The Badger Herald and The Daily Cardinal last week interviewed University of Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank and Dean of Students Lori Berquam on a range of issues, from alcohol policy and sexual assault to tuition and diversity.
Below is a transcript of the conversation, which has been edited for style and clarity.
The Badger Herald: I wanted to start out with a survey you sent out last year on academic integrity, wondering what you learned from the survey and what kind of action are you taking on it, if any?
Lori Berquam: One of the things we learned from the academic integrity survey is, well, probably no surprise that there’s probably a lot more questions about what is academic integrity, what does it actually … what is contained within it. And then one of the other areas is really looking at a focus on our international students who come here with an entirely different mindset about academic integrity. What you will see is that there’s a new video up on the ISS [International Student Services] website about academic integrity and helping to explain it and explain the expectations we have here in the U.S. about academic integrity in classroom and in research and in the work that our students do.
So that’s probably the primary outcome. The other thing that we learned is I think there is quite a lot of variation in what faculty holds students accountable for. So we’ve been working with our faculty to talk about what UWS 14 has in the code for what they can do with students who are found to be responsible for violating the academic integrity code of conduct. So those are probably the primary things.
BH: Any other things that you found concerning in there?
LB: Well, again, probably not of surprise to you, the number of students who self report that they have cheated or somehow found another way to get an answer on an exam. We were also really pleased at the number of students who believed that measures were being taken to mitigate that, whether it’s in alternating tests, seating charts, different ways in which the tests were produced or not reproduced were also really good pieces of the information that we were able to discern. One of my staff members would be very willing, though, to walk you through the entire assessment and all of the information that was gleaned from it and how we’re actually using it moving forward.
The Daily Cardinal: I have a question about sexual assault on campus. It’s recently been a hot topic, I think, both here and nationwide. I know that UW recently joined the “It’s On Us” campaign to help combat that and spread awareness and prevention. What other steps are being taken? Specifically, I know that California recently passed a bill, it’s called “Yes Means Yes” that requires … positive verbal consent … instead of just lack of resistance or silence. So in light of that, would you support legislation like that here and what kinds of other steps do you think will be taken in the future in order to help prevent sexual assaults?
LB: Right now there’s a lot of legislation being proposed. If you’re familiar with the Campus Accountability and Security Act, CASA, as we call it, that’s also out there being proposed. There’s also legislation that hasn’t yet actually been in place, and it goes into place in November so the guidance on how to actually apply it to our campuses, we don’t even have the guidance on that yet. One of the things I would say is I think we need to see how many things are in place before we … Because they’re almost starting to contradict each other. And so for me in terms of additional legislation, I’d kind of like it to sort of maybe slow down just a little bit and make sure the why we’re doing it is as important as the what we’re doing.
I’m often asked about the numbers about sexual assault. The numbers to me, after we’ve reached one, it’s already too many. So, after that, it doesn’t matter because one is too many. And how do we create a campus culture, a campus environment, where we are asking for consent, and consent is what’s sought, not the absence of a no but the presence of a yes. So to go directly to the heart of your question, the legislation in California, I think that there is some real value in the discussion that is being kind of connected to that bill. I think the bottom line [is] regarding how do we create community, and how are we effectively communicating with each other? Recognizing that alcohol has played a role and how do we make sure that when there is sex involved that consent is connected to any sex that ensues. I think consent has to be at the core of what we do. The other parts of the legislation are really about those numbers and reporting, and what information and training is also out there. You know, we were on the cutting edge before it was required to do “Tonight,” and we’ve done “Tonight” for a couple of years.
State, campus officials turn their attention to preventing sexual assaults
Rebecca Blank: You can’t be at any big institution like this without worrying about what is happening on the sexual assault front. The numbers are horrifying at the national level. We know there is underreporting. Our desire to both reduce the number of incidents as well to when horrific things happen, to really give people support in a way that helps them and deals with the issue. It’s got to be a high priority.
I have the sense that this university was doing a very good job, but there are always things you can do better … We are in the midst of expanding the training, for instance, we were really focusing on training for people who are in touch with undergraduates. We need to focus this as well on people who are in touch with graduate students, and … have more inclusive training across campus beyond just groups that we’ve been working with. Lori’s office has recently hired another full time investigator, stepped up their investigative abilities.
