to promote the liberal and
practical education of the industrial classes in several
pursuits of life. There's something really
interesting to me, mainly because of its agricultural
focus, but this is a really interesting historical document.
On September 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln gave an address
to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society.
And it's a wonderful read because it has Lincoln's humor,
but also he was campaigning. 1860 was the election and he was
campaigning at this time. And I'm mainly going to read the
things that are in bold just so I can move through this fairly
quickly. He does mention here that he
doesn't expect the people in the audience he's just going to
flatter farmers although he believes farmers are flattered
more than others and the reason is that I cannot perceive unless
it be that they cast more votes than any other.
And, of course, that's changed dramatically.
That was about 60% of the population were farmers then,
and today 1.7% which actually may address some of the issues
that we have in terms of funding land-grants.
But this is the part that's interesting, and I think a lot
of you will find this interesting.
Remember, he was saying this in 1859.
A lot of people believe that nobody labors unless somebody
else owning capital somehow by the use of that capital induces
him to do it. They further assume that whoever
is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
And this is called the mud-sill theory.
But another class of reasoners holds there is no such
relationship between capital and labor.
They hold that labor is prior to and independent of capital, and
that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor.
Now, education and labor. By the mud-sill theory, it is
assumed that labor and education are incompatible, and any
practical combination of them is impossible.
The education of the laborers is not only useless but pernicious
and dangerous but free labor says no.
And so, he says here, "I have so far stated the opposite theories
of mud-sill and free labor without declaring any preference
of my own between them." Again, he is a politician.
"On an occasion like this I ought not to declare any.
I suppose, however, I shall not be mistaken in assuming the fact
that the people of Wisconsin prefer free labor, and with it,
its natural companion, education."
So that's the beginnings of this great university and this
great state. So land-grant universities were
not created to duplicate private universities.
The land-grant university was only one of many progressive
ideas that were enacted by Congress in 1862 and promoted by
Lincoln. And all of these things were
investments in the future. The transcontinental train, the
Department of Agriculture, there was actually a progressive
income tax implemented then, and a number of other things that
were progressive that happened at that time.
And, of course, UW Madison was created to provide access to
higher education to everyone in Wisconsin regardless of income
or class. So that's a little history
lesson. And here we see that just this
last year or so the amount of support for undergraduate
education has shifted, or tuition revenue has overtaken
state appropriation. And you can see, historically,
the state invested more tax dollars into supporting
education than tuition revenue. This is another point I want to
make on this slide is that, and a number of you have heard me
say this, that we've been making a really bad mistake in higher
education, especially in land-grants and the big research
universities, telling the state that they're only giving us 15%
of our revenue. Or 10% or 20%.
These two lines here pay 100% of undergraduate education.
Not 15% or anything like that. When we say it's 15%, we're
including the billion dollars we get from the federal government
for research. So we're telling the state we
don't need them when we say we're only getting 15% of our
income from them. We need that $400 million.
It's about $400 million, and we need it to support affordable
education for the students of Wisconsin.
And we need to get that message out.
That's an incredibly, critically important message.
Obviously, as tuition goes up, access goes down, and I just
wanted to show you this slide. This is 1969 to 2004 earnings
per non-farm job.
This is the number that you should be most interested in
here is that today the rural parts of the country, and this
is true in Wisconsin, Wisconsin is a little bit
higher, but the rural part of Wisconsin makes about 70%
of what the metro areas do. So, in this case, we're always
talking about people who don't have access, this is another
community that access is declining for.
And, given my recent role as interim dean in the College of
Ag and Life Sciences, this is a concern to me.
So, about the future. Well, what happened in 1862 to
have that spasm of progressiveness?
It actually was because half the Congress walked out, and it
happened to be the conservative half.
And it left the progressive northerners to actually do
things they wanted to do because the southerners were no longer
there. And at least among that group
there was a consensus. And this is what I tried to
talk to yesterday, for those of you who were here,
with Cory Mason. We don't have a consensus
anymore about what our mission is, whether we should be
supporting increased access, more affordability, or whether
we should have a high tuition model.
