Thank you for all the gracious words you have shared with me. But more importantly, thank you for what you have done to help this university move forward.

While there have been some hard days on this job, there have been many more good memories. No other job in the world would let me lead an institution with its own marching band, sailing club, mascot (I’m going to miss Bucky), and ice cream flavors. In no other job do you get to address 50,000 people in Camp Randall on graduation day when they are all in a happy mood and can’t wait to hear what you have to say. And there is no other spot on any college campus in the country as much fun as the Terrace, drawing in not just the campus community, but people from all around the region for good food, good music, and an unbeatable view.

I have been regularly asked what I think my legacy is here at UW. If you’ll indulge me for a bit, let me list what I think were the most important changes of the past nine years. But let me be clear that this is not MY legacy, but OUR legacy. All of these things took the effort and involvement of staff and faculty across campus. I want to do a special shout-out to my Executive Team, the deans and other unit leaders. I’ve had the privilege of working with a great group of leaders.

Here are a few of the things we’ve accomplished:

• Most important, UW is on a much more stable financial footing than it was when I arrived, with investment resources that have allowed us to fund new initiatives and further advance our mission across campus. This didn’t happen by accident but is the result of a multi-pronged effort to be entrepreneurial and generate our own investment income when it became clear the state would not do so. We’ve expanded summer programs, increased class size, raised out-of-state tuition, grown research dollars, and received many generous donations from alumni and friends. As a result, we’ve brought our faculty salaries up substantially, made big increases in our graduate student stipends, greatly increased our scholarship dollars, invested in IT infrastructure, and done more for campus maintenance. (This coming year, now that we have benchmarks for all staff salaries, we’ll be putting extra money into salary changes for staff based on compression, parity, equity and merit.)

• UW has steadily improved as an educational institution. We’re now one of the top 10 public universities in our graduation rates. We’ve substantially decreased the graduate gap for low income and underrepresented groups. We’ve steadily increased the share of undergraduates who leave with ZERO debt – it’s just under 60% of the class. And our advising and career counseling has steadily improved. It’s not surprising that applications to UW-Madison have doubled in the nine years that I’ve been here.

• UW has expanded its research enterprise. When I arrived, research dollars were declining at a time when they were growing at other top universities – which, not surprisingly, led us to slip in the research rankings. We’ve stabilized that, with research dollars growing 17% over the past five years. We brought in almost $1.5 billion in research awards last year. While there is always more to do, we have improved administrative support for those competing for outside funding. And our partner organization WARF has also increased its dollar support to us, allowing us to deepen our funding for new projects and new faculty start-up packages.

• After almost 30 years of declining or flat faculty numbers, we’ve increased faculty size. The Cluster Hire program has strengthened a number of areas of research excellence, while the TOP program has helped diversify our faculty. This increase was made possible by more investment dollars in key areas of research and teaching and also reflects the increase in the undergraduate student body.

• A key effort has been our All Ways Forward fundraising campaign, aimed at alumni and friends. This campaign has helped us deepen our scholarship pool, fund named faculty positions across the university to help attract and retain top faculty, and subsidize the cost of some key building projects on campus. We aimed at raising $3.2 billion when we started in 2015. We ended the campaign with $4.2 billion. Thanks to the WFAA for being such great partners in this effort.

• We’ve expanded access to the university. Most notably, Bucky’s Tuition Promise has guaranteed that all low-income Wisconsin students who qualify for admission can come here tuition-free. But we’ve deepened scholarships and educational opportunities for many others as well. Our professional masters’ programs have expanded, providing a UW education to early and mid-career students. And we’re growing our online presence, both with summer online courses for our regular students and by starting a few online undergraduate degree programs for older workers who want to finish their degree but are not going to be residential students in Madison.

• Our service to the state is stronger than ever, reflecting our commitment to the Wisconsin Idea. In the early 1970s, the Extension program and Wisconsin Public TV and Radio were pulled out of Madison (which pioneered these programs more than 100 years ago.) Five years ago, these programs again became part of UW-Madison. It took work to reintegrate them into campus, but it’s been worth it. Our campus enriches these programs, and these programs help our campus reach out to serve the entire state even better.

• Our campus has worked in a sustained way to be more diverse and inclusive of all community members. Our student body and our faculty have become more diverse (and additional focus will be required to increase diversity among staff.) The schools and colleges are implementing diversity plans, working with departments and units on building hiring pipelines, developing training, and initiating sometimes difficult conversations. The School of Education is providing training to help faculty teach in more diverse classrooms. Conversations about living in a diverse community are now a regular part of our freshman orientation. Our Public History project is presenting stories from UW’s past that have gone untold, focusing on the experiences of more marginalized groups. We have more work to do, but many people are committed to keeping us focused on these issues.

I could keep going but suffice it to say that lots of good things have been happening on campus over the past decade.

There are plenty of ongoing challenges that the new chancellor will need to deal with, working closely with all of you. Most important will be breaking the logjam in funding and approvals that prevent us from modernizing and updating our facilities as our needs change. We need stronger partnerships with UW System and policymakers to promote flexibilities, particularly around facilities projects, so that problems are addressed quickly and at a lower cost.

UW-Madison also needs to negotiate greater leeway around in-state tuition. We’ve had a decade (yes that’s TEN YEARS) of an in-state tuition freeze. Unfortunately, our costs have not been frozen. It’s time our in-state tuition was set at a level similar to that of Minnesota, Illinois, or Michigan – with plenty of financial aid to lower and middle-income students. This will help provide revenue needed to maintain high quality educational programs for all our students.

And we will continue to need to persuade the legislature, the governor, and the citizens of this state, of the value of UW-Madison to the economy and the civic well-being of the state. We need the state to invest in us as a way to invest in the future of the entire state. UW-Madison is the source of this state’s most skilled workers and entrepreneurs and our research powerhouse is a key reason that businesses seek to locate or grow in Wisconsin.

I do not want to end with complaints. I thought you might enjoy excerpts from a few of my most memorable phone calls during my time at UW. These were usually calls that came in on evenings or weekends, just as I was ready to relax and forget about work. Here’s my recollection of three of them:

• “The pool at the SERF has sprung a leak. We seem to have lost thousands of gallons of water. Unfortunately, we aren’t quite sure where it’s gone. We’re a little worried that a big sinkhole could open up on Dayton Street at any time. But don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.”

• “There’s a new PCR test for COVID that doesn’t require a nose swab. People just have to drool into a test tube. Everybody will love it!”

• “We just learned that the pipes burst on the top floor of <you name the building>. Unfortunately, this happened Friday night and we didn’t discover it until Monday morning. We’re going to have to relocate everybody in the building and move all of the classes. But don’t worry. We can probably get this fixed up in six months to a year.”

Don’t worry. The good news is that all of these were handled by our excellent staff.

It’s been an honor every day that I’ve served as Chancellor at this university. Thank you for being such great partners and colleagues in this work.

Wisconsin is one of the great public universities. I know you will give the new Chancellor the same level of support and friendship that you’ve given me. And I am confident that all of you will do what is necessary to grow and change in a way that maintains the excellence of this institution.

I have come to love this campus, as I know you do. I look forward to watching it continue to move forward.

On, Wisconsin!

Mon. Apr. 4, 2022

5:45 p.m.

Olin House

Good evening.  It’s wonderful to see you all here.  After two years of virtual award ceremonies, it is really a treat to welcome you in-person to our annual celebration of the Hilldale Awards — UW–Madison’s top faculty honor.

We presented the awards earlier today at the Faculty Senate meeting, and now it’s time to celebrate!

These awards honor four outstanding faculty members:

• Michael Bernard-Donals
• Anna Huttenlocher
• Steve Wright
• and Tim Smeeding

Please join me in a round of applause for these accomplished scholars.

The Hilldale Awards have been given annually since 1987.  It’s the only faculty honor that recognizes the trifecta of contributions:  teaching excellence, research achievement, and dedication to public service.

Each year, one outstanding faculty member is selected from each area — Arts and Humanities, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences.

Faculty who receive this award are skilled instructors who have had a profound impact on their students.  They’re innovative researchers who have made groundbreaking contributions to their fields.  And they’re dedicated to serving the university, their profession, and the public.

We’d be here all night if I tried to tell you everything that makes each of these individuals worthy of this honor, but let me say just a few words about their accomplishments.

First, Dr. Michael Bernard-Donals, Chaim Perelman Professor of Rhetoric and Culture and Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English.

He was nominated by Anja Wanner, Chair of the English department.

• Michael is one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of composition and rhetoric. He is widely recognized for his work in rhetorical theory, Holocaust studies, and memory studies.
• He has had a profound impact on undergraduate education as director of two writing programs that satisfy the Comm A and Comm B requirements. And he is the Executive Director of the initiative to create the Center for Teaching and Research on Writing, which will coordinate the various writing programs in the English department.
• In his six years of service as Vice Provost for Faculty and Staff, he helped to launch programs like the Cluster Hire Initiative and the TOP program to help us recruit faculty who are underrepresented in our departments.

Michael, congratulations and thank you for your exceptional contributions to the university and to your field!

Next we have Dr. Anna Huttenlocher, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Pediatrics and Medical Microbiology and Immunology.

She was nominated by Dr. Ellen Wald, Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine and Public Health.

• Anna is an internationally recognized physician-scientist. Her research focus is cell migration, which plays a central role in cancer, heart disease, asthma, and arthritis.
• Her groundbreaking use of zebrafish as a model has transformed the way researchers are able to study basic cellular processes like wound healing. This has opened new doors for treating a broad range of human diseases.
• Her lab even played a role in diagnosing a rare disorder in a patient who suffered from recurring infections.
• Anna is also strongly committed to the university’s educational mission. She has had an enormous impact on graduate education, both as a mentor of grad students and postdocs and in helping to direct the M.D./Ph.D. program for over 20 years.
• And if all that weren’t enough, she is also an active clinician caring for patients in pediatrics and rheumatology.

Anna, congratulations and thank you for your many contributions to the university and to your field.

Next is Dr. Stephen Wright, the George B. Dantzig Professor of Computer Sciences in the College of Letters and Science.  Steve is traveling and couldn’t be with us tonight.

He was nominated by his department chair, Professor Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau.

• Steve is a world-renowned researcher in the field of optimization.  Over more than three decades, he has conducted basic research as well as applications-oriented work that has had an impact in such diverse areas as machine learning, computational statistics, meteorology, and cancer-treatment planning.
• He has had a profound impact on teaching in optimization. He is a sought-after teacher and mentor with a knack for communicating complex information, and he has authored textbooks that are used on campuses all over the country.
• He directs the Institute for Foundations of Data Science at UW, and leads a federally funded interdisciplinary team that’s building on the university’s long history of important contributions to both fundamental and applied data science.

We are grateful for his contributions to the university and to his field.

And finally, Dr. Timothy Smeeding, Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics.

Tim was nominated by Susan Webb Yackee, Director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs; and Katherine Magnuson, Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty.

• Tim is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking contributions to understanding and addressing the intertwined problems of poverty and inequality.
• He has pioneered techniques for measuring poverty, and income and wealth inequality, that are used by governments and organizations around the world to inform policy and programs.
• He is also passionate about education. Within the La Follette School, he teaches students at all levels in policy analysis and comparative social policy.  And he designed and teaches the first introductory undergraduate course for the La Follette School’s new certificate in public policy.
• His many service activities include directing UW’s Institute for Research on Poverty, creating the annual Wisconsin Poverty Report, and heading the University Lectures committee.

Tim, thank you for your exceptional contributions to your field and to the university.  Congratulations!

This opportunity to recognize the accomplishments of our world-class faculty is one of the best parts of my job.  I hope you enjoy the evening and sample all of the wonderful foods — our caterer tonight is Fairchild restaurant, which focuses on locally sourced ingredients, simply prepared.  Their executive chef, Itaru Nagano, was just named Madison’s 2022 Chef of the Year.

And now, please join me in extending one more heartfelt thank you and congratulations to this year’s Hilldale Award winners.

Union South – Varsity Hall

Tue March 8, 2022

4:00 p.m.

Good afternoon.  Thank you, Rob, for that kind introduction, and for your commitment to keeping the Administrative Improvement Award Program going strong in its 10^th year.

I want to congratulate our winners and thank all of you — whether you’re in person or joining online — for being here to support and celebrate your friends and colleagues.

I also want to thank:

• Rob Cramer and his team, as well as the Office of Strategic Consulting, for putting this program together
• The Award Review Committee and Board for their hard work
• And all of the nominees and their nominators.