There’s a number of things that we are looking at because we want to do as good a job as possible on this front. In terms of a lot of national proposals, and I will say this as sort of the empiricist, you really want a little evidence as to what works and doesn’t work in terms of either discouraging bad things from happening or encouraging people to report or giving them better support. And there are a lot of proposals out there where we just have no evidence for. … You really sort of [would] like to try at least a little bit of experimenting when you implement this in a few places and see where it works and doesn’t work and what happens. There are a lot of people of real valid concern jumping into this with sort of broad and sweeping proposals that … cause extensive changes, and I’d like to do that only if I had some evidence.
The “Tonight” video, there’s actually real evidence that certain types of engagement with this material makes a difference. it actually adds to education and it changes behavior. The “Yes Means Yes” law, I think we don’t have that … and probably because it’s really hard to monitor, right? This is a law that is hard to implement and enforce.
There’s a lot of ways in which you want to communicate about consent. I’m absolutely with Lori. Consent is at the center of reducing the amount of sexual assault. But I just don’t know whether that is the right way to go or not because we don’t have any real evidence as to whether that type of regulation is any more effective than trying to talk broadly in the way the “Tonight” video does, or other forms of more immediate engagement with a single individual, whether it’s online or in person, may have bigger effects than a sweeping law that says, “You must behave this way” in a very personal and private setting where no one’s watching, right?
BH: As a follow up to that, a lot of the discussion and the discourse around sexual assault has recently led back to Greek life. I know the Cardinal just published an editorial about it this morning, and then with UW-Milwaukee and even the Guardian wrote one with a rather controversial statement of ‘Should we just ban all Greek life?” How big of an influence does that have in initiatives the university is taking? And I know there were some proposals of pushing back rushing for Greek life that sparked some controversy.
RB: Well, let me start out, and I’ll let Lori finish on this one, we have some wonderful fraternities and sororities here that do service in the community that never get in trouble in any way. I really wouldn’t want to tar Greek life as the problem. There are problems in some individual organizations, and that’s what we need to focus on, not on Greek life in general because there’s a number of people from Greek life. It’s just been a great community that’s wonderful to have on campus in a whole variety of ways.
That said, there are some organizations here that have been more problematic than others, and a lot of those problems are around alcohol. The abuse of alcohol is so highly correlated with sexual assault issues, with being the victim of a crime, with health-related problems and with poor performance in dropping out and not completing your academic work. I think we’re very concerned with places that have had multiple incidents of abusive alcohol or breaking the underage drinking laws, not following the rules, and there have been a number of changes that have actually been implemented this year to try to create more visibility around the fact that we are watching and monitoring, and Lori can talk about some of the stuff that we have implemented this fall.
LB: I want to wholeheartedly concur in terms of, I don’t want to make any broad sweeping generalizations. We don’t like that of any particular body or entity, and so I certainly wouldn’t want that out there regarding Greek life. I do think that there are pockets of concern, and hopefully we’re able to zero in on them, focus on them and increase and hopefully make them more valuable parts of our community.
What we have started is an initiative that is really a soft initiative. And I hesitate to focus on this because what happens then is when I talk about the first 45 days then people say, “Well what happens on day 46?” But the idea is that the first six weeks of a student’s experience here, particularly a new student, is one that we want to make sure that we’re paying close attention to. The research out there demonstrates that it’s in those first six weeks when a student finds affinity here, gets connected here, makes friends here, feels like they can academically succeed here, all of those along with, now let’s get involved in the culture that is Madison, oftentimes involving alcohol.
So we have stepped up the alternative options for students to do things outside of going to a house party or to any other type of party involving alcohol. In fact, the chancellor is calling bingo next Thursday night from 8 to 10 p.m. I called the first bingo, and it was a blast, by the way. I think that these efforts along with working with residence halls, along with working with local liquor stores and the Madison police and the UW police, working together to address these issues so that we don’t get to the point of dangerous behavior.
The transports to detox, the alcohol content via breathalyzer being above a .3. You know, .08 is the legal limit, if you’re legal to drink, and you’re driving. Beyond that it gets really concerning in terms of your health and well-being and the impact on your academics, the impact on your social life. We want a campus where students can have a Wisconsin experience that’s free from the negative impacts of alcohol. And you know it, whether you’ve lived in a place where your next door neighbors were really loud when they came home, whether it was a roommate you’ve had to clean up after, you know what I’m talking about.
