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Year-end letter from Chancellor Martin

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

The following message was broadcast to the campus community by Chancellor “Biddy” Martin on Wednesday, May 5, 2010. It is reproduced (with minor reformatting) in its entirety here for reference and comment by S&W readers. The letter consists of several sections, each of which may be accessed directly via the links below.

A Year-End Letter: Opportunities, Challenges, Impressions
By Chancellor Biddy Martin

- Eds.
(more…)

Posted in College costs, Compensation, Restructuring proposal, Shared governance, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget | 1 Comment »

Video: First Campus Forum on Financing Public Higher Education

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

On Tuesday, February 23, 2010, the first Campus Forum on Financing Public Higher Education took place in the Memorial Union, hosted by PROFS, CAPE, and UFAS. As summarized in greater detail in a previous article in S&W, the purpose of this first forum was to identify and explain the current fiscal challenges facing the University of Wisconsin. Future planned forums in the series will dissect proposed solutions. Members of the local press as well as interested faculty, staff, and students were in attendance.

For the benefit of those who could not attend, we are now belatedly posting (courtesy of CAPE) a link to the complete video record (157 MB) of the presentations by the three distinguished speakers: Noel Radomski, director of the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education (WISCAPE); Andrew Reschovsky, professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs; and Kevin Reilly, President of the University of Wisconsin System.

All three presentations made clear that the budget problems facing the state of Wisconsin, and therefore the University, will be with us for some time to come and will require difficult choices.

Planning for the second forum in the series, which will likely take place in early Fall 2010, is now underway.

Posted in College costs, Compensation, State-University Relations, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget, The University System | 1 Comment »

Mark your calendars: Campus Forum on Financing Public Higher Education

Friday, February 19th, 2010

How will we pay for public higher education in Wisconsin and at UW-Madison in the years to come? Metaphorically speaking, we have entered a dark fiscal tunnel of unknown length, and that glimmer of light up ahead just might be an oncoming train. According to former UW System President Kathryn Lyall (pers. comm.),

[T]his is the overarching policy issue of the decade (century?) and we need all members of the university community, as well as those in the wider public, to understand the inexorable trends that are driving the university’s future and what it can expect to do for the state in the future.

Three separate campus organizations — PROFS, UFAS, and CAPE — have come together to jointly sponsor the first of a planned series of public forums on the subject, to be held Tuesday, February 23, 4:00-5:30 pm at the Memorial Union (check Today in the Union to confirm the room location; tentatively the Wisconsin Inn). (more…)

Posted in College costs, State-University Relations, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget, The University System | 2 Comments »

The Chronicle mentions ASEC report on restructuring – and a reader replies.

Monday, January 25th, 2010

The Chronicle of Higher Education made brief mention of the Capital Times article on the report from the Academic Staff Executive Committee (ASEC) Ad Hoc committee on the Research Enterprise. (Unfortunately, the Chronicle misattributed the report to the faculty, which has not yet issued its report on the same subject.)

Of greater interest than the Chronicle posting itself is one reader’s response, a short excerpt of which follows:

The real story here is not the restructuring of research supporting systems but the broader issue of disintegrating research administration infrastructures at Wisconsin, and indeed across the United States. Offices that manage sponsored programs (grants, contracts, research fellowships, etc.) universally have had flat budgets for the past decade, and yet this period saw an unprecedented growth in research funding (e.g., doubling of NIH grants) as well as a torrent of new regulatory requirements governing all aspects of research (electronic submission of proposals, research subjects, animal care, conflict of interest, export controls, accounting, reporting, auditing, technology transfer, etc.).

(continue reading comments)

From our vantage point at S&W at least, this is indeed a new perspective on the restructuring issue. We hope more readers will weigh in.

Posted in Restructuring proposal, Shared governance, State-University Relations, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget | No Comments »

Dramatic action in New York — could UW benefit from similar leadership?

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Yesterday, the office of Governor Paterson (New York) issued this press release: http://www.ny.gov/governor/press/press_01151001.html

The full text is reproduced below for the convenience of S&W readers. While we have not had time to digest the details, our impression at first reading is that the problems facing the SUNY system are very comparable to those facing us here at UW and that similar dramatic action and creative leadership are urgently needed. As always, reader comments are invited. (more…)

Posted in State-University Relations, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget, The University System, Uncategorized | No Comments »

The future of public research universities?

Monday, January 4th, 2010

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a piece entitled Needed: a National Strategy to Preserve Public Research Universities that should be mandatory reading for those concerned about the future of UW-Madison. Unfortunately, we cannot legally reprint the entire article here, and access is for subscribers only (and, rumor has it, those accessing via the library system from a UW account). The following key quotes, however, summarize the problem: (more…)

Posted in State-University Relations, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget, The University System | 2 Comments »

Smart furloughs?

Monday, December 21st, 2009

PROFS is lobbying for what’s known as the Smart Furlough proposal, which would exempt state and university employees who are paid with federal and state funds from the state-imposed furloughs.

Please click here for the complete article from the PROFS website.

Please comment either here or on the PROFS page, or both.

Posted in Compensation, The University Budget | 1 Comment »

Our very own Berlin

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

In the summer of 1996, I stood at the edge of what may well have been the largest and most expensive construction zone of the past half-century of human existence: Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. In the wake of the fall of the Wall in 1989, the entire war-damaged, Cold War-neglected city center was being razed and completely rebuilt from the ground up.

Never in my life have I witnessed such a vast beehive of cranes, cement trucks, earth moving equipment, and, of course, thousands of construction workers, all swarming over vast tracts of excavated urban real estate and dozens of steel building frames in various stages of completion. In one massive effort, 21st century architectural wonders were springing up everywhere to evict, once and for all, the lingering ghosts of 1945.

Yesterday, I walked once again (as I do almost daily) through another construction zone that never fails to remind me of Potsdamer Platz, albeit on a much smaller scale: the UW-Madison campus. And on that occasion the same questions occurred to me that always do:

(more…)

Posted in Facilities, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget | No Comments »

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