It’s wonderful to have this opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of our 35 honorees who developed the five projects we recognize tonight:

• The Faculty Volunteer Recruitment Project in the Department of Surgery that’s increasing faculty engagement with medical students
• The Graduate School Fellowship Project that’s making it easier for graduate students to find, and apply for, external fellowships
• The project to streamline the emergency financial aid process, to ensure that requests are handled as quickly as possible
• The project to modernize the Undergraduate Academic Standing Process in the Registrar’s Office
• And the project at the Mead Witter School of Music to provide 130 livestreamed performances.

Let’s give them all a round of applause!

These five projects rose to the top in a very competitive field, as Rob indicated.  The number of nominations says a lot about the commitment of thousands of employees across this campus to finding better, more efficient, more effective ways to do their work.

The projects range in size and scope, but they have five things in common:

• First, they all involve individuals reaching beyond their job descriptions to look at a system or a process and ask: How can we do this better?
• Second, all of them not only made an immediate difference, but also will have long-term impacts.
• Third, all involved collaboration — either among colleagues within a single department, or between units across campus. I know this was particularly challenging in a pandemic.
• Fourth, this year’s projects all directly benefit our students. And students helped design some of them.  Which is good reminder of the ways in which administrative improvements can help us fulfill our mission as a public university.
• And fifth, all of these projects save time and money while also improving how we operate.

I want to thank our 2022 Administrative Improvement Award winners for sharing their talent and creativity … for bringing a spirit of entrepreneurship to their work … and for inspiring us all to find ways to do things a little better tomorrow than we’ve done them today.

Congratulations on a job well done!

DeLuca Forum, Discovery Building

Wed., March 23, 2022

5:45 p.m.

Good evening.  Thank you, Dan, for that kind introduction and for your dedicated leadership that has allowed us to grow entrepreneurship education here at UW–Madison from a ‘nice thing to offer’ into an essential part of what we do.

I want to begin with a warm congratulations to our guests of honor — Lynn Allen-Hoffmann, Jim Bakke, Valarie King-Bailey, and Scott Resnick — thank you for being here with us, and for all that you have done, and continue to do, to expand and enrich what we’re able to offer our students.

And thanks to everyone else for being here.  Over the past two years we’ve moved many events online, but there are a few that are so full of energy and excitement that you can’t contain them within a laptop.  This is one of those.  We’ve waited until we could hold this event in person.

Acknowledgments

I want to say a few special thanks:

First, to the UW–Madison Innovate Network, which is 19 different campus units and university affiliates, coordinated by our Discovery to Product (D2P) program, who work together to support UW innovation and entrepreneurship.  Would the members please stand or give a wave?  Thank you!

Next, to a few state and local leaders who have been key partners — if they would stand as they’re able and stay standing.  Please hold your applause:

• Sam Rikkers, Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer, Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation
• Mary Kolar, Secretary, Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs
• Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway
• And Fitchburg Mayor Aaron Richardson

If there are other state and local elected officials I’ve left out, please stand. Thank you all for being here.

We also have a number of university leaders here tonight. Will the members of my leadership team, the vice chancellors, deans, and directors and our affiliates please stand and be recognized?

Thank you for being here.

I’m told we have a few past winners of the EAA joining us tonight.  Would they please stand or give us a wave?  Thank you for being here!

And finally, I want to thank all of the mentors who encourage and support our students, along with the industry partners who help us expand our research and create new opportunities for our students.

• In particular, American Family Insurance has been deeply involved in a number of our most successful programs. Thank you.

One of the things that makes this event special is that it brings our students together with successful alumni and entrepreneurs.

Some of the students here are earning degrees and certificates in entrepreneurship … some are active in a number of out-of-classroom programs we run to cultivate entrepreneurship … and some are so interested in becoming entrepreneurs that they’ve chosen to live in a special StartUp Learning Community in Sellery Hall.

Students — where are you?  Thank you for being here.

Entrepreneurial Achievement Award

The Entrepreneurial Achievement Award gives us a chance to tell some fascinating stories about some truly remarkable people.

No two stories are alike, but there are three common threads.  Tonight’s honorees have all:

• Built successful companies that create jobs and contribute to economic growth;
• Stayed connected to UW — as advisors, contest judges, guest lecturers, and generous supporters;
• And dedicated themselves to using their education and talents to making people’s lives better.

Dan will introduce our four award-winners in a moment, but I want to talk just briefly about a few of the ways in which we’re encouraging entrepreneurship on campus and around the state.

Entrepreneurship at UW–Madison

This campus has long been a place that cultivates creativity and encourages innovation — but designing educational programs that not only reflect that culture but also nourish it (particularly in the STEM fields) can be very challenging.

Our entrepreneurship programs are a model for how to do this well, and we’re seeing a surge of interest in these programs among undergraduates as well as graduate students:

• The Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship has seen a nearly 500% increase in students enrolled in entrepreneurship classes since 2010. We have nearly 1,000 students enrolled in these classes this year.
• Our Undergraduate Certificate in Entrepreneurship, which is for students outside the Wisconsin School of Business, is now the most popular undergraduate certificate on campus.
• We are also working outside the classroom, to give students a chance to practice what they are learning and to share their knowledge with people from the community who are ready to become entrepreneurs.

At the same time, we’ve built an entrepreneurial ecosystem that’s taken what used to be a passive process that relied on faculty, staff, and students to figure out what services were available when they thought their work was ready for commercialization, and turned it into a more proactive process by reaching out across the campus to identify innovations that might be ready for further development.  And then helping with expert advice, mentorship, and financial support.

That’s the work of D2P, under Andy Richards’ leadership, in partnership with WARF, under Erik Iverson’s leadership.  I’m very proud of how this work has expanded during my time as Chancellor.

Conclusion

When the pandemic (and accompanying global recession) hit almost exactly two years ago, no one was sure what the impact would be.

There were those who predicted a deeply negative effect, in particular, on new business start-ups.  And there were many start-ups that didn’t make it, and many new graduates who had to put their dreams on hold.

But there was also good news:

• The Wisconsin Technology Council reported last month that Wisconsin early-stage companies set a new record in 2021 by raising more than $800M from angel investors and venture capitalists. That continues a six-year upward trend.

It’s no surprise that several UW spinoffs led the way — and there are many more to come, developed by faculty, staff, students, and alumni whose determination to solve pressing problems was only strengthened over these past two years.

• For example, a team from the School of Medicine and Public Health — with help from D2P’s Innovation to Market Program — is using technology invented here at UW in a start-up called AyrFlo, which is a respiratory monitor that detects breathing problems immediately when a patient is under sedation, to help save lives.

Like so many Wisconsin start-ups, AyrFlo was shaped by hundreds of hours of expert consulting and mentorship from a long list of Innovate Network organizations, and they earned a spot in a highly competitive National Science Foundation entrepreneurship training program.

We take our role in fostering entrepreneurship very seriously, but we can’t do it without committed, engaged entrepreneurs.

The successes of tonight’s awardees speak to the importance of entrepreneurship in our economy, and the ways in which a UW education can build the skills to create and nourish new business ventures.

I want to thank everyone present, but particularly our award winners, for the support and encouragement you have given to creating a culture of support for innovation and entrepreneurship on this campus and across the community.

Congratulations to tonight’s honorees, thank you, and On, Wisconsin!

Omni Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Spa, Fiesta Ballroom – Salon 6
Thurs., March 10, 2022

4:35 p.m.

Thank you Mike for your kind words — and thanks to all of you for being here.

It’s hard to believe it’s been four years since I was last with you here.  It’s always wonderful to be in the Coachella Valley, and it’s particularly wonderful right now.  I know many of you will remember that special mix of snow, ice, and mud that is Wisconsin in March … but the days are getting longer and (in a sure sign of spring) the students are running around in shorts.

I’ve enjoyed talking with many of you tonight, and I want to thank Mike and Alisa and their team for bringing us together, and Dean Golden and Dr. Kaplan for being here to update us on some of the really innovative programs they’re building.

Before they do that, I want to share a brief update from campus.

Good News from Campus

• First — I am happy to tell you that UW–Madison remains a ‘hot’ school. The deadline to apply for a spot in the new freshman class was last month, and we received a record 60,000 applications for about 8,400 spots.
  • There are lots of reasons for this – as you all know, the Wisconsin Experience is unlike anything anywhere, and we’ve improved in some significant ways:
    • Our graduation rate is at a record high (we are now one of the top 10 public universities in the country in graduation rates)
    • And time-to-degree is at a record low, which means more students than ever are graduating with less college debt.
• We’re also continuing to expand our research – one benefit of the pandemic was the faculty had more time to develop new grant proposals. As a result, our grant awards went up 15% last year to $1.5 billion.
• And ten weeks ago at the end of 2021 we ended the most successful fundraising campaign in our history – All Ways Forward raised more than $4 billion, which is a game-changer for the university. Among other things, the campaign is helping us to recruit world-class faculty and to compete on an entirely new level for outstanding students.
  • That’s especially important in recruiting students of color. These students are often juggling multiple scholarship offers and (as a Midwestern, mostly white school) it’s been historically difficult for us to compete.
  • We’re already seeing the results. Our current freshman class is the most diverse in our history, and we’re still going through the new applications but we anticipate that the incoming class will also be more diverse.

 Raimey-Noland Campaign

But we can’t just bring people in – we have to make UW–Madison a place where all students feel they belong and can be successful.

That’s one of the goals of the Raimey-Noland Campaign, which is named in honor of Mabel Raimey and William Noland, the first-known Black students to graduate from UW–Madison.

The campaign is designed to leverage the All Ways Forward investments with a special focus on building a more inclusive campus community … supporting research related to social and racial justice … and helping to ensure that students who come to us from high schools that might not have prepared them as well in math and science can be successful in the STEM majors if that’s what they want to pursue.

Let me give you an example.

We have a senior named Ashley Yang who’s a first-generation Hmong-American. Becoming a Badger was a dream come true for her.  She’s a biology major working on a certificate in Asian-American studies, and was doing very well until the pandemic hit and she found herself failing Organic Chemistry (those of you who took O-chem in person can probably imagine how difficult it is online).

She got connected with our Chemistry Learning Center, where she found the support she needed.  She passed the class and is now getting ready to graduate and exploring her next steps – which may include medical school.

When we launched Raimey-Noland a little over a year ago, we hoped to raise $10M.  We are now at more than $70M.

All of this speaks to how much our alumni care about this great university. That’s something to celebrate in any year – but in a global pandemic, your support has been more vital than ever.  Thank you!

Building Boom

We’re also in the middle of a building boom (consider yourself warned if you plan to visit over the summer).  We have a number of new or newly renovated spaces, and I am particularly excited about several that are upcoming:

• We’re hoping to start construction on a long-overdue Computer, Data & Information Sciences building in the next couple of years. Computer Science is now the #1 major on campus and we’re finally going to have a building worthy of a top-ranked program.  This building is entirely funded by alumni donations…and we have a matching program available for those of you who might want to participate.
• The state approved funding for a new academic building for the College of Letters and Science –to be known as Levy Hall – that will allow us to move a number of departments out of the Humanities building. I know a few of you will remember Humanities very well.  The melting snow still runs down the outside of the building and creates those giant puddles that guarantee your feet will be wet for the rest of the day … and now the water also runs down the inside of the building.  I can tell you the faculty are really looking forward to hosting prospective graduate students without constantly telling them to watch their step!
• And finally – we’re replacing the Nat with the Bakke Recreation & Wellbeing Center. It’s been a lot of fun watching the new building take shape – it’s going to have an ice rink, demonstration kitchens for cooking classes, and a lot more, and I know that many of our students and employees on that side of campus are really excited to have a modern wellness facility nearby.

Our fundraising campaign may be over, but our fundraising is not.  We still need to raise millions of dollars for each of these projects and I hope that many of you will consider taking part.  

Wisconsin Medicine

I hope you will also take part in the Wisconsin Medicine campaign that Bob and Alan will talk about.

We waited until All Ways Forward was wrapped up to launch this one because it’s very specifically targeted to bring us into a whole new era of medicine that includes expanded health research … translating discoveries into our clinical work … and educating more students in the health professions.

If we needed a reminder of the importance of top-quality healthcare, we’ve gotten one in these last two years.  UW Health and SMPH have been national leaders in this very challenging moment because of their commitment to examining everything they do and asking, “How can we do this better?”

Conclusion

I want to close with a few words about my own plans.  As you know, I am leaving this job at the end of May to become the President of Northwestern University.