What we want is to create a culture, a campus community where number one, there are no bystanders that are not engaged and active. Each one of us has a responsibility to be a positive bystander and engage and interrupt behavior that is questionable.
RB: And I should say, I think that’s one thing that really has changed in our approach both to sexual assault as well as to alcohol compared to 10 or 15 years ago, the emphasis not just on you yourself have to pay attention to your behavior, but that this is a broader community, and you need to actually help others as part of that, and if you see someone who may be in trouble in some form or another or not be able to care for themselves, there should be some way to intervene. I thought that was one thing where the “Tonight” video did a really nice job of giving people a sense of what would that mean? How do you do that without making a fool of yourself?
LB: Or looking like a goody goody or whatever. … That’s what we do as Badgers. That’s what we stand for is that we take care of each other, we don’t let anybody else fall victim to anything and that we are willing to take a stand. If we do that, I really think we can move the needle on this. That’s what the “It’s On Us” campaign is about, is that it it is about us as a community coming together, but i think it holds true for alcohol as well.
BH: As a follow up to that question is the responsible action bill. It failed to pass in April and the university was pretty outspoken about saying its unnecessary on this campus and it’s already in its own bylaws. What do you think would be an appropriate level of state involvement in this matter, if any?
LB: Do you want me to answer? Because if I respond you might not like it.
RB: Go ahead. I can always disagree.
LB: Well I would just like to point out, and you can do your research as good researchers should, look at the last time the alcohol tax was increased in this state. Because we could solve your issues for tuition, my issues with regard to alcohol education if we increased —what we have here is a beer barrel tax where most states have a beer can or bottle tax — the beer barrel tax by one penny.
RB: And I should note when we talk about evidence, this is one where there is actually substantial amount of evidence in the extent to which underage drinking and abusive drinking actually is correlated with the price of alcohol.
LB: It’s the truth. I don’t think anybody would notice if on a six pack it went up six cents. I’m pretty much guaranteeing no one would know that, if we moved from a barrel tax to a bottle or can tax, and if we increased it by one cent.
BH: So if no one would notice, then, would it make a difference?
LB: It would make a difference to funding level.
BH: Have you talked to state lawmakers about this and are you considering any sort of action on that end?
RB: We haven’t been actively pushing this at this point with state lawmakers. I mean, I think it hasn’t been a conversation that has been too likely in the state of Wisconsin.
BH: How effective is the responsible action policy at UW?
LB: We have a responsible action guidelines … Those are currently in place and have been in place for three [or more] years. I would actually go to the “It’s On Us” campaign and say that I would really hope you wouldn’t need a guideline to demonstrate your care for your friend. It actually makes me a little bit saddened to think, “Oh we have to have a guideline that says we’ll absolve you of your responsibility of drinking so that you would take care of your friend.” It makes me actually, like I said, a little bit sad. But we have it in place. I will tell you, I’m not sure I can tell you one instance where it’s been used.
RB: I would say the responsible action legislation last year, as you know, almost uniformly, police opposed that, because they thought that it went too far in one direction in terms of getting people byes … if they reported something on someone else. There were situations where police did want the opportunity, so that was a big issue on that. It was an issue for our police here, as well. It’s not that there is no legislation of that sort that wouldn’t be useful. I think a lot of folks felt that particular legislation wasn’t as well written as it should be.
LB: And I do think it applied only to students, so then somebody who was like 19 and wasn’t a student, they would be held to a different standard, so i think it really was … it was weak legislation.
BH: We see all sorts of rankings about, you know, academics and stuff like that, but we also see a bunch of party rankings. How do you guys feel about Madison, in a way, having this reputation of a party school?
RB: So i like the fact that our alums think back to their time in Madison as, among other things, they talk about what they learned here, they talk about the friends they made, but they also had a good time here. That is important for where you’re going to come to college. I am not happy about our rankings on some of these that really emphasize particularly stuff that involves extensive drinking. I mean, the Playboy ranking really is not a ranking I want to be high on. I think there’s ways that this can be a fun place. Who said that they came here because they liked sailing? There’s a lot of good things that go on around here. We don’t have to drink to excess in order to have a good time. If you do, there’s a problem.