There's not consensus. And today, in one of Paul
Krugman's, one of his blogs, this graph appeared.
And this is the trust in science and the trends since 1974.
Many of you have probably seen this graph in other forums, but
these are people who describe themselves as liberal, the trust
hasn't changed. For some reason the moderates
really dropped off very quickly here, but the moderates haven't
changed. But we see who are
self-described conservatives as changing and losing their
interest in science. And I know that science isn't
the only part or thing that we do at a university like this,
but this indicates a lack on consensus in what we do.
I think that's my last slide.
Kathy Cramer Walsh: Good afternoon, everybody.
It's really an honor to be a part of this panel, and, Sara,
thank you for inviting me to participate in it.
So, the title of the panel, as I understand it, is The Future and
the Challenges of Higher Education, and I think one of
the major challenges we face is demonstrating to the public our
relevance and establishing that relevance.
So to that end, back in May of 2007, I was very fortunate to
receive a grant from the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment to
conduct research on perceptions among the public of the
UW Madison. And I want to emphasize that to
say the funding for my research came from the university.
So it's just one indication, to me, of how much concern there is
among people on campus, including the administrators,
about how we can better connect with the public.
So what I did was to sample 27 communities from across the
state, which you see plotted up here somewhat anonymously.
And these communities were sampled not to be a
cross-section of the state, but to provide a wide variety of
Wisconsin communities. And then once I had sampled a
place, I called up the UW Extension office in the county
in which those places fell, and I said where in such and such
Wisconsin do people get together on a regular basis that I could
probably get access to? And so they pointed me towards
gas stations and McDonald's and restaurants and cafes.
And so ever since May of 2007, I've been inviting myself into
the conversations of 36 groups that meet in these communities.
The first time I went to such and such a place, a gas station,
I would walk in and say, hi, I'm Kathy Walsh from the University
of Wisconsin Madison, do you mind if I join you this morning?
They would laugh and look at me a little crazy and then say
sure. And I would then proceed by
saying I'm a public opinion scholar at the University of
Wisconsin and I sincerely want to know how you think about
issues going on in our state as well as what you think about the
university. So I asked them, with respect to
the university, what do you think we do well?
What do you think we do not so well?
And what do you think we should be doing in your community?
I want to emphasize, as you can probably tell already, the data
I'm talking about are not great for describing what
Wisconsinites, in general, think about UW Madison.
Instead, their value lies in a deeper understanding of why
people think what they do. When we hear resentment towards
the university, what kind of considerations are people
bringing to bear when they think about it?
When we hear pride, what kind of things are they drawing upon,
what kind of experiences are they drawing upon?
So here are some of the things that I learned.
I did hear a lot of pride towards the university.
Our alumni are notorious for having very strong emotional
attachments to this place. But I also heard pride towards
the university across a wide range of people.
A lot of times it came in the form of very, what do you say,
vehement Badger sports fans. A lot of people, oftentimes
people did not know I was going to show up on a given day,
they'd be in their Badger sports gear, and they'd talk about how
much they loved men's football, men's basketball, so on and so
forth, and the marching band and UW Hospital and they would talk
about research from time to time, not always and typically
stuff that's appearing in the news, but people were proud of
the university as a research institution, and in particular,
as institution where it's a great place to get an education.
It has that reputation out there, which we know.
But when I heard resentment, here's what it looked like.
People would express concerns that were inaccessible and that
were out of touch. Meaning, time and time again I
heard folks saying it costs too much to go there.
How do you all expect me to send my kid to UW Madison.
It's too hard to get in. Johnny Smith had A-plus grades
throughout high school and couldn't get into your school.
But it also showed up in terms of faculty.
And, mind you, the conversations that I heard were expressed to
me, said in front of me after I've given people a business
card that said I'm a member of the faculty.
They know who I am, and yet they many times did not hold back.
And perhaps their attitudes were stronger than they were letting
on that they say, oftentimes, faculty as lazy, liberal, and
elitist. You don't teach your own
classes. You have TAs that are doing all
the work for you. Liberal in the sense of
political liberalness. We talked about politics a bit
during my conversations. But also just socially liberal.