I will have completed 9 years at UW when I leave and I love many things about this campus.  I will miss game days at Camp Randall and evenings on the Terrace.  But it’s time to let someone else step into leadership.  I will particularly miss all the friends that Hanns and I have made over these years, which includes many of you.  Thank you for your friendship and support.

UW–Madison is a special university, as you all know.  And, with your help, it will continue to move forward.  On Wisconsin!

Union South, Marquee Theater

Tues., March 8, 2022

11:15 a.m.

Chancellor Blank’s slides

Slide 1:  Showcase 2022

Good morning and thank you Jenny for that kind introduction.  It’s wonderful to see you all here.  I want to begin with a special thanks to:

• The Office of Strategic Consulting for organizing this wonderful event
• The presenters who have taken the time to share their knowledge and expertise in the breakout sessions
• The participants who have exhibited their outstanding work in the poster sessions
• And all of you attending today, either in person or virtually – thank you.

I am told we had more than 60 projects and initiatives showcased in the exhibit hall this morning.  They are wonderful examples of the commitment of our faculty, staff, and students to looking at everything we do and asking:  How can we do this better?

We’ll recognize five projects later today with Administrative Improvement Awards.  I’m looking forward to returning for those, and I hope to see many of you there.

Slide 2:  Good news from the last decade

One of my goals when I arrived here at UW nearly nine years ago was to leave this university stronger than when I came – and I believe that, together, we have achieved that.

So I want to take a step back and talk about some long-term trends – both some of the things we’ve accomplished and some of the challenges we’re facing that I hope you will all have in mind as you welcome a new Chancellor.

And I also want to put your work into a broader historical context to illustrate how UW–Madison became a laboratory for administrative innovation.

Let me start with the good news.  Working together, we’ve had a number of significant accomplishments.  It is striking how many of these can be traced directly to administrative improvements.

Slide 3:  What we’ve accomplished – better educational outcomes

First, our educational outcomes are improving.

• We have record-high graduation rates (we are among the top 10 public universities in graduation rates)
• Record-low time-to-degree, which is driving student debt down.
• More than half of our undergraduates now graduate without taking out student loans. Nationally, only about one-third do.

These advances are all traceable to administrative improvements – from expanded advising and mental health services … to our initiative to help faculty re-design curriculum to help students learn better … to growing the summer semester to help students graduate on time.

Great teaching, a strong campus culture and a constantly evolving modern curriculum is what attracts great students – and I am happy to tell you we have again set a new record for applicants to our freshman class.

Slide 4:  What we’ve accomplished – increased applications, higher quality, more diversity

We’ve had record-setting freshman applications again this year — 60,000 for about 8,500 spots.

We’ve also had a steady increase in the number of National Merit Finalists in the freshman class.

And our current freshman class is the most diverse in our history.  15% of the students are from groups that have been historically underrepresented on this campus.

All of these are a result of improvements in admissions and recruitment as well as our efforts to make UW more inclusive and welcoming.

I know a number of you have worked on initiatives related to these goals and I want to thank you.

Slide 5:  What we’ve accomplished:  A more sustainable campus

We’ve also made significant progress toward making our campus greener and more sustainable.

• For example, we’ve had a 45% reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions since 2007, and a 25% reduction in our water use since 2013.
• And last summer, we made the largest investment in our history in green energy with the opening of the O’Brien Solar Fields.

These improvements and many more are the result of our efforts to transform sustainability work on this campus from a series of individual projects to a coordinated, cross-campus effort through our Office of Sustainability.

Slide 6:  What we’ve accomplished:  major administrative improvements

And of course we’ve undertaken much broader initiatives that many of you are involved in, to enable us to make long-overdue improvements to our operations.  These include:

• The Title and Total Compensation project, which has given us, for the first time, uniform titles for staff and a compensation structure that’s benchmarked to the marketplace. We’ve struggled with this for many years. This is key to making sure that we’re able to attract and retain good people.
• Our cybersecurity program. Like every major research university, we are a target for cyberattacks that could seriously disrupt our operations.  I am happy to tell you we have significantly improved our online security, but this requires constant vigilance.
• Better cybersecurity is part of the Administrative Transformation Program, which is modernizing how we do business with better technology and with a deeper understanding of how our different units do their work and where the barriers are.

The work all of you are doing on these and many more initiatives is built on a tradition of exploration and experimentation to find better ways of doing things.

And as is true today, many of the people who managed change under really challenging circumstances over the past century did their work with little fanfare.

But it’s worth knowing something about the legacy you carry forward.  So I want to share with you three stories of people whose administrative innovations have shaped this campus.

Slide 7: Mark Ingraham

The first is Prof. Mark Ingraham, for whom Ingraham Hall is named.  Prof. Ingraham came to UW as a math professor in 1927 and immediately went to work setting up a Campus Computing Center — the first of its kind in the country.

It was one room with a slide rule, an adding machine, and a part-time student worker.  But it represented a radical change on this campus in an era when departments that wanted to install a telephone had to go to the Regents for approval.

They did just nine projects for faculty in that first year, but demand grew quickly and Prof. Ingraham and his team traveled the country seeking out new technologies to bring to UW.

Their work had a number of long-term impacts.  For example:

• It established UW as the place to be for computer science education. We opened one of the first Computer Science PhD programs in the country, which brought in faculty, staff, and students committed to doing leading-edge work.
• As you may know, Computer Science is now the #1 major on this campus, and we have a new School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences that is working on the next generation of advances in artificial intelligence among other things.
• And that first Campus Computing Center was the forerunner of DoIT, which has been critically important to our operations during the pandemic and to nearly every major administrative improvement project we’ve undertaken in recent years.

But Mark Ingraham’s impact was much broader than technology.   He ultimately became dean of the College of Letters and Science, and he was a leader on the Campus Planning Commission, which gave UW — for the first time — a way to assess proposed facilities in the context of enrollment trends, faculty research interests, and student needs.

Before then, we built buildings based on what the governor and legislature were interested in funding — which may be why the university was completely unprepared when enrollment doubled following WWII, and we had to buy surplus Quonset huts from the military to house all of the students.

I am happy to say that we’re no longer housing students in Quonset huts, but our lack of control over facilities projects remains a serious problem that I’ll say more about in a couple of minutes.

Slide 8:  Abby Mayhew

First let me introduce another innovator you might not know about.  Abby Mayhew came from Minneapolis in 1895 and became UW’s first full-time physical education teacher for women.

She arrived here believing that UW already had a women’s athletic program — probably because we had announced that we had a women’s athletic program.

In fact, the only women’s team was the crew team.  And they hadn’t gotten past the idea stage for two reasons:

First, the women didn’t know how to swim, and had no pool to learn in.

And second, they had no boats.

Ms. Mayhew changed that by creating the Women’s Athletic Association, which raised money for facilities and equipment, and generated a buzz that made UW a magnet for talented students and dedicated staff who would build the program.

In an interview with the Daily Cardinal, she described herself as working for “A better era for women, when health and fun shall walk hand in hand.”

This effort took years.  She succeeded by inspiring students, staff, faculty, and alumni with her vision for what UW could be.  But even she might not have been able to imagine what our women Badgers have accomplished this year!

Slide 9:  Charles Holley

The third and final person I want to introduce is Charles Holley.  Mr. Holley was an undergraduate and Co-President of the Black Student Union in the late 1980s when there were a number of very troubling racist incidents here at UW.

He chaired a Steering Committee on Minority Affairs comprised of students, faculty, and administrators charged with developing recommendations to improve the campus climate.

The Holley Report, as it became known, was a forerunner of the Madison Plan, which was created in 1988 as UW’s first formalized, institutionalized diversity plan and one of the first anywhere in higher education.

The Madison Plan was flawed in a number of ways, but it was also groundbreaking.  Earlier plans here at UW and at many other universities were narrowly focused on numbers, but the Plan recognized that, to become more diverse, we would have to change our culture.

Among its most important legacies are the ethnic studies requirement … the Multicultural Student Center … and an approach to diversity and inclusion that recognizes the importance of involving the entire campus in these efforts.

These ideas grew from the Holley Report.  Charles Holley went on to earn a degree at UW Law School and practice law in Chicago but has remained connected to this campus — he’s shown here (second from left) at the Multicultural Student Center’s 10-year anniversary.

Slide 10: Robben Fleming/Edwin Young

As you know, not all ideas are destined for success.  Let me share one proposal from 50 years ago that never got off the ground.

In the mid 1960s, this campus had the same problem we have today:  Record enrollment.  Back then it was 29,000 students — today it’s 48,000.

We’ve accommodated this growth by expanding the faculty and instructional staff along with student services, but Chancellor Robben Fleming had other ideas.

He proposed building an entirely new campus — UW–Madison West — out on Mineral Point Road.  It would be focused on the arts and sciences, but not part of the College of Letters and Science.  And the students enrolled there would be discouraged from coming to the main campus unless they were athletes, because that would defeat the point of reducing congestion.

Those involved in promoting the idea envisioned that faculty might really enjoy rotating between the two campuses — further evidence that this plan was probably doomed.

There is little information about how, exactly, UW–Madison West met its end.  But we have a fairly good idea.

Chancellor Fleming assigned the dean of the College of Letters and Science — Edwin Young — to lead a major study of the plan, to which Dean Young responded by quickly accepting a position at the University of Maine.  The notation in the file reads simply:

“He was unable to complete his report as anticipated.”

Dean Young’s instinct to distance himself from this project served him well. He returned here as Chancellor and ultimately became President of the UW System.

Looking forward

As we look back at some of the people and programs that have shaped this university, we also need to look ahead at the key challenges UW–Madison is facing.

I met with the Regents last month and talked about a number of problems that need to be addressed — let me close by sharing four of these with you.

Slide 11:  Challenge #1:  Lagging growth in revenues

UW–Madison remains at serious risk of losing its competitive position.  Nine years ago we were in crisis — showing declining revenues when all of our peers were growing.

We turned that around and have done some significant catch-up thanks to an array of initiatives including, among other things, our expanded summer program, expanding undergraduate enrollment and a very successful fundraising campaign that raised more than $4B

But as you can see, with all of the revenue growth and innovations that have been implemented during my time here, we are still below our peers and haven’t caught up.

Do not assume UW–Madison is in great financial shape.  The right comparison is not with other UW System schools, but with our peer schools.  In that comparison, we are still behind where we need to be, and have clearly lost competitive ground.

That’s why we have to remain entrepreneurial…we have to keep looking for new opportunities to generate investment revenue.  We have to keep insisting that higher education in Wisconsin needs to receive increased state dollars when the state budgets are growing.   And we have to make sure we get our fair share of those state dollars.

Slide 12:  Challenge #2:  limited investments in facilities

We are uniquely constrained in our ability to manage our capital assets — our buildings.  I showed you that we’ve fallen behind our peers in revenues.  We’ve fallen even further behind in capital spending.

This graph shows a five-year rolling average of investment in facilities.  The black line represents the total amount of need — whether for new projects or maintenance — as calculated based on commonly used metrics.

Among our Big 10 peers, we’re at the bottom, spending far less than we should to maintain our campus.  The A-through-G bars represent a group of other universities including some privates: Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Washington.  They’re shown this way to keep them anonymous.

As you can see, the Big 10 is falling behind other schools, and we’re falling behind the Big 10.  We are spending less than one-quarter what we should be spending on our facilities.  This is no way to maintain the kind of campus students and faculty expect at a first-rate university.

What are the primary constraints?

Slide 13:  Challenge #2a:  no borrowing authority

First:  we have no borrowing authority.  Every time we do major building renovations or construction that is not entirely funded by gifts and grants, we need approval of the Governor, the Assembly, the Senate, the UW System and the State Building Commission.

No other state has a flagship (or a System) without borrowing authority, and it

puts the burden on us to find gift/grant funding in order to move projects forward in anything approaching a timely manner.  We’ve been able to do that for some critical needs, but we’re not going to get private gifts to fix the HVAC or otherwise renovate or replace our aging buildings.  We need bonding authority along with state and System support.

Slide 14:  Challenge #2b:  Lack of control over state-managed capital projects

The second constraint is our complete lack of control over the entire process of building buildings.

The state signs the contracts, and we have no input.  The result has been contracts with very limited damages clauses and very limited penalties for delays.

Once the contract is signed, we have no authority over the project.  The result has been ongoing cost overruns and delayed projects — you’ve all seen what happened with the Chemistry building (which I’m happy to say is now open).

No other flagship has zero control over what’s in the contract, or oversight over projects.