To no Badger’s surprise, Mifflin, Freakfest reign on list of top college traditions
LB: It was interesting. I was meeting with the young alum earlier this fall who said when the Playboy ranking specifically came out, that they were razzed at their place of employment. I just worry that it devalues the UW-Madison degree, and is that what we want? The whole idea is that in his place of work and his office, it was like, “You’re not that smart. You come from a Playboy list school.”
I would hope that’s not what we end up being known for, but instead we’re known for students who will stand up for each other, this pride that runs so deep throughout this campus, the energy on a football Saturday, the excitement that our students demonstrate when they go out and volunteer in the community. Those are things that I would love us to be known for, the concept of being a part of cutting edge research, learning things that aren’t yet in books. Those are the things that, I think, I want our students to shout from the mountain tops and not allow some ranking to interfere.
RB: Those are the things that I hear from alums when they look back is to what did they learn and where did they actually get something from this place. It’s those sort of experiences that you always hear about.
BH: In terms of the value of the degree you’ve been very outspoken about making UW-Madison the competitive and premier institution that it is. Now, a year in, how is your perspective on how to address that changed, or has it?
RB: Well, I don’t know if it has. I would hope I have a more specific implementation plan around certain things. As you may know, one of the things we’ve started this year is we’ve really tried to step up our communication with the state about what the value of this institution is to the state, both in terms of a source of skilled labor, but even more so because I think this is what people don’t understand: Of course they know we graduate well-skilled people but what the value of having a first rate research institution is to the state and its economy and the companies that exist here, and communicating that to the state I think is important.
I think being more visible in the national conversation and more present in the national higher education conversation is important. One, we did some restructuring, for instance, in our office of research with the grad school so we had more resources available for someone to really be a leader in terms of the research conversations that reflects the school, that gets enormous amounts of research dollars.
So, you know, there’s the external marketing piece that I don’t think Wisconsin has done as well as some other schools do. As I’ve said, I’m from the upper Midwest. I know the culture of “we don’t talk about ourselves very much here.” We need to talk about ourselves more because we’ve got some really great things here, and I’m trying to put in place some ways in which word about all the good things about the University of Wisconsin will get out a little bit more visibly and publicly than it has. The other piece of it is all the other things we’re doing on campus and making sure that we stay on the cutting edge of research and that we have great educational programs.
DC: We are in the middle of a gubernatorial election. Do you have a stance either way on what each candidate would do for the university?
RB: I’m going to be very happy to work with whoever the governor of the state of Wisconsin is. Whoever that is, I’m hoping it’s someone who would — and I think this is true of both candidates — who understand the value of education and of the higher education system in the state of Wisconsin.
DC: Do you think there would be differences in implementations of policies?
RB: You know, I don’t think that I’m the appropriate person to comment on that. You can look at the two campaigns and see what they say about higher education. But I will work happily with anyone who is elected.
DC: Last year when you met with student media, you talked about how you wanted to become more involved with people on the other end of State Street. So far, have you seen a shift in UW-state relations?
RB: So, a number of things have happened. I will say that I spend a lot of time on the other end of State Street or meeting them even out in their districts because I traveled around the state quite a bit this last year, as well, and in many cases I met with legislators locally or in their office or I’ve had legislators over breakfast at Olin House at my residence a number of days. I don’t know what the numbers are. I think I’ve met with some 115 or 120 state legislators over the years. I’ve really wanted to work at this because anyone who’s in a more political environment knows that personal relationships really matter in that environment.
I will also note that the new president of the [UW System] Ray Cross, who started last February, has really made an effort as well to reach out, and I think that’s helpful as well for all of us within the higher education system. So, two things happened this spring that I think were a sign of improved relations. One, the fund balances issue, which blew everything up a year-and-a-half ago, the [Legislature’s] finance committee set a very specific set of rules and regulations about how we report these balances, what they need to know, what we need to do. I mean in some sense, I hope it’s put the issue behind us. It’s clear agreement on everyone’s part about, with the Legislative Audit Bureau’s guidance, what is it that we need to be showing everyone and what does that mean. That, I thought, was a good sign.