There were concerns with am I going to send my kid, in whom
I've instilled these great-- Oh, sorry.
Am I going to send my kid, in whom I've instilled great
values, and they'll come back a godless communist.
That's an extreme version. That's not all that common, but
I did hear that from time to time.
But elitist, I think that's an important thing that I need to
define in that there were many conversations about the salaries
that people on campus earn in comparison to the average
Wisconsin worker. And so there's elitism kind of
in a social class sense, but also a perception that folks on
campus are elitist because they're out of touch with
average Wisconsinites. And in particular, I heard this
in rural areas where people in metro areas, the M and Ms,
Madison and Milwaukee, don't have any sense of what it's like
to live in a rural area, to try to make ends meet in a rural
area. So those are some of the ways in
which these attitudes of resentment were related to
feelings about us being out of touch.
But it wasn't just about faculty members, individual people on
campus, it was also about the institution as a whole.
And I think it's important to note that when people talked
about feeling distant from the university, they expressed that
in, oftentimes, the same conversations as feeling distant
from government in general or from HMOs.
There's a broad swath of people who feel as though major
institutions that govern our lives are not listening and
don't have any understanding of what it's like to be an average
person. So we're sort of bound up in
many people's understandings with other important
institutions in the state and in the country and in the world.
One last thing I want to say with the last few minutes I have
is the relationship of the attitudes toward UW Madison with
attitudes about public employees.
So, most of my fieldwork was done before Governor Walker was
elected, but after things sort erupted here I was very curious
to go back to many of these communities and listen to what
they had to say about what was going on in Madison.
And from those conversations, but primarily from the
conversations in the three or four years leading up to that,
I heard many people talk about public employees as people who
were unaware of how good they have it.
So, here's a typical conversation.
People, in especially a rural area, would talk about how
difficult they work, how hard they work, how much they get
their hands dirty, unlike those people down in Madison who sit
behind desks and have these great pensions and great
healthcare benefits. And here I am, a taxpayer,
working extremely hard, I can't afford healthcare, I can't
actually afford to get my tooth fixed that's been hurting me for
five years, and I'm paying big taxes so that those folks can
get big pensions and healthcare. And so that, in the current
context, we're well aware of animosity toward public
employees, and I think it's important to keep in mind that
some of the animosity toward public higher education is
intertwined with these attitudes about public workers versus
private workers. So, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Adam Gamoran: I have just few things to add.
As you heard in the previous remarks, we are in a time of
transition in public higher education.
It's a transition from a period of relatively high state funding
and relatively light accountability to a period of
low state funding and high accountability.
We've witnessed a deliberate change in the funding model for
public higher education, at least at the four-year
university level, from state support to tuition support.
I think we see this reflected in the remarks from around the
state that Kathy reported that this shift is not accidental but
is a reflection of choices made, not only by our leaders, but by
our citizens. And this is comparable to many
areas in which individuals are choosing to pay fewer taxes and
to put the burden of services on those who use the services.
We saw in one of Bill's slides a historic turning point in which
tuition is now paying a greater share of the cost of
undergraduate education than the state subsidy.
But Wisconsin has more support from state subsidies than many
states. Some states have seen a shift
from a time when one-third of the cost was born by tuition and
two-thirds by the state to a reverse with two-thirds of the
cost of undergraduate education now paid for through tuition and
one-third by the state. So this is a really profound
shift in the organization of public higher education.
And both as a result of these changes and in reflection or
coinciding with these changes, we are experiencing many
pressures within higher education.
There are pressures on compensation as universities,
such as this one which compete in a global market for faculty
and staff, are facing pressure in maintaining compensation
levels that allow us to maintain the faculty and scientist who
bring in that billion dollars of extramural funding.