I have worked on trying to make changes to this process for my entire nine years, without success.  But I think more people understand the problem and are sympathetic to our needs.  The new Chancellor needs to make this a high priority issue with the Board of Regents, the Governor, and the State Legislature.

Slide 15:  Challenge #3:  Nine years of frozen in-state tuition

We’ve fallen out of step with the marketplace thanks to a nine-year tuition freeze along with declines in the state subsidy for students.

In my time here, we’ve put substantial resources into expanding affordability for lower-income Wisconsin students so that higher tuition will not negatively impact this group.  We can remain affordable without charging bargain-basement prices.

As long as some of our closest peer schools receive 50% more in tuition for every in-state student they admit, UW–Madison will struggle to compete with them and maintain the same level of quality.

The next chancellor will need to work with the Board of Regents and with political leadership to allow us to institute in-state tuition policies more in line with our peers in the upper Midwest.

Slide 16:  Challenge #4:  The divided and divisive political environment

The other major challenge is the growing politicization of higher education, and the growing willingness of some politicians to attack universities (particularly the flagship).

I should be clear that I see this on both sides of the aisle, although the criticisms are often quite different, and it’s not unique to Wisconsin; it is happening across the country.

The UW Foundation and Alumni Association conducted a poll of 930 Wisconsin residents in December.  Some of the questions were designed to gauge public support for the university.  Here’s what it showed:

• About 70% of Democrats but just 45% of Republicans approve of the job we’re doing at UW–Madison.
• And there was a similar divide on the question of whether a degree from this university is valuable and worth the cost: 65% of Democrats said yes, but only 41% of Republicans agreed with that statement.

I mention this not to criticize Republicans; indeed, several bills of great importance to the university have been authored by Republican legislators and are currently moving through the legislative process.

But for public institutions that depend on the trust and confidence of the people, this polarization is dangerous.  It can threaten the federal funding we rely on to do basic scientific research, and it empowers politicians seeking to score points with voters to use our universities — and especially flagship campuses — as political chips in the partisan wars.

No public institution can survive in the long run without public support, and I have asked the Regents to actively engage with political leadership when they criticize the university.  Sometimes the criticism is warranted, and we need to respond.  But sometimes it’s just political posturing.  We need credible and consistent voices of support for the value of a world-class research university to this state.   

Conclusion

Slide 17:  Thank you

I want to close as I began, by thanking you for your dedication and hard work to make a great public university even better.

The array of initiatives you have helped to lead is extraordinary and will help us continue to compete at the highest levels for the best and brightest students, faculty, and staff.

Even with masks, it’s great to see all of you. Thank you and I’ll be happy to take questions.

Major Accomplishments and Four Key Challenges

Spring Academic Leadership Breakfast

Union South, Varsity Hall

Wed Feb. 16, 2022

8:00 a.m

Chancellor Blank’s slides

Slide 1:  Title slide

Welcome.  It’s good to see you all.

We are now a few weeks into the new semester and I want to thank you for all you’ve done to welcome the students back and keep your departments and units running well as we enter this fifth semester of pandemic operations.

We’re seeing COVID-19 cases declining in the community as well as on campus.  PHMDC announced on Monday that the masking order in place in Dane County will expire on March 1; we will have an announcement before the end of February on our masking order.

We aren’t back to normal just yet, and I continue to be grateful for the work all of you (and all of our faculty and staff) have done to make it possible for us to hold in-person classes … conduct research … and do outreach work in the community.

Slide 2:  Welcoming new leaders

Following tradition, I want to welcome a couple of new leaders who have joined us since we last met in August:

Cindy Torstveit, Associate Vice Chancellor for Facilities Planning and Management

• Appointed to this role in December
• Previously served as Director of Capital Planning and interim director of the Physical Plant
• Also served for 13 years as Administrator of the WI Division of Facilities Management within DOA.

Patrick Sheehan, Interim Associate Vice Chancellor for Human Resources

• Came to UW more than a decade ago from Oregon, where he completed law school – drawn here by a job posting to work in human resources for University Staff.
• More recently he has helped to lead the Administrative Transformation Project.
• Replaces Mark Walters who retired at the end of fall semester

Slide 3:  Good News from the Last Decade

As I noted, COVID cases on campus and in the community are declining, and we are transitioning into a new phase where we figure out how to perform our essential missions utilizing a combination of risk-reduction strategies like masking and testing, along with support and flexibility for our faculty and staff.

I know that there will be questions and comments about COVID-related issues, but I’d like to ask you to hold them until the next session when the Provost is going to talk about our COVID strategies.  In this talk, I want to take a step back and talk about some long term trends – both some of the things that we’ve accomplished over the last decade, as well as some challenges this university is facing that I hope you will all have in mind as you work with whoever the next Chancellor will be.

Let me start with the good news.  Working together, we’ve had a number of significant accomplishments.

Slide 4:  What we’ve accomplished – higher quality

The quality of our students has risen:

• Average test scores are up, although since we’ve gone test optional in the last two years, this measure is no longer as useful.
• So instead, let’s look at the number of National Merit finalists enrolled at UW-Madison. We’ve more than doubled that number in our freshman class since 2013.
  • Total – 2013:   2021:  132
  • WI resident – 2013: 56. 2021: 87

We’re serving students better with expanded advising, expanded mental health services (as Lori Reesor will discuss), news health/wellness facilities, and new majors that reflect students’ (and employers’) needs and interests.  For example, in recent years we’ve started:

• Undergraduate degrees in Data Science and Global Health
• Master’s degrees in Business Analytics and Financial Economics (L&S)

Great teaching, a strong campus culture and a constantly evolving modern curriculum is what attracts great students – and I am happy to tell you we have again set a new record for applicants to our freshman class.

Slide 5:  What we’ve accomplished – more applications

Despite declines in the number of Wisconsin high school graduates, our applications among Wisconsin students have NOT declined.  And we’ve seen huge increases in out-of-state applicants.

• My first fall here, we were very happy to receive 30,000 freshman applications; last week we got word that this year, we’ve received more than 60,000. We’ve had a 12% increase over last year alone.

These numbers are primarily driven by big increases in out-of-state applicants, who are important to our future because they add diversity to this campus and pay tuition at a rate that supports our programs and subsidizes our in-state students.

The applicant numbers we’re seeing – and the strength of those applicants – says a lot about the reputation we’ve built as a place for top-quality education.  Thanks to Derek Kindle and his team who are doing an extraordinary job (and currently reading 60,000 applications…)

Slide 6:  What we’ve accomplished – greater diversity

As we’ve grown in size and strength, we’ve also become more diverse.

• Our current freshman class includes more students of color overall, and more students of color from historically underrepresented groups than any freshman class in our history.
  • 25% of our freshman are students of color, and 15% of our freshmen are students of color from historically under-represented groups – this is up substantially from just a few years ago.
• We’ve also maintained a strong number of first-gen students
• We’ve expanded faculty hiring
  • 31 new faculty of color have joined us over the last year
  • 243 have joined us over the last five years
    • This happened in part because of a focused central effort through our TOP Program to provide funding for departments to recruit new faculty from groups not well-represented within their discipline.
• And I’m happy to say that most schools and colleges have diversity plans, as do a growing number of departments. This issue has to be top of mind across the university – thank you to those among you who are playing an active role in this important work.
• And we’re successfully growing the Raimey-Noland Campaign, designed to raise funding for scholarships, research, and programming related to diversity.
  • When I told you about it one year ago, I said the goal was $10M and that we were delighted to have raised $12M. Today we have raised nearly $70M and we have 82 students with new scholarships that came through the Raimey-Noland Campaign.
• It’s important to recognize that bringing in more diverse students, faculty, and staff isn’t enough. The institution itself has to be a place where people who have been historically underrepresented on this campus can see themselves.  We’ve focused multiple efforts on this work – LaVar Charleston will talk about our strategies in just a few minutes, and you can read the latest updates in the Campus Climate Report that you’ve received today.

Slide 7:  What we’ve accomplished – greater access

Expanded access for all students, but especially WI students

• Quadrupled institutional scholarship dollars in the last 14 years
  • 2007 = $25M; 2021 = nearly $100M
    • These new dollars allowed us to implement Bucky’s Tuition Promise and Badger Promise.
    • This year we have 3,500 students enrolled in these two programs.
• Expanded professional masters’ programs, both in-person, hybrid, and online. Students in these programs now comprise about ¼ of our graduate school enrollment.  Thanks to Dean Jeff Russell and his team at Continuing Studies.
• Now launching undergrad online opportunities. We have five online undergraduate degree programs that we are working to market and grow.
• These serve a population of students we have not served in the past – returning adults who may already have some college credits and are now ready to finish their degree.

The competition for top students among U.S. universities is fierce, particularly in the Midwest and northeast where the number of high school students is declining.  Very few schools have been able to do what we’ve done, with substantial increases in applicants that we’ve been able to turn into classes with higher quality and greater diversity.

Your leadership has helped to make all of these things possible – thank you.

And you have also helped to grow our research enterprise.

Slide 8:  Keeping research strong/research expenditures graph

You can see the growth in our research since 2016.  Last year our faculty and staff brought in $1.5B in new awards and spent $1.4B.

We can trace some of the acceleration in the past two years to two things:

• First, the extraordinary array of projects we’ve developed related to COVID.
  • As of last week, we’d been awarded 92 major research grants totaling nearly $100M for COVID-related work, with many more still pending.
• Second is the increased number of proposals we’re submitting across all areas. The restrictions on travel and field work in this pandemic have allowed our faculty to focus more time and energy on grant applications.  Last fiscal year, we submitted over 100 more proposals than in the previous year.  Even better, we grew our total awards by $200M, an increase of over 15%.

This growth is particularly good news because it comes after a period when we saw our research expenditures shrinking.  When I arrived, research expenditures were declining.  We’ve worked hard to turn that around, and I want to thank Steve Ackerman for his leadership.

But this is an area of fierce competition and we can’t let up on our ongoing efforts to grow research dollars:  Though we’ve increased research expenditures by close to 18% over the past five years – which is a very strong growth rate –during that same period, research expenditures among the top five schools grew by 22%.

Slide 9:  Keeping research strong

If we’re going to continue to grow our research enterprise, we need to do several things – and Steve Ackerman will expand on these.

• First, we need to be strategic about targeting research areas that we know federal agencies are funding.
• Second, we need to build more industry research partnerships. UW-Madison has not always been the easiest place to work with as a research partner.  We’ve worked hard in recent years to change that, and at the heart of our work is the collaboration between our schools and colleges and the Office of Business Engagement, which we created five years ago.

Of course, none of these efforts will bear fruit without top-quality faculty and modern facilities.  We also need to expand the faculty and we’ve been doing that in a couple of key ways.

• The Cluster Hire Program we began in 2018 has allowed us to hire groups of 3-4 faculty in key areas of emerging research interest. I know that a number of you have worked hard to put together new clusters – thank you.
• And we’ve grown our faculty in general across many different academic areas as our student size has grown to 48,000 students. Our faculty size shrank in the late 1990s.  And though we are still about 100 faculty short of where we were 30 years ago (when there were 8,000 fewer students on this campus), I am happy to tell you that in the past few years, we’ve expanded our faculty by nearly 200 people.

I want to thank the provost, along with the deans and department chairs for all of your work to bring in some outstanding people.

Slide 10:  New facilities

We’re also building and renovating buildings all over campus to create facilities that are worthy of the nationally ranked departments that live there, and worthy of our standing as a premier research institution:

• We’re expanding the Veterinary School – we broke ground in June.
• We have a new Meat Sciences building that opened in November 2020.
• The Babcock Dairy Plant and Center for Dairy Research are nearing completion.
• We opened the new Hamel Music Center five months before the pandemic began, so it’s been wonderful to start to see it come to life over the past semester.
• And after many setbacks and delays, I am delighted to say that the new nine-story addition to the Chemistry Building is now open!
• I want to thank Chemistry Chair Clark Landis and Past Chair Bob McMahon; Rob Cramer and John Horn; building manager Jeff Nielsen; Dean Eric Wilcots, Provost Karl Scholz, and the many other people who spent countless hours to bring us to this day.