The other thing that happened this spring is again a year-and-a-half ago we were set to implement, to put our own HR system in place, so we were no longer in the state human resources system. The problem here is the state system is not necessarily very well designed for the job titles and the roles that you have on a big research campus. So we were going to get that discretion. That got pulled away in the upset over reserves, and it was supposed to be implemented [more than] a year ago in July. They told us in June [it wasn’t] going to happen. The appropriate committee came back and has now given us the ability to move forward with that at beginning of the next budget cycle. I worked hard on that one to try to persuade people that this was important to the university, would let us run more effectively, and that they should trust us on this one. so the fact that they gave us that approval, I also considered to be a good sign. There’s a lot of discussions we’re going to have this coming year on budgets and where that’s going to go, but I think we are on a pretty good track.
BH: What about on the federal level? The Cap Times just did a thing on Ben Miller in DC. There’s sequestration cuts, [National Institutes of Health] funding, the Higher Education Act. What kind of priorities are you setting at the federal level?
RB: Ben was just hired this past year, so we really started last fall, this federal office. We had had a federal relations person. They were here in Madison. And I thought it was really important to have people on the ground in Washington DC in part because I want Wisconsin to be part of both the conversation that happens in the House and Senate around policy issues, as well as the conversation that’s going on inside agencies since a third — more than a third of our budget comes from federal funding, and we really have to care what the agency priorities are and where they’re going.
Our biggest concern by far is federal research dollars. At what level are those approved, and what are the specific policies involving how they’re paid out, and so we’ve been very heavily involved in the budget debates. The budget bill did not get signed, no surprise, hasn’t happened for quite a few years so we’re under a continuing resolution. But we’ve actually ended up, I think, and it’s not just Wisconsin but working with a coalition of other universities, as well, with some reasonably good proposals for research funding should Congress come back after the election and actually pass the appropriations bills. They’re at pretty good levels. If they stay with the CR, the continuing resolution the whole year, we won’t get any increases. We will get what we got last year.
The research dollars have been up and down in recent years, and that’s really hard for our researchers who have labs they’ve got people they hired, undergraduates, graduate students, post docs, to not have a steady stream of funding, to be uncertain whether you’re going to get renewed or whether you’re going to have to wait six months until when your money runs out or the renewal comes through. That’s a problem, so we’re really trying to communicate that, particularly to our DC delegation from Wisconsin and why they need to support this.
BH: Do you think they understand that? I mean, we’ve got Paul Ryan, a pretty important person on budgeting issues. Do you think the delegation understands the message that you guys have been putting out?
RB: We’ve actually had some pretty strong support in our delegation. Mark Pocan here locally has been a very strong supporter of this. Tammy Baldwin, our senator, has actually done a number of things, very, very helpful to try to stabilize and have a good level of federal funding. There are people elsewhere around the state, as well, who’ve been actively involved in this debate. It’s a pretty good delegation on this issue.
But if we don’t talk to them about the concerns and give them the anecdotes and tell them sort of what’s happening in the higher education system in Wisconsin and why it matters to their state, it’s not that they would be opposed but they become more proactive when they understand what the benefits are to the state of Wisconsin. And for that, we need to be there talking to them.
BH: I wanted to ask too about voter ID. The university’s been handing out IDs. Do you think that’s all going well and do you have any concerns about whether there’ll be any confusion among students with the additional document that they have to bring to the polls? Do you have any concerns on that?
LB: Well I hope not. I know that we’ve gotten the word out on a variety of different venues and every time you walk up or down you should be asked if you are registered to vote because I know that students are really committed to getting this information out.
The IDs have been up and going since [two weeks ago] … It costs you nothing, and so whether or not you’re in question, should you get it or not? Get it. It costs you nothing but a few minutes. It’s done very, very quickly.
RB: And the message I’d love for all of you to get out if you write articles on this is do it now. Please do not wait [until] the day before or the day of the election when the lines will be very long. Get it now so you’re ready when Election Day comes if you plan to vote.
LB: Enrollment verification is also needed. That’s up on MyUW, and so you can access that really quickly as well.
BH: Maybe I’ve missed this but what kind of outreach efforts is UW-Madison doing?
LB: You mean you didn’t read my email? Are you confessing here?
BH: I’ve seen a couple of things, but is there like a video or a marketing campaign going on?
LB: There is a video. There is a marketing campaign. Both have been tweeted out. Come on, you follow me!
RB: There are student groups on campus that are really working with us and helping on this, as well.
LB: But [we do have a website with more information] vote.wisc.edu.
RB: I will say, this is one where, everybody picks up one of your two publications, over a week and reads it or looks at it at least, so anything you can do to help get the word out on this is really useful.
BH: I wanted to talk a little bit about the growing class sizes, admission class sizes. How is the university dealing with bringing in more students? We talked with, I think it was Mark Pocan [or Scott Resnick] who said that dorm prices were rising.
RB: We actually are down a little this year over last year … We’ve had three higher number years and plan to stay at about this level. This year, it’s down by somewhere between 200 and 300 students compared to last year. That’s sort of noise given the total numbers.
As you know, we’ve built some new dorms. I think we probably [have] the right capacity dorms for this size. The other thing we’ve been doing over the last four or five years is we’ve been increasing the number of teachers in those big intro classes to reduce bottlenecks. And actually, we have made those classes more accessible because of that. We’ve been working to improve advising, and we’ve actually brought down time to graduation. So I think that there’s not a concern about size right now from what I know is going on in the numbers.
I don’t know what he was talking about in terms of dorm prices, and he might have been talking about broader numbers than just Madison. Our prices do tick up a little every year and they certainly did this year. I believe this is true that we have if it’s not the lowest, it’s one of the very lowest room and board prices in the Big Ten. And we are hardly the cheapest community in the Big Ten to live in. So we’ve actually been, I think, incredibly responsible in managing prices for students who live on campus.
BH: And on the topic of incoming classes, I noticed your last blog post about diversity. Can you expand a little bit about that?
RB: You want to talk about diversity in the incoming class or diversity more broadly on campus?
BH: Both. You can talk about both.
RB: This was actually one of our most diverse classes. … I think we’re at around 10 percent of historically disadvantaged minorities in this class, which is a very strong number for us, particularly in the state of Wisconsin, where we’re a little minority challenged around here. It’s also more diverse class in terms of international backgrounds. We have people from more countries than we’ve seen otherwise. So the freshman class looks pretty good on this dimension.
One thing that I’ve been going around talking about diversity in a number of different places and I just want to say diversity is not about we want to feel good or we want to do something here that people tell us we should be doing. Diversity is fundamentally about the mission of education.
If you ask what people get when they go away to college, there’s a whole bunch of answers to that. But one of the answers is they go into an environment where they meet a whole bunch of people who aren’t like them and aren’t like their families, who come from different backgrounds, different experiences, different parts of the country, different parts of the world, think differently about gender identity or about religion or politics. That interaction with a whole bunch of different people, whether it’s your classmate or a staff member or your professors, is a really key part of the educational process because I can promise you, any of you wherever you go work are going to be in very diverse environments over the next 40 years in this global economy.
And making sure that we have students who have had those diverse experiences and know how to work with and get along with and even live with at times depending on who your roommates are, people from very different backgrounds is a really important part of what the experience here at Wisconsin should be about. So I take diversity as a core educational mission.
There was a committee this last year of students, staff, faculty and community members who reviewed the diversity on campus, wrote a diversity framework document that was released in May. That document had a whole bunch of recommendations at a pretty high level. It was sort of goals for the university that we should be looking at. It wasn’t an implementation plan [where] you should go do one, two and three.
What we’re doing this fall and this information, I think, is just getting posted is we are building the implementation plan. There’s a lot of recommendations in this report. We’re trying to prioritize the recommendations, say, “What things can we just do? What things do we need to think about further and how do we think about them?” And we’re appointing six task forces of depending on what the area is, students, staff faculty, to look at areas such as faculty staff hiring, culture issues, areas where we want them to take some of the recommendations in the report and say, “OK this is what the university is doing. Here’s where there are some gaps. Here’s where they can improve. Here are some explicit recommendations around how you move forward on these recommendations in the next year or two.”
LB: There’s a student town hall meeting specifically designed to hear from you all, so it’d be great if you would be there. There were 30 recommendations, I might add. So it’s not like a small number. It’s 30.
RB: And you’ve got to do some prioritizing on this. You can’t do 30 things at once, and that’s OK. There’s many of these recommendations that overlap. So you can work on several of them at the same time.
DC: Do you have any sort of timeline?
RB: For these six groups, they’ve been told to report out by the end of this semester at the latest, so that we actually can start implementing things. There are a few [of] what I think are more “do it” type of recommendations that we are trying to just put in place. … For instance, there’s some recommendations here around establishing a better curriculum of [ethnic studies], and we should review that curriculum. … That’s one of the recommendations. Do we have the most effective set of courses there? And another related recommendation is to try to build a certificate in ethnic studies. So you need to get on campus that work on this, the faculty, staff, student committees together to look at those recommendations and think about: Does it make sense to do these, and how would you do them if you wanted to, and what are their recommendations.
LB: And that’s not a short term.
RB: That’s probably one of the longest term things because it takes a while to change curriculum and get teachers and classes in place. But I’d like to be in a place early next year where we know what are the things we’re going to really push to try to accomplish over the next year or two and be able to lay those out, and talk very specifically about this is what we’re doing and the timeline on which we’re doing them.
DC: In terms of those “do it” kind of items, do you have examples of some of those?
LB: Implementing more award for our staff of color and for their marginalized populations, for our faculty, staff and students. How are we making sure that we’re recognizing the achievements that are on our campus and kind of heralding them? That’s one example. I think that there’s also looking at the staffing structures that are currently in place. … There’s some of those things that will be done internally that, as the chancellor said, just do it or check them off. I think we have that in place to make those happen.
DC: And are those more staff centered or more student centered?
RB: There’s a whole set of issues, and I think these six task forces we’re creating, some will be more focused on student related issues such as the curricular one. Some are much more focused on staff or faculty hiring or training. There’s the whole culture issue which I think stretches across all of these and is very, very central to how do you create a culture across campus that is open and welcoming to incredibly diverse populations.
LB: The report is online, so you can review it yourself and kind of make your own sense of it. But I think some of them are pretty obvious that you’d be like, “Oh that’s probably one that the chancellor was talking about [and] we need to get that one done.” Some of them, and we’ve used the ethnic studies as an example, I think the recruitment of more staff and faculty, specifically again not a short-term one but a long-term one.
RB: And I should say we’ve had some real successes on the recruitment among historically disadvantaged groups for faculty in particular. I know that this year we had a very strong presence in our new faculty of people of African-American and Latino background. … There’s a lot of stuff going on on campus already. I think three or four years ago, they established a fund to provide incentives to departments that could identify really first-rate potential faculty who are of a historically disadvantaged background and to help cost share with departments to bring people in. If a department is a target of opportunity but didn’t have a funding line we wanted to try to encourage them to think about that anyway if there really is an opportunity to bring someone here. We’ve been pretty successful at that and one of the things I did was that money ran out after three years and I renewed that money for another three years. That was one of the sort of “just do it” type things to make sure it keeps going.
DC: There was talk last year about merging four of the ethnic studies certificates and making it into one bigger department. I think a lot of it was for financial reasons. Is that a continuing conversation going forward?
RB: I think you’re going to have to ask the L&S dean about that because this is one that really was inside the liberal arts college, and the dean was the one who was running that issue and not me.
BH: Going back to relations between the university and the state, Tommy Thompson a couple of days ago said that UW leadership could be doing a bit more to reach out to state lawmakers. I know you’ve said you’ve talked to more than half of them.
RB: I’m not sure what more I could’ve done this past year.
BH: Is there anything more that we can be doing and are they getting that message? We’ve got a budget session coming up next year. Do you think they’re understanding?
RB: There’s going to be a lot of competition for state dollars. There’s always more increases needed in the Medicaid program … that’s largely state funded, the transportation trust fund is in trouble, that’s going to need dollars, K-12 is going to come in with big dollar requests. Legislators have a lot of stuff on their plate and you have to tell them why the higher education system is worthy of their attention given everything else that is there.
The UW System has come in with a $94 million budget request. That’s a strong request. The governor asked all agencies to come in with flat dollars and the system decided and we all decided together that we were going to do that, but it’s a tough budget environment. The revenues have been coming in at a disappointing level, and it’s just not clear how this budget debate will play out.