The situation with staff salaries is even worse because
as we've had to pay more toward health insurance and towards
pensions, since those have been across the board charges, they
fall more heavily on those with the lowest salary levels,
particularly are lower paid academic staff and our
classified staff. We've seen a reduction in
benefits and an increase cost in benefits, and this puts further
pressure on our efforts to maintain a competitive
workforce. We've also experienced, at the
same time, dramatically increased administrative burdens
due to increased regulations coming from the federal and
state levels, especially from the federal level.
So activities such as effort reporting, compliance with human
subjects regulations, other kinds of safety regulations and
compliance have dramatically increased the administrative
burden at a time when we have not been able to afford to
increase our investments in administrative services.
Finally, there is increased interest, as I mentioned at the
beginning, increased interest in accountability for results.
And this is a national trend. It's affected the private
for-profit institutions most of all and rightfully so, in my
opinion. But it's also affecting those of
us in public higher education. Nonetheless, in my judgment, our
core remains strong. Our situation remains strong.
We have a number of attributes that are helping us confront and
respond successfully to these challenges.
First of all, as Chancellor Ward has frequently mentioned, and
perhaps he mentioned in his remarks to this conference, we
have extraordinary breadth and that is a source of great
strength. Public four-year universities
that emphasize research have research strengths in many
different areas, and this university is distinctive among
those board universities in that our strength comes not from one
particular are, like the medical school or the biological
sciences or the physical sciences, we have strength
certainly in all the divisions of the university and in many,
many of the departments within those divisions.
Whether it's medical research or social sciences or arts and
humanities or biological and physical sciences, we have
strengths in all of these areas. And that is a great virtue for a
couple of reasons. First of all, as cutting-edge
research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, we at
Wisconsin have local colleagues that we can call upon with whom
to collaborate. So we don't need to collaborate
with other institutions to the same degree that other
institutions might because we've got world class scholars in so
many different fields right here.
Our breadth is also a strength because we've got something for
every student. That may be an exaggeration, but
we've got something for a lot, a lot, a lot of students, and so
we can contribute to attract a broad spectrum of students with
many diverse intellectual interests, and that is also a
source of strength for us. It also cushions us against
rises and falls in the availability of outside
resources. So, if there's less NIH funding
but more funding from the Department of Energy, our
billion dollars remains secure because we have people who are
getting funds from NIH and the Department of Energy and so on
for all the different federal and private funding sources to
which we respond. So breadth is a strength for
many reasons. Second reason we remain strong
is the strength of our community.
Despite the skepticism with which we are regarded in some
part of the state, here in Madison we're well regarded, and
we have tremendous populations of students, faculty, and staff.
As you know, the composition of our student population has never
been more extraordinary. The quality of our students at
both the graduate and undergraduate levels is
exceptional on a par with many of the leading universities in
the world, let alone in the United States.
As the pressure to enroll in high quality higher education
institutions has increased, University of Wisconsin Madison
has become more and more selective.
And so the intellectual depth of our undergraduate population, in
particular, is just extraordinary.
I interact with faculty in many departments, so although my next
remark is anecdotal, it's an anecdote based on broad based
experience. And I can report that the
faculty remains strong, particularly in our junior and
our younger faculty members, our junior faculty and our young
senior faculty. We have extraordinary faculty
members who, I am confident, will carry us for another
generation of outstanding scholarship.
So community is the second reason that I think the future,
at least at this university, is bright.
A third is investments in research.
Despite the pressures on the federal budget, actually, in
recent times, because of the pressures on the federal budget,
there have been great investments in research in a
wide range of areas, and we are well positioned to capture those
investments. So the federal stimulus package
was a great boom to the University of Wisconsin Madison
because we managed to bring in to capture our share of those
funds. And, similarly, the other
federal investments in research have been something that we've
been able to take advantage. Now, there is, of course,
unending uncertainty about the federal budget, and the most
dire predictions of what may happen would have very, very
negative consequences for us. So there's reason to be
concerned, but so far so good. We've been extremely successful
of taking advantage of opportunities for research
funding. Fourth, I think our future is
bright because we have untapped potential.
And in my judgment, we have untapped potential in two areas.