Slide 11:  Future facilities

And still to come:

• We kicked off a major fundraising campaign in September for a new Computer, Data, and Information Sciences building. There are no state dollars in this one, and we still have a bit more fundraising to do before we break ground hopefully early next year.
• A new academic building for the College of Letters and Science –to be known as Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall as a result of a gift from Jeff and Marvin Levy who asked that the building be named for their parents. This is a very long-awaited project – it will allow us to build a number of much-needed state-of-the-art classrooms and move a group of departments out of our crumbling Humanities building.
• A new recreation and wellness facility for the west side of campus, to be known as the Bakke Center. Besides replacing a facility that was more than 50 years old, the new space will give us (among other things) an ice rink and a pool, an indoor track, as well as services designed to promote student well-being such as cooking classes.
• And finally, we are working hard to get a much-needed new Engineering building. The College of Engineering is the second-largest school on campus, and they’re turning away too many highly qualified students for lack of space.  We’d hoped that the building would be included in the current state budget – it was not, so we’re pursuing a separate bill to get the state to fund half of the new facility with a promise that we will fundraise for the other half.

Slide 12:  Strategies for funding our public mission

People, programs, and facilities all require resources.  With frozen in-state tuition and declining state funds, we’ve needed to generate our own investment income.  In my time here, I’ve  worked with many of you on six core strategies.  These include:

• First, growing research and development dollars – I’ve already talked about this.
• Second, expanding the summer semester, which is helping to drive down time-to-degree (which in turn drives down student debt) as students take courses they need to graduate that they either can’t get into or don’t want to take during the regular school year (Intro to Organic Chemistry is our most popular summer course).
  • We’ve grown our summer program by more than 10% each year over the past five years. I want to thank Jeff Russell and all of his staff for their work on this.
• Third, expanding fundraising.  Deans and department chairs have been very involved with fundraising during the six-year All Ways Forward campaign.   We aimed to raise $3.2B in the campaign.  We closed the campaign at the end of December with $4.2B raised.  Let me be clear:  This doesn’t mean we have $4.2B to spend.
  • Much of it is allocated into endowment – that means it pays out at 4.5% far into perpetuity. This will generate millions of dollars far into the future for (among other things) faculty support and research.
  • A substantial share is still pledged, often as part of a will, and hasn’t yet been collected.
  • And some is directly and immediately expendable
• Fourth, we raised our out-of-state and professional tuition to market levels.
• Fifth, we grew our professional masters’ degrees
• And last, we’ve grown undergraduate enrollment, taking advantage of that deep growth in applications.

We also have a newly launched strategy:  Real estate development, in partnership with the University Research Park.  This is not only a revenue generator but also a way to guide development of parcels that we own that could be put to better use to advance our mission.  Last week the Board of Regents approved two key steps:

• First, the development of two parcels adjacent to University Research Park; and
• Second, the development of a strategic process for a West Campus Innovation District. Input from all of you and from people across the campus will be essential to this process and you will have lots of opportunities to learn more and offer your thoughts and ideas this year.

The goal of these efforts and all the others is to grow our investment dollars, and thereby strengthen and expand what we can do in education, research, and outreach.

Let me tell you about some areas where these new dollars have had a big impact:

Slide 13:  Impacts

I’ve told you about the growth in scholarships, including our very successful Bucky’s Tuition Promise program.

Here are about five other areas where we’ve been able to make major improvements.

• First, our investments in expanded advising and in educational programs like the summer semester have increased graduation rates and decreased time to degree.
  • Six-year graduation rate of 89% is the highest ever.
• The graduation gap for undergraduates between all students and historically underrepresented students has been cut nearly in half in the last decade (now a 7-point difference).
• And undergraduate time-to-degree of 3.9 years (40 days less than 4 calendar years) is the lowest ever.
• This is driving the second improvement – reduced student debt.
  • The share of undergraduates graduating from UW-Madison without student loans has grown by 10 points in the past eight years to 57%.
  • At the national level, only about one third of students graduate with no debt.
  • Student default rate on federal loans is less than 1% compared to 9% nationally and 3% at other WI schools.
• Third, we’ve been able to bring faculty salaries to a place where we’re again competitive for top people.
  • Nine years ago, our full professors were making nearly 13% less than professors at our designated peer institutions. We were 12th among our 12 official peer schools in faculty salaries. This was a huge threat to our ability to hire top faculty and a reason why we were constantly dealing with retention issues.
  • Today, our faculty salaries are #5 among our peer schools.
• But competitive salaries for faculty alone aren’t enough – we need to compete for top graduate students in order to attract top faculty.
  • Eight years ago, we began a focused effort to improve our graduate student stipends.
  • Minimum stipend for TA has grown by 43% in that time, going from near bottom of major research universities around the country to above median.
  • And our Graduate School has a program to grow external fellowship support that’s showing great results. Last year we were one of the top 15 institutions in the country – public or private – in the number of NSF Graduate Research Fellowships awarded (32).
• The fifth major impact of these new dollars is a series of major administrative improvements including:
  • The Title and Total Compensation project
  • The Administrative Transformation Program
  • And Cybersecurity, a critical area where we’ve made multiple long-overdue investments.

Rob Cramer will talk more about the Administrative Transformation Program.  Let me say a few words about one other area of improvement that I know many of you care deeply about – making our campus greener and more sustainable.

Over the past nine years, we’ve done critical work to become more energy efficient and decrease our use of resources – for example:

• Since 2013 we’ve reduced our water use by 25%;
• We’ve reclaimed the construction materials from buildings we demolish and we’re using them in our new construction;
• We’ve substantially reduced our total greenhouse gas emissions;
• And last summer, we made the largest investment in our history in green energy with the opening of the O’Brien Solar Fields.

The next big thing will be our first-ever Climate Action and Adaptation plan.

The foundation for all of these improvements (and many more) is the work we’ve done to transform sustainability work on this campus from a series of individual projects to a coordinated, cross-campus effort through our Office of Sustainability.

Slide 14:  Commencement photo

And on a lighter note – this remains one of my proudest accomplishments: Bringing commencement back to Camp Randall!

CHALLENGES

Slide 15:  Challenges

But many challenges remain.  When I met with the Regents last week, I raised several key challenges with them, and proposed ways they could help address them.  Let me talk about four of these.

Slide 16:  Challenge #1:  Lagging growth in revenues

• UW-Madison remains at serious risk of losing its competitive position. Nine years ago we were in crisis…showing declining revenues when all of our peers were growing.
• We turned that around and have done some significant catch-up but we are still below our peers. Maintaining the same rate of growth as our peers will be challenging, especially without any new investments from the state.  If we were to see future state budget cuts, we would be back in the world we were in when I arrived, dealing with falling revenues while our peers continue to grow.
• So let me be clear – with all of the revenue growth and innovations that have been implemented during my time here, we are still below our peers and haven’t caught up.
• Do not assume UW-Madison is in good financial shape. The right comparison is not with other UW-System schools, but with our peer schools.  In that comparison, we are still behind where we need to be, and have clearly lost competitive ground.
• That’s why we have to remain entrepreneurial…we have to keep looking for new opportunities to general investment revenue. We have to keep insisting that higher education in Wisconsin needs to receive increased state dollars when the state budgets are growing.   And we have to make sure we get our fair share of those state dollars.

Slide 17:  Challenge #2:  Limited Investments in Facilities

• We are uniquely constrained in our ability to manage our capital assets – our buildings. I showed you that we’ve fallen behind our peers in revenues.  We’ve fallen even further behind in capital spending.
• This graph shows a five-year rolling average of investment in facilities. The black line represents the total amount of need – whether for new projects or maintenance – as calculated based on commonly used metrics.
• Among our Big 10 peers, we’re at the bottom, spending far less than we should to maintain our campus. The A-through-G bars represent a group of other universities including some privates: Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Washington.  They’re shown this way to keep them anonymous.
• As you can see, the Big 10 is falling behind other schools, and we’re falling behind the Big 10. We are spending less than one-quarter what we should be spending on our facilities.  This is no way to maintain the kind of campus students and faculty expect at a first-rate university.

Most of you know that we have a long list of building projects we need to undertake…places where we need to tear down existing buildings, areas where we need new and more modern buildings, and places where we need to renovate the buildings we have now.

Our buildings continue to age.   In 2019, an outside firm estimated we had a deferred maintenance backlog of $1.5B – and it’s grown larger since then.  This is a huge threat to the long-term quality of UW-Madison.

What are the primary constraints?

Slide 18:  Challenge #2a:  No Borrowing Authority

First:  we have no borrowing authority.  Every time we do major building renovations or construction that is not entirely funded by gifts and grants, we need approval of the Governor, the Assembly, the Senate, the System and the State Building Commission.  This complete lack of control over our capital assets creates serious difficulties, particularly at a $3.6B organization whose reputation in part rests upon its scientific and educational facilities.

• No other state has a flagship (or a System) without borrowing authority.
• This puts the burden on us to find gift/grant funding in order to move projects forward in anything approaching a timely manner – and we’ve been able to do that for some critical needs.
• But there are many areas where we do not have major donors available. And we are not going to get private gifts to fix the HVAC or otherwise renovate or replace our aging buildings.  We need bonding authority along with state and System support.

Slide 19:  Challenge #2b:  Lack of control over state-managed capital projects

Second constraint:  A complete lack of control over the entire process of building buildings.

• The state signs the contracts and we have no input into those contracts. The result has been contracts with very limited damages clauses and very limited penalties for delays.
• Once the contract is signed we have no authority over the project. The result has been ongoing cost overruns and delayed projects.  We are responsible for paying these cost overruns and we have to deal with the consequences of these delays.  But we have none of the authority that would allow us to reduce these problems.
• No other flagship has zero control over what’s in the contract, or oversight over projects.
• Example: Chemistry Building – central to our teaching/research missions.
  • Basic construction elements – the elevators and HVAC system – failed when the building was close to completion.
  • The result: 9,000 students and 450 course sections were moved to spaces not designed for teaching chemistry.
  • We’ve lost an estimated $3.2M in research, and this is not a final number.
  • The contract had limited damages clauses and limited compensation for delays. As a result, we are limited in our ability to hold anyone responsible for these problems.  We bear many of the costs.
• Our inability to control decisions over capital renovation, repair or construction has led to dollars wasted due to:
  • Delayed projects
  • Cost overruns
  • Construction problems from subcontractors and contractors who know they will bear limited responsibility for any problems.
• We are the ones who end up paying the bills and bearing the costs of delay. And we are the ones who have to work in these buildings.
• This cannot continue. We MUST have greater control over these projects.  That’s management 101:  Align incentives so the people who have to pay for and live in the building are responsible for getting things built and built well, on time, and within budget.

• I have worked on trying to make changes to this process for my entire nine years, without success. But I think more people understand the problem and are sympathetic to our needs.  The new Chancellor needs to make this a high priority issue with the Board of Regents, the Governor, and the State Legislature.

Slide 20:  Challenge #3:  Nine years of frozen in-state tuition

• We’ve fallen out of step with the marketplace. Our in-state tuition is much further below our peers than is in-state tuition at other UW system schools relative to their
• Furthermore, while this tuition freeze has been in place, state funding per student has continued to fall as well, so we have a double-whammy of a tuition freeze and declines in the state subsidy for students.
  • 10 years ago, we were receiving the equivalent of $14,000/student in state GPR dollars. (Note that money goes for many things, beyond our undergrad students – it supports a medical school, a veterinary school, and lots of agricultural facilities across the state.)  This year, we are at about $10,400/student.
• Our student body is different than at other UW system schools – they are often looking at a very different set of comparison schools (which are far more expensive than UW-Madison) when deciding where to go to college.
• Furthermore, UW-Madison has put substantial resources into expanding affordability for lower-income Wisconsin students so that higher tuition will not negatively impact this group.
• We’re providing a high-value degree and for many of our students we can remain affordable without charging bargain-basement prices.
• As long as some of our closest peer schools receive 50% more in tuition for every in-state student they admit, UW-Madison will struggle to compete with them and maintain the same level of quality. Over time, we simply will not be able to provide the same educational or research experience these schools provide.
• The next chancellor will need to work with the Board of Regents and with political leadership to allow us to institute in-state tuition policies more in line with our peers in the upper Midwest, while holding us accountable for providing the access for lower and middle-income families in Wisconsin who need financial aid.

Slide 21:  Challenge #4:  The divided and divisive political environment

The other major challenge is the growing politicization of higher education, and the growing willingness of some politicians to attack universities (particularly the flagship).

I should be clear that I see this on both sides of the aisle, although the criticisms are often quite different, and it’s not unique to Wisconsin; it is happening across the country.

The UW Foundation and Alumni Association conducted a poll of 930 WI residents in December.  Some of the questions were designed to gauge public support for the university.  Here’s what it showed:

• About 70% of Democrats but just 45% of Republicans approve of the job we’re doing at UW-Madison.
• And there was a similar divide on the question of whether a degree from this university is valuable and worth the cost: 65% of Democrats said yes, but only 41% of Republicans agreed with that statement.