I know that I’m committed, and I know the president of the system is committed to doing everything we can to communicate about the importance of this budget funding to our universities. One of the major concerns I have is we were given a pretty substantial budget cut last time around as a result of that reserves debate and we did not take the budget cut. We filled the hole with our reserves.
If there is no new budget funding this year, we will have to take the cut effective next year and that will mean a 4 percent cut, if I did this across the board, to all of our educational programs. That’s a big cut for a university like this and it’s one reason why I’m hopeful there will be some new funding in the state budget because I would like to be cutting less than 4 percent if at all possible.
BH: Last year, the Joint Finance Committee co-chairs called for former UW System President Kevin Reilly to be fired. Do you think that relations have changed fundamentally since then [and] maybe we can get more funding for the university system?
RB: A lot of that happened before I came, I think that Ray Cross, the new president, has been doing a great job in terms of relations at the other end of State Street … and he’s very good at that. So I think we have better communication, but better communication alone is not going to get you a state budget, if our revenues are down and everyone else needs money at the same time.
So there is going to be the standard budget fight over how you allocate scarce dollars across a whole number of places — all of which are deserving and were obviously going to come in make the case. I hope that we can get some of our alumni involved. I hope that the Associated Students of Madison Legislative Affairs Committee can get involved in this. I am hoping that there may be a few leaders in the business community who will make the case to the state Legislature about the importance of Madison and the rest of the higher education system to the state and the need to really fund it at good level.
BH: I know you’ve talked about this in the past, but the governor called for an extension of the tuition freeze. What are your thoughts on that?
RB: So we are very sympathetic to the need to make the University of Wisconsin affordable to people from the state of Wisconsin. I really understand that. I’m an economist [so] I would argue a tuition freeze ought to mean an increase at the rate of inflation, that’s just me, and I don’t think we’re going to get that. So I don’t have a problem with freezing undergraduate in-state tuition, [but] you can’t do that forever. Prices do go up at some point [and] you’re going to have to raise tuition to reflect that.
I would say two things about this freeze, one is that there are prices out there that I shouldn’t be subsidizing in particular for out-of-state students fornd I think we’re not at market price right now. We’re well below a lot of some of our competitors. I have students who turn us down for admission and go to universities where they pay a whole lot mo some of my professional schools. They are much more places that should be market price, are in tuition. So I would like to look at some tuition levels, not the in-state undergraduate, and have some options to try to make some changes there.
The other thing I would say is that I really want a deeper pool of financial aid dollars. We have fewer financial aid dollars in this state in higher education than most of our competitor states. I could make that case to the state government, but this is also one, as I’m going into a fundraising campaign with our alums, that I plan to make strong simply because I think our alums are people who would understand the need for financial aid, and I think might be very willing to give us some additional dollars to deepen that pool. I’m working on a number of fronts on keeping the university affordable while still being able to finance all the things that go on around here.
DC: When you say market price, can you kind of give me an idea about where we are now and what market price would be?
RB: I can tell you right now the top of the Big Ten is the University of Michigan which I think is [more than] $40,000 a year, this is tuition not room and board. We’re 26. So we are $14,000 below University of Michigan. Now I don’t want to be at the top of the list here but we are $2,000, I think more than $2,000, below the average Big Ten school. We are not at the bottom end of quality in the Big Ten. We compete with Michigan, we compete with a number of good privates and I think validly though our out-of-state students, we can be charging them more.
Now I can go talk to the regents and we can discuss what’s reasonable here, and I think with anything you do you want to phase in over time. You’re not going to want to jump out-of-state tuition by huge amounts in any one year, but I do think we are pricing ourselves much below where we should be. Similarly, I can give you some examples with other professional schools. Our vet medical school, I find this particularly amazing, our out-of-state tuition for our vet medical school is below in-state tuition at the University of Illinois. So we have students from Illinois who come here because it’s cheaper than going in-state for them. I don’t understand that at all, that makes no sense to me.
These schools should be priced at market which is where their peers are and that would really help on a lot of financial fronts and allow me to maintain lower prices for in-state and undergraduates because then I’m not subsidizing all these other students who are in slightly different markets.
DC: Is there a midlevel in the Big Ten you