First is philanthropy. Like most public higher
education institutions, UW Madison is latecomer to the
importance of philanthropy. We have not viewed philanthropy
as a source of our core operating funds, but we should.
We should be moving in this direction We have many
successful alumni who are extraordinarily loyal and
committed to the University of Wisconsin Madison, and they just
need to be asked. So I think we're moving in that
direction. As many of you know, I chaired
the Commission on Faculty Compensation and Economic
Benefits. We had two jobs.
One, to figure out how to fix the situation with faculty
salaries, and those of staff as well.
So we had some suggestions in that realm, but we also had
suggestions in the areas of generating the resources that it
would take to put those strategies for faculty
compensation into place. And one of our major suggestions
was let's stop funding buildings and start funding people.
And that argument got a very good reception at the
UW Foundation, with the UW administration, with the
leadership of the UW Alumni Association, and so I'm
optimistic that we'll move in that direction.
We also have untapped potential in tuition.
Right now, UW Madison is a great education at a bargain price.
We are, according to Kiplinger, we're the 13th best value in
education in the country. We have room to maneuver,
particularly in non-resident tuition and in differential
tuition. And my expectation is that we
will move in that direction. If you can do arithmetic, you
can see that we have been doing that, and I think we will in the
future. Finally, I would suggest that
there are things we can do to take advantage of the
opportunities that I've been addressing.
And I'll mention four areas in which we need to take advantage
of opportunities. First, we need to broaden our
collaborations. We need to be reaching out to
people both inside and outside this institution.
One reason we need to do this is because of the growing
importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in the area of
research. This is not a new statement.
I could have said it 10 years ago and made the same statement,
but, nonetheless, it's true. Interdisciplinary research
continues to be the wave of the future.
We can do more of it, and so we need to broaden
those collaborations. The second way in which we need
to broaden our collaboration is through global partnerships.
We exist increasingly in a global world in both the
resources for which we compete and in the opportunities that
lay before us. We need to broaden our
collaboration globally as well as nationally.
Second, we need to be more entrepreneurial.
I'm speaking about research funding.
Not only from the public sources from which we've been so
successful, but from private sources as well.
UW Madison is not a leader in corporate funding for research.
I think this is an area that could be explored further.
There's a great deal of skepticism here about corporate
funding for research. I think that skepticism is well
grounded for a couple of reasons.
One, our challenges over the intellectual property.
Who owns the intellectual property when corporations are
sponsoring research? Second, corporations are often
reluctant to pay for the overhead of running a university
the way the federal government does.
So that's a challenge as well. But we need to pursue it.
We also need to be more entrepreneurial globally and in
areas of interdisciplinary work, as I was saying a moment ago.
And we need to be more entrepreneurial in thinking
about new models of technology transfer.
Those of you from the School of Education have certainly heard
about the Wisconsin Center for Education Products and Services,
which is a new nonprofit Friends of the University organization
that was created to facilitate the commercialization of
educational products and services to the K-12
marketplace. In the area of accountability we
need to grab the momentum. We need to define accountability
outcomes and measures on our terms rather than having narrow
paper and pencil assessments that's are supposed to have one
size fits all that fit for all programs and all departments.
We need to make measures of learning specific to programs
and courses of study. Of course, we need to continue
to monitor graduation rates, retention rates, and gaps by
economic and social background in these rates, but we also need
to come up with new measures that capture engagement and
motivation. Are we inspiring joy in
discovery among our students? Do they go on to careers in
public service and contributions to the betterment of the human
condition? What kind of career outcome are
our students obtaining, not just in the short-term, but in the
long-term? So in accountability we can
capture the momentum. Finally, we've been discussing
engaged scholarship on this campus in a number of forums.
I think that's another area where we need to take advantage
of opportunities. Researchers still need a strong
disciplinary foundation to be excellent research, but given
that foundation, they can make contributions to society in ways
that could be developed further than they are now.
Thank you. >> Okay, thank you to all of
you. And Adam is a very busy man, but
I hope that you'll watch on Wisconsin Public Television the
talks that we've had over the last couple of days.