I mention this not to criticize Republicans; indeed, several bills of great importance to the university have been authored by Republican legislators and are currently moving through the legislative process.

But for public institutions that depend on the trust and confidence of the people, this polarization is dangerous.  It can threaten the federal funding we rely on to do basic scientific research, and it empowers politicians seeking to score points with voters to use our universities – and especially flagship campuses – as political chips in the partisan wars.

No public institution can survive in the long run without public support, and I have asked the Regents actively engage with political leadership when they criticize the university.  Sometimes the criticism is warranted, and we need to respond.  But sometimes it’s just political posturing.  We need credible and consistent voices of support for the value of a world-class research university to this state.

CONCLUSION

Slide 22:  (landing slide – campus photo)

For a number of years, we were essentially standing still, if not moving backwards, in large part because of reduced budgets.  We’ve turned that around, thanks to the very good work of the people in this room, and our faculty and staff and alumni and friends.

We’ve made important investments, but our peers are also investing.

If we’re going to maintain our reputation and our quality, we need to continue to invest and grow in the right ways.  To do that, we need resources combined with a smart strategy for the future – that will be the job of the new Chancellor.

We also need governance that recognizes that the state’s flagship campus is different and needs to be able to compete nationally and internationally in ways that other System schools do not.  And we need recognition from our political leadership of the value of this university to the state of Wisconsin.

It has been my honor and privilege to work with each of you.  I want to thank you for all of your work – particularly over these past very challenging two years.

Even with masks, it’s great to see all of you, and I’m looking forward to a good semester.

Thank you and I’ll be happy to take questions

Union South – Northwoods Room

Thurs. Feb. 10, 2022

8:45 a.m.

Good morning.  Thank you for inviting us today, and for organizing this three-part series to give us a chance to showcase some of the ways in which UW–Madison’s biomedical research is changing lives here in Wisconsin and beyond.

A couple of years ago, we held an alumni gathering in D.C. and as we shared a few examples of our research, one of our alums raised her hand and told the story of her heartbreaking decision to quit teaching after she developed a tremor in her hands that made it very difficult for her to write.  But then she learned that UW scientists were using Botox to treat tremors.  She came to us, and the treatments changed her life and made it possible for her to keep doing the job she loved.

This the type of human story behind the numbers we often share about research dollars … numbers of grants … and numbers of patents.

Of course, these metrics are important — they let us know if we’re moving in the right direction to continue to grow our work.

When I arrived here nine years ago, research expenditures were declining.  We’ve focused on turning that around, and I am happy to tell you that, in the last nine years, our research expenditures grew by about 17%.

During the pandemic, our research continued to grow.  Last year we spent $1.4B on research, while increasing our awards by $200M.

As you will hear me tell the full Board this afternoon, one of the reasons for this growth is a much more strategic approach to going after funding in key areas of interest.

Biomedical technology is one of our most important areas at UW-Madison.  We have a history that goes back more than a century to life-saving discoveries about vitamins A and B, and today we’re a biotech powerhouse.

Because of this, we’re a “hot” school for biomedical education.

• We just graduated the first 500 students from the Master’s in Applied Biotechnology degree we launched two years ago.
• And last year, we opened a new Bioinformatics Certificate Program that is already very popular.

Our strength in biotech is also driving Wisconsin’s reputation as a magnet for biotech companies.  There are now more than 1,700 biohealth companies across the state that employ nearly 50,000 people.

You are about to hear from two of the people who are helping to make Wisconsin a magnet for this work:

• Professor Michael Sussman who teaches Biochemistry and is part of a team developing a blood test for predicting colon cancer earlier and more effectively.
• And Sara Pirnstill from Stratatech, which manufactures synthetic skin that has changed the way burn victims are treated, based on work by one of our faculty members. I had the opportunity to tour Stratatech with Gov. Evers in December, and the work happening there is remarkable.

Before Steve Ackerman introduces these two speakers, I have the pleasure of introducing the person who leads University Research Park, which has been nourishing UW research and helping us to bring innovations and discoveries out of the lab and into the marketplace for nearly 40 years.

Aaron Olver started in his role as Managing Director of University Research Park about one year after I came to UW.  As President as URP’s Board, I have had the opportunity to work closely with him, and I have been consistently impressed by his knowledge, creativity, and ability to get things done.

In the time we’ve worked together, URP’s assets have doubled in size, as the demand for more industry lab space grows in Madison.

When the pandemic hit, Aaron knew that many of URP’s 125 companies would be central to the response.  Companies like Flugen and Pan Genome began work on COVID vaccines … Flambeau Diagnostics brought us mobile testing labs.  And leaders like Exact Sciences became the backbone of PCR testing here in Wisconsin and well beyond.

At every step, Aaron had to make sure that the right protocols were in place to keep people safe and limit liability so that this vital work could continue.

I want to thank Aaron for his partnership, and I look forward to seeing URP’s continued growth and success.

State of the University Address

UW System Board of Regents

Thurs., Feb. 10, 2022

Chancellor Blank’s Slides

Slide 1:  Title Slide

Flagship universities – big research universities – are complex institutions.  At UW–Madison we manage:

• 48,000 students
• 20,000 faculty and staff, and
• $3.6B budget
• With a very diverse group of stakeholders

These institutions are deeply important to their states and to the nation

• Important for education
  • At Madison, we graduated a record number of undergraduates and professional-school students last year — these highly trained, highly skilled people are the future of this state.
• Important for discovery and innovation
• People and families benefit directly from our work – from more effective treatments for cancer to better farming techniques to smarter shoreline preservation.
• WI businesses also benefit directly from our work – we provide the building blocks of scientific advancement, which they then use to develop new products and services.
• These contributions in both education and research are important for economic growth.
• We fuel start-ups and attract companies in the region that want to be near a top research university.
• We generate revenue for the state. The state provides just under 15% of our direct revenue – that means we generate more than $3B in revenue based on our own activities.   For instance, we bring $5B into Wisconsin annually from out-of-state dollars through Federal and private research grants and out-of-state tuition dollars.

But the strength, quality and reputation of these big flagship campuses can only be created over long periods of time.  One of my favorite political figures, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once said:

“If you want to create a great city <and I would say “a state as well”>, First, create a great university…then wait 100 years.”

To build a university with a world-class reputation that attracts faculty, research capacity, and students requires many years of strategic investment.

To maintain that reputation is equally difficult.  These institutions are fragile, particularly at a high level of quality.  It’s much easier to go downhill than to maintain or grow quality.

• Faculty are mobile (and have become more so in recent decades). Top faculty are constantly receiving inquiries from other universities.
• Students are mobile – every year a new group of students can choose to go elsewhere if something damages our reputation.
• Competition for research dollars is fierce…for instance, only 20% of research grant applications to the National Institutes of Health get funded.

Don’t ever take the quality of UW–Madison for granted…if we aren’t working every day to maintain and grow this quality, it will start to erode.  Maintaining quality requires maintaining the support of the state and its citizens.  As a public institution, top-quality research universities require bipartisan support across administrations, parties, and political environments.

I have been in leadership here at UW–Madison for nine years.  I want to use this time to tell you what we’ve done to maintain and grow quality in recent years.  And I want to talk about the challenges that this university is facing that I hope you will all have in mind as you hire and work with a new Chancellor.

First, a few of the things we’ve accomplished.   On the education front, we’ve expanded the quality, size, and diversity of UW’s students, while also improving financial aid and access.  All of this helps us serve WI better than ever.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Slide 2:  What we’ve accomplished – higher quality

• The quality of our students has risen:
  • Average test scores are up, although since we’ve gone test optional in the last two years, this measure is no longer as useful.
  • So instead, let’s look at the number of National Merit finalists enrolled at UW-Madison. We’ve more than doubled that number in our freshman class since 2013.
    • Total – 2013:   2021:  132
    • WI resident – 2013: 56. 2021: 87

We’re serving students better with expanded advising, expanded mental health services, a wonderful new health/wellness facility (the Nick) and another underway (Bakke Center), and new majors that reflect students’ (and employers’) needs and interests.  For example, in recent years we’ve started:

• Undergraduate degrees in Data Science and Global Health
• Master’s degrees in Business Analytics and Financial Economics (L&S)

Great teaching, a strong campus culture and a constantly evolving modern curriculum is what attracts great students.

Slide 3:  What we’ve accomplished – expanded enrollment

• Despite declines in the number of Wisconsin high school graduates, our applications among Wisconsin students have NOT declined. And we’ve seen huge increases in out-of-state applicants.
• My first fall here, we were very happy to receive 30,000 freshman applications; we’ve just gotten word that this year, we’ve received more than 60,000.
• With your help in revising the in-state/out-of-state requirements, we’ve been able to take advantage of our rapidly growing pool of first-rate out-of-state applicants.

Why does this matter?

• These students add diversity and pay tuition at a rate that supports our programs and subsidizes our in-state students. This has been particularly important during a period when in-state tuition has been frozen for nine straight years.
• Our ability to attract out-of-state students is also critical to the future of WI as the number of HS graduates in this state continues to shrink. We bring more than 20,000 smart graduate & undergrad students to this campus every year from outside of Wisconsin. No other institution in the state brings highly talented individuals to Wisconsin in such large numbers.
• We’re working hard with Wisconsin employers to keep our students here after graduation by showcasing all the reasons to stay and work in this state.

These rising applications reflect our strong reputation as an educational institution.  And the rising demand isn’t slowing down.

Slide 4:  What we’ve accomplished – greater diversity

As we’ve grown in size and strength, we’ve also increased diversity.

• More students of color
  • In 2017, our incoming freshman class included about 700 students from historically underrepresented groups … this year’s freshman class includes more than 1,200.
• 25% of our freshman are students of color, and 15% of our freshmen are students of color from historically under-represented groups — an all-time high and up substantially from just a few years ago.
• Meanwhile, we’ve maintained a strong number of first-gen students
  • Modest increase – 6,000 in 2013 to 6,300 in 2021

It’s important to recognize that bringing in a more diverse class isn’t enough.  The institution itself has to become more open to diversity; more multicultural.

We’ve focused multiple efforts on increasing awareness of issues related to issues of diversity and inclusion on campus.

• Expanded faculty hiring
  • 31 new faculty of color have joined us over the last year
  • 243 have joined us over the last five years
• This happened in part because of a focused central effort to provide funding for departments to recruit new faculty from groups not well-represented within their discipline.
• Most schools and colleges have diversity plans, as do a growing number of departments. This issue is top of mind across the university.
• Created a new framework to support some of education and training programs that have been implemented across campus.
  • For instance, our annual Diversity Forum attracted nearly 3,000 attendees – virtual and in person in 2021. This is a chance to learn from experts and from one another about successful efforts that might be scale-able.
• Successfully launched Raimey-Noland Campaign, providing funds for scholarships, programming, and faculty research that focuses on diversity.
  • Hoped to raise $10M … now at nearly $70M.
• 82 students in the fall freshman class have newly available Raimey-Noland scholarships.

Slide 5:  What we’ve accomplished – greater access

Expanded access for all students, but especially WI students

• Quadrupled institutional scholarship dollars in the last 14 years
• 2007 = $25M; 2021 = nearly $100M
• These new dollars allowed us to implement Bucky’s Tuition Promise and Badger Promise.
• Expanded professional masters’ programs, both in-person, hybrid, and online.
• Now launching undergrad online opportunities. Until last fall, we had no online degrees for undergraduates.  We now have five and more to come. Examples:
  • BBA in Business with a focus on Management and Human Resources
  • BS in Personal Finance
  • These degrees are designed to serve a whole new population of students — returning adults who may already have some college credits and are now ready to finish their degree.

The competition for top students among U.S. universities is fierce, particularly in the Midwest and northeast where the number of high school students is declining.  Very few schools have been able to do what we’ve done at UW-Madison, with substantial increases in applicants that we’ve been able to turn into increased class size with higher quality and greater diversity.

But education is only one part of our mission.  We’ve also had significant research accomplishments.

Slide 6:  Research expenditures at UW-Madison

UW–Madison is a top 10 university in its research expenditures.  Last year, we brought in $1.5B in new awards and spent $1.4B.

• There’s no other research facility — public or private — in Wisconsin that comes close to us in size and scope.  We raised and spent $1.4B on research.  The next largest school in the UW System spent $61m on research, only 4% of our research scope.
  • Note: UW–Milwaukee, spent $61M last year; next is Stevens Point with $4.8M.
• When I arrived, research expenditures were declining. We’ve worked hard to turn that around.  Over the last nine years, our research expenditures grew 17%.
• The declines happened during two biennia of deep budget cuts and that terrible fight over tenure, when we lost a number of our top faculty and top grant-getters. That political dispute — at a time when other universities’ research grew strongly — was enough to drop us from the top 5 to the top 10.
• In FY2021, which closed at the end of June, we submitted over 100 more extramural proposals than in the previous year.  Even better, we grew our total awards by $200M, an increase of over 15%.
• We need to maintain that strong rate of growth. But the competition for this money is fierce.  Over the past five years, our research expenditures increased by just under 18%.  That’s a very strong growth rate.  But research expenditures among the top five schools grew 22%.

Slide 7:  Keeping research strong

• We want to continue to grow our research enterprise. That requires being strategic and targeting research areas that we know federal agencies are funding.
  • For instance, there are big funding opportunities are in biomedical sciences, atmospheric sciences, education, data science, and quantum physics. We want to compete successfully in these areas.
    • For example, we recently met with senior Army officials to explore partnership opportunities with the Dept of Defense in virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, video game development, and game theory.
• Having the top faculty is key to our research enterprise. We’ve expanded faculty expertise in a strategic way.
  • The Cluster Hire Program began in 2018. It has allowed us to hire groups of 3-4 faculty in key areas of emerging research interest.  This also enriches our educational offerings in these areas.
  • We’ve also been growing faculty more generally across many areas. Our faculty size shrank in the late 1990s.  In the past few years, we’ve expanded our faculty by nearly 200 people.  But we are still about 100 faculty short of where we were 30 years ago (when there were 8,000 fewer students on this campus).
    • We’ve needed to do this as we’ve increased class size, but it helps us grow research as well.
• Another major opportunity is in industry research partnerships.
  • UW-Madison has not always been the easiest place to work with as a research partner. We’ve worked hard over the last nine years to change that, and at the heart of our work is the collaborative work between our schools and colleges and the Office of Business Engagement, created five years ago to improve how we link businesses to student recruitment and research on campus.
  • We’re seeing results: Industry dollars flowing into UW-Madison from corporate partners, which support not only research but also student scholarships and public service projects, increased by 60% between 2013 and 2020, and we expect continued growth.
  • And I’d note: Our work with industry is much more than tapping into new revenue streams: it’s central to our mission of public outreach and a great example of the WI Idea in action

Slide 8:  CDIS

• One example of the critical need for growth in both educational programming and research is computer sciences. A first-class computer and data science program is a necessity for a first-class university – and for a state that wants to build its reputation as a regional and national beacon for high tech industry.
• We created the School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences (CDIS) in 2019 to respond to extraordinary demand from students, employers, and industry partners.
  • Computer Science is now the #1 undergraduate major
    • Five years ago = 300 undergraduate majors. Now = 2,100.
  • And thousands of undergraduates from every major you can think of are taking classes at CDIS.
    • One of the first introductory classes aimed at non-majors last year enrolled students from 72 different majors.
• Now we need a building worthy of the nationally ranked departments that live there (including our very successful American Family Data Science Institute) and worthy of our standing as a premier research institution.
  • We kicked off a major fundraising campaign in September to build a new building with the announcement of two major gifts. Unlike nearly every other academic building here at UW, this facility will be built entirely with support from alumni and friends.  We still have a bit more fundraising to do and hope to start construction early next year.

All of the things I’ve talked about in education and research require resources.  With frozen in-state tuition and declining state investment, we’ve needed to generate our own investment income at UW-Madison.  I have worked to change the culture around fund-raising at UW-Madison.  We can’t just wait for the state to give us more funding; If we want to maintain our quality, we have to be entrepreneurial, generating much of our own revenue for investment.

Slide 9:  Strategies for funding our public mission

How do we do this?

(1) Expanded research and development dollars

• • I’ve already talked about this.

(2) Expanded summer semester

• • We began to expand our summer offerings in 2016 and we’ve seen extraordinary growth:
    • • Summer tuition revenue is up 75%
  • Expanding summer session is a win-win. It generates more revenue but it’s also an important educational benefit for our students.
    • Students are taking advantage of summer to complete their distribution requirements and graduate on time. This drives down time-to-degree and reduces student debt.

(3) Expanded philanthropic support

• • Top priority when I arrived: I’ve worked closely with Mike Knetter and the UW Foundation to improve our fundraising capacity, particularly involving deans and department chairs much more in fundraising.
  • We’ve just completed the six-year All Ways Forward campaign
    • 2015: Goal of $3.2B goal set on a campus whose most successful campaign to date had raised about half that much.
    • We closed the campaign at the end of December at $4.2B

(4) Set market-based tuition for out-of-state students and professional schools. Regents have been an important partner in this.

• • Allows us to tap into a deep pool of qualified out-of-state students while maintaining our commitment to WI residents.
  • Helps us provide the same quality of educational experience at UW that our peer schools provide.

(5) Expanded professional master’s degrees

• • We began a concerted effort in 2014 to grow certificates and degrees for working professionals. The result:
    • Students in these programs now comprise about ¼ of our graduate school enrollment.
    • Net revenue has increased to $53M in 2021.
    • Most popular professional degrees are MS Economics, MA Library & Info Studies, and a part-time Social Work master’s degree.

(6) Grown our undergraduate enrollment – we’ve now completed five years of growth.

(7) Newly launched strategy: Real estate development.  You are familiar with this topic.  You approved an MOU in October that allows us to move forward to explore potential options.

Slide 10:  Impacts

What has been the impact of these efforts? I’ve told you about the growth in scholarships and the creation of Bucky’s Tuition Promise.

Let me tell you about five other areas where we’ve been able to use our new investment funds to make major improvements.

• First, our investments in expanded advising and in educational programs like the summer semester have increased graduation rates and decreased time to degree.
  • Six-year graduation rate of 89% is the highest ever.
  • The graduation gap for undergraduates between all students and historically underrepresented students has been cut nearly in half in the last decade (now a 7-point difference).
  • And undergraduate time-to-degree of 3.9 years (40 days less than 4 calendar years) is the lowest ever.
  • These improvements are driving student debt down.
    • The share of undergraduates graduating without student loans has grown by 10 points in the past eight years to 57%.
    • At the national level, only about one third of students graduate with no debt.
    • Student default rate on federal loans is less than 1% compared to 9% nationally and 3% at other WI schools.
• Our revenue-building strategies also have allowed us to bring faculty salaries to a place where we’re again competitive for top people.
  • Nine years ago, our full professors were making nearly 13% less than professors at our designated peer institutions. We were 12th among our 12 official peer schools in faculty salaries. This was a huge threat to our ability to hire top faculty and a reason why we were constantly dealing with retention issues.
  • Today, our faculty salaries are #5 among our peer schools.
• But competitive salaries for faculty alone aren’t enough – we need to compete for top graduate students in order to attract top faculty.
  • Eight years ago, we began a focused effort to improve our graduate student stipends.
  • Minimum stipend for TA has grown by 43% in that time, going from near bottom of major research universities around the country to above median.
• Finally, we’ve invested in major administrative improvements.
  • • The Title and Total Compensation project has given us, for the first time ever, uniform titles for staff and a compensation structure that’s benchmarked to the marketplace. This is critical to attracting and retaining great employees.
    • Administrative Transformation Program – You know all about the value of ATP in modernizing how we do business.
    • Cybersecurity –We’ve made multiple investments to upgrade security and educate our employees about how to keep information safe online.

Slide 11:  Commencement photo

• And one of the best accomplishments of all – bringing commencement back to Camp Randall!

CHALLENGES

Slide 12:  Challenges

But many challenges remain.  I want to talk about five of them:

1. Lagging growth in revenues
2. Serious constraints on maintaining our capital infrastructure
3. One-size-fits-all System policies that put us at a competitive disadvantage
4. In-state tuition freeze that has lasted throughout the entire nine years I’ve been at UW-Madison
5. The divided and divisive political environment, which can spark unwarranted criticisms of flagship universities.

Slide 13:  Challenge #1:  Lagging growth in revenues

• UW-Madison remains at serious risk of losing its competitive position. Nine years ago we were in crisis…showing declining revenues when all of our peers were growing.
• Let me be clear about how bad things were: We had state budget cuts in the 2011, 2013 and 2015 budgets.  The net GPR cut over those six years was $98 million.  This happened at a time when none of our peers were experiencing budget cuts.
• By doing what we’ve done with increased revenues, we turned that around and have done some significant catch-up but we are still below our peers. Maintaining the same rate of growth as our peers will be challenging, especially without any new investments from the state.  If we were to see future state budget cuts (for example, another $40M cut like the one we received in the 2013-15 biennium) or loss of our GPR, we would be back in the world we were in when I arrived, dealing with falling revenues while our peers continue to grow.
• So let me be clear – with all of the revenue growth and innovations that have been implemented during my time here, we are still below our peers and haven’t caught up.
• Do not assume UW-Madison is in good financial shape. The right comparison is not with other UW-System schools, but with our peer schools.  In that comparison, we are still behind where we need to be, and have clearly lost competitive ground.

Slide 14:  Recommendations

• If we’re going to maintain our competitive position, we need ongoing support for UW-Madison’s efforts to expand revenues and a commitment by the State and the System to continue funding UW-Madison at a level commensurate with its quality, its size, and the contributions that it provides to the state. Cutting UW-Madison’s funding is a fool’s journey if you really want to help the state.
• Many of you have seen the report that indicates that once you remove the funding for programs at UW-Madison that are unique to us, such as the medical school, vet med, and Extension – our GPR funding/student is virtually identical to UW-Milwaukee.  Do not put us at risk of falling lower than this.

Slide 15:  Challenge #2:  Fewer state dollars for capital projects

• In recent years we’ve gotten approval for several critical projects – for example, the School of Veterinary Medicine and the new Letters & Science building (Irving & Dorothy Levy Hall).
• These and others are transformative projects and I appreciate the Regents’ support, and the support of the Legislature and the Governor.
• However, our share of state funding for capital projects has fallen steadily for decades:
  • We are 52% of System’s total revenues and receive 45% of the total state appropriation.  And given our much larger footprint, including properties across the state – we are an even higher share of the total property value in the System.
  • Yet, we have consistently received far less than this share of the capital budget within the System.  Over the past 5 biennia, we have received only 30% of the General Fund Supported Borrowing to support our capital assets.
• From 2001-2011, the average of the state’s capital investment in UW-Madison was 45% of the funds for all System schools, which was about the same as the total state appropriation.  However, from 2011 to 2021, UW-Madison’s share of GFSB dropped 15 percentage points to 30%. In 2019-21, the state-supported borrowing at other System schools was 3x what we received.
• I understand that we are able to raise more private funds for buildings than some of the other schools in the System. But we also have a much older set of buildings as well as a need for far more specialized research-intensive buildings.  At the Capital Planning & Budget Committee, Rob Cramer showed how far behind we are in maintaining our old buildings.
• Given the lack of funding, it has gotten progressively harder to do the things we need to do to keep our university functioning effectively.
  • Example: High on our list of must-do projects is to empty the aging and almost entirely dysfunctional Humanities building.  But to do that, we need space where we can move the Art Department and the Music Department.
  • But there is little willingness to put state bonding into a music building or art studios. These won’t get through the political approval process, but we must find a way to solve these issues if we’re going to meet the needs of our students today and in the future.

Slide 16:  Reinvestments falling behind peer institutions

• As I said, we are uniquely constrained – and as a result we’ve fallen out of step with our peers. I showed you that we’ve fallen behind our peers in revenues.  We’ve fallen even further behind in capital spending.
• This graph shows a five-year rolling average of investment in facilities. The black line represents the total amount of need – whether for new projects or maintenance – as calculated based on commonly used metrics.
• Among our Big 10 peers, we’re at the bottom, spending far less than we should to maintain our campus. The A-through-G bars represent a group of other universities including some privates: Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, and University of Washington.  They’re shown this way to keep them anonymous.
• As you can see, the Big 10 is falling behind other schools, and we’re falling behind the Big 10. We are spending less than one-quarter what we should be spending on our facilities.  This is no way to maintain the kind of campus students and faculty expect at a first-rate university.

Slide 17:  Deferred maintenance continues to grow

• As our proportional dollars from the state capital budget have shrunk, our buildings have continued to age. Our lack of investments led to a deferred maintenance backlog of $1.5B in 2019 – and it’s grown larger since then.  This is a huge threat to the long-term quality of UW-Madison.

What are the primary constraints?

Slide 18:  Challenge #2a:  No Borrowing Authority

First, we have no borrowing authority.  Every time we do major building renovations or construction that is not entirely funded by gifts and grants, we need approval of the Governor, the Assembly, the Senate, the System and the State Building Commission.  This complete lack of control over our capital assets creates serious difficulties, particularly at a $3.6B organization whose reputation in part rests upon its scientific and educational facilities.

• No other state has a flagship (or a System) without borrowing authority.
• This puts the burden on us to find gift/grant funding in order to move projects forward in anything approaching a timely manner – and we’ve been able to do that for some critical needs.
• But there are many areas where we do not have major donors available. We are not going to get private gifts to fix the HVAC systems and otherwise renovate our aging buildings.  And we don’t have any donors who can fund a major new art building, so that department can vacate Humanities.  We need bonding authority along with state and System support.

Slide 19:  Challenge #2b:  Lack of control over state-managed capital projects

• We have no control over the process of building buildings.
  • The state signs the contracts and we have no input into those contracts. The result has been contracts with very limited damages clauses and very limited penalties for delays.
  • Once the contract is signed we have no authority over the project. The result has been ongoing cost overruns and delayed projects.  We are responsible for paying these cost overruns and we have to deal with the consequences of these delays.  But we have none of the authority that would allow us to reduce these problems.
  • No other flagship has zero control over what’s in the contract, or oversight over projects.

• Example: Chemistry Building – central to our teaching/research missions.
  • Basic construction elements – the elevators and HVAC system – failed when the building was close to completion.
  • The result for Chemistry: 9,000 students and 450 course sections were moved to spaces not designed for teaching chemistry.
  • We’ve lost an estimated $3.2M in research, and this is not a final number.
  • The contract had limited damages clauses and limited compensation for delays. As a result, we are limited in our ability to hold anyone responsible for these problems.  We bear many of the costs.
• Our inability to control decisions over capital renovation, repair or construction has led to dollars wasted due to:
  • Delayed projects
  • Cost overruns
  • Construction problems from subcontractors and contractors who know they will bear limited responsibility for any problems.

• We are the ones who end up paying the bills and bearing the costs of delay. And we are the ones who have to work in these buildings.

Slide 20:  Recommendations

• This cannot continue. We MUST have greater control over these projects.  That’s management 101:  Align incentives so the people who have to pay for and live in the building are responsible for getting things built and built well, on time, and within budget.
• For new projects and major renovations:
  • Work with us to get approval for program revenue bonding,
  • Work with us to give us more control over contracts signed and construction project oversight.

Slide 21:  Challenge #3:  One-Size-Fits-All Policies

• UW-Madison is different from the other System schools – different students, major research operations, different funding streams, etc.  One-size-fits-all policies from System consistently harm UW-Madison and limit its competitiveness.
  • We have 48,000 students,
    • Double the # of the next-largest System school (UWM 24,000)
    • Third-largest UW-Oshkosh has 14,000
  • Furthermore, our students are different along a number of dimensions. Most notably, the great majority of them are considering schools outside WI, often across the country if not the world.  We compete in a different market.
  • As noted earlier, our $1.4B in research expenditures are on an entirely different scale than others.
  • We compete in a different market for faculty talent as well.
• There are times when UW-Madison needs to be treated differently and given greater flexibility.
  • Example: Our efforts to implement the Common App.
    • Our Big Ten peers began moving to the Common App in 2010. I raised this issue in early 2014.  The first reaction from the System was complete dismissal.
    • We finally got approval to move to the Common App in 2016 but were told we had to stay on the System app for at least one more year. By the way, this movement to the Common App is one reason for the huge growth in our applications in recent years.  Students who are applying from around the state, the nation, and all over the world can now apply to UW-Madison in the same way they apply to other schools.
    • We’ve since been told we cannot go off the System app, even though only about 12% of our applications come that way. This means that our admissions office is constantly dealing with applications from two entirely different platforms.  This costs time and money.
  • Another example: The inflexible BOR policy that requires us to seek BOR approval for all contracts over $1M (which is most of our larger contracts these days).
    • Although I know you have tried to expedite these reviews, they still add a minimum of one month to the process, which has led to us losing out on industry partnerships that would be good for UW-Madison, for the state, and for the business community.  And we’ve yet to find a single contract we’ve brought that the Regents have NOT approved.
    • This is a vestige of a time when conducting research with private businesses was viewed as outside of our mission and deserving of special scrutiny. But those days are long past.
    • Our peer institutions recognize this – none of them has this type of board oversight. For example, Michigan and Minnesota have no monetary threshold requiring board approval of research contracts; the authority lies with the university president or chancellor. At schools that DO require board approval for some contracts, the threshold is much higher.
    • The delays inherent in this process are especially problematic for industry-sponsored clinical trials that enable access to potentially life-saving therapies for patients.  And healthcare related agreements make up the vast majority (about ¾) of the contracts we’ve submitted in recent years for your approval.  The current industry standard for initiating clinical trials is less than 60 days from first contact by the sponsor to beginning of patient enrollment, which is virtually impossible for us to meet.

Slide 22:  Recommendations

• On this issue, I am asking that we be given the ability to approve industry contracts within UW-Madison, reporting quarterly to the BOR about what contracts we’ve taken on.
• More broadly:
  • Understand that UW-Madison operates in a different environment than many of the other System schools. Do not insist on one-size-fits-all policies.

Slide 23:  Challenge #4:  Nine years of frozen in-state tuition

• We’ve fallen out of step with the marketplace. Our in-state tuition is much further below our peers than is in-state tuition at other UW system schools relative to their peers.
• As long as some of our closest peer schools receive 50% more in tuition for every in-state student they admit, UW-Madison will struggle to compete with them and maintain the same level of quality. Over time, we simply will not be able to provide the same educational or research experience these schools provide.
• Furthermore, while this tuition freeze has been in place, state funding per student has continued to fall as well, so we have a double-whammy of a tuition freeze and declines in the state subsidy for students.
  • 10 years ago, we were receiving the equivalent of $14,000/student in state GPR dollars. (Note that money goes for many things, beyond our undergrad students – it supports a medical school, a veterinary school, and lots of agricultural facilities across the state.)  This year, we are at about $10,400/student.
• Our student body is different than at other UW system schools – they are often looking at a very different set of comparison schools (which are far more expensive than UW-Madison) when deciding where to go to college.
• Furthermore, UW-Madison has put substantial resources into expanding affordability for lower-income Wisconsin students so that higher tuition will not negatively impact this group.
• As long as some of our closest peer schools receive 50% more in tuition for every in-state student they admit, UW-Madison will struggle to compete with them and maintain the same level of quality. Over time, we simply will not be able to provide the same educational or research experience these schools provide.

Slide 24:  Recommendations

• We’re providing a high-value degree and for many of our students, we can remain affordable without charging bargain-basement prices.
• Work with us and with political leadership to allow us to institute in-state tuition policies more in line with our peers in the upper Midwest, while holding us accountable for providing the access for lower and middle-income families in Wisconsin who need financial aid.

Slide 25:  Challenge #5:  The divided and divisive political environment

• The last major challenge I want to discuss is the growing politicization of higher education, and the growing willingness of some politicians to attack universities (particularly the flagship).
• Let me be clear on two things:
  • First, I see this on both sides of the aisle, although the criticisms are often quite different;
  • Second, this is not unique to Wisconsin; it is happening across the country. Where we once were a nation with high, bipartisan support for higher education and particularly public higher education, we are now a nation deeply divided along political lines on the value of universities.
• Here in Wisconsin, the Foundation and Alumni Association conducted a poll of 930 WI residents in December 2021. Some of the questions were designed to gauge public support for the university.  The results were similar to national polls:
  • About 70% of Democrats but just 45% of Republicans approve of the job we’re doing.
  • A similar divide on the question of whether a degree from UW-Madison is valuable and worth the cost: 65% of Democrats said yes, but only 41% of Republicans agreed with that statement.
• I mention this not to criticize Republicans; indeed, several bills of great importance to the university have been authored by Republican legislators and are currently moving through the legislative process. I want to thank those who have authored and signed onto those bills, which I hope that they will pass this session.  And I want to thank Gov Evers in advance, who I believe will sign this legislation if it passes, and who has supported the university.
• Rather, I mention the partisan divide because, for public institutions that depend on the trust and confidence of the people, this polarization is dangerous.

It can threaten the federal funding we rely on to do the kind of basic research that made the COVID vaccine possible… and it empowers politicians seeking to score points with voters to use our universities – and especially flagship campuses – as political chips in the partisan wars.  Two examples:

• Forcing us to lower our annual fund balances, which limits our flexibility, hurts us relative to our peers, and goes against all financial advice.
• Criticizing the ways in which we’ve enforced health and safety rules on our campus – and this criticism has come from both sides of the aisle, although on different issues.

Slide 26:  Recommendations

• No public institution can survive in the long run without public support.
• Request of the BOR: Actively engage with political leadership on both sides of the aisle when they criticize the university.  Sometimes the criticism is warranted, and we need to respond.  But sometimes it’s just political posturing.  We need you to be a consistent voice of support for the value of a world-class research university.  Speak up for the importance of our System institutions to the state, particularly the flagship.

CONCLUSION

Slide 27:  (landing slide – campus photo)

For a number of years, UW-Madison was essentially standing still, if not moving backwards, in large part because of reduced budgets.  We’ve turned that around, thanks to your help, to our alumni, and to the very good work of many of our faculty and staff.

I’ve talked about some of our accomplishments and challenges, and how to address these challenges in a way that keeps UW-Madison competitive moving forward – but this is just the beginning of a conversation that needs to continue.

We’ve made some important investments in a strong future, but our peers are also investing.  No one can take the quality and reputation of UW-Madison for granted, assuming that its reputation will remain strong.   It wouldn’t take much for faculty salaries to fall again, for our research dollars to stall, for student interest to decline, or for us to start losing faculty again to other universities.

If we’re going to maintain our reputation and our quality, we need to continue to invest and grow in the right ways.  To do that, we need resources — and we will help generate those — combined with a smart strategy for the future — that will be the job of the new Chancellor.

We also need governance that recognizes that the state’s flagship campus is different and needs to be able to compete nationally and internationally in ways that other System schools do not.  And we need recognition from our political leadership of the value of this university to the state of Wisconsin.

Thank you and I’ll be happy to take questions.

Tue Jan. 25, 2022

Shannon Hall, Memorial Union

6:40 p.m.

Thank you, Gabe, for that kind introduction and for your leadership in bringing tonight’s keynote speaker to campus.

It’s wonderful to see you all here, and to welcome many more of you who are taking part virtually in what will be a truly memorable evening with Nikole Hannah-Jones as we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I also want to thank Keiva Aranda and Leotha Stanley for that beautiful performance.

And the sponsors of tonight’s event:

• Student Affairs
• Division of Diversity, Equity, and Educational Achievement
• and the Wisconsin Union Theater

Thank you all.

Some of you know that Dr. King has a special place in our history here at UW­–Madison.

We were fortunate to host him on two occasions.

The first was in 1962, when he spoke at the Wisconsin Union Theater about non-violent resistance as a means to achieve social change.

Three years later, he returned to this campus to speak at the Stock Pavilion. He had recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he addressed a crowd of nearly 3,000 students and faculty on educational opportunity as the way to lift people out of poverty and move us closer to achieving true equality.

Dr. King was deeply interested in education.  When he was just 18 years old, he wrote an essay in which he argued that education is important not only for the individual, but for the larger community that benefits when knowledge is directed to improving people’s lives.

That’s what the work of tonight’s keynote speaker is all about.  I know that she will inspire lots of questions and thoughtful debate – as any renowned speaker at a world-class university should do.

Before we hear from Nikole Hannah-Jones, we will hear from the person who is at the heart of the effort to make UW a more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming place.

Dr. LaVar Charleston is uniquely well-suited to this work.  He is both deeply familiar with UW (as a student who earned two graduate degrees here … as a researcher … a clinical professor … and an administrator) and deeply familiar with the work of advancing equity.

• He is a co-founder of Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
• He is credited with more than 50 publications including a book he co-edited called Advancing Equity and Diversity in Student Affairs.
• He sits on the Governor’s Advisory Council on Equity and Inclusion.
• He was recently was named one of Wisconsin’s most influential Black leaders.
• And seven months ago, he agreed to be our Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer.

Dr. Charleston brings a compelling vision for our future, and the ability to bring us along the path to achieve that vision.  He is a wonderful colleague.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. LaVar Charleston.