Members of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute are calling for UW-Madison to eliminate its relationship with the UW System.
In a report released yesterday, WPRI, a non-profit organization that studies Wisconsin public policy, said the school would fare better as a charter school if it wants to reassert itself as a top national university.
According to the recommendation, if UW-Madison declared itself a charter school, it would be free from the state’s financial woes and the bureaucratic entanglements WPRI president James H. Miller said bring the school down.
“You’ve got to give Madison the tools that other major universities have if you want to compete with those schools, which it doesn’t right now,” Miller said.
According to the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings, UW-Madison claims the No. 35 spot, behind other prestigious public universities such as University of California-Berkeley and the University of Michigan.
These schools are much more successful, Miller said, because they have something UW-Madison lacks: autonomy.
As a statutory agency, UW-Madison’s financial dealings are controlled by the state Legislature. The University of Michigan, on the other hand, is a “constitutional school,” which means that while it is funded by the Michigan state Legislature, it is free to appropriate this money wherever it deems necessary.
Much like current charters in K-12 school systems, if UW-Madison were chartered it would still be considered a public university and would receive state funds. But the school, under the condition that it follow a set of guidelines set up by Wisconsin, would control where the money is spent.
These guidelines, Miller said, could range from a higher-ranking standard to the number of students of color annually enrolled.
“The idea is to give the university as much flexibility as it can,” Miller said. “It’s hamstrung by a lot of rules and regulations.”
The report names the inability to build new buildings, lack of research funding and poor faculty management as the downside of a restricted budget.
With 26 percent of the faculty expected to retire in the next decade, Miller said, the school needs to kick itself into gear.
“They’re going to need resources and flexibility to replenish its faculty,” he said.
Critics, however, say the plan to withdraw is not nearly as good as it sounds.
According to Charles Hoslet, director of state relations for UW-Madison, the charter could be more detrimental to the school than helpful.
“When [charters] happen, the state tends to … withdraw its support to the university,” Hoslet said. “That’s the concern we would have for this concept.”
The school received about $400 million in funding from the state this year, which constituted 27 percent of the annual endowment.
“We’d like to have all the flexibility we can get,” Hoslet said. “The question is: what is the tradeoff?”
Hoslet also refuted the reports’ charges that UW-Madison is not excelling like it should be, calling the rankings “subjective.”
“While the report seems to indicate that our academic reputation is in decline, the indicators we’re looking at suggest otherwise,” Hoslet said. “I believe we are competing with a number of the schools that they mention.”
As of yet, the report is merely a recommendation, but Hoslet said it is likely it will come up again.
“I expect that some policymakers may want to talk more about it and see if this is something that should be considered further, and we’re not opposed to that,” he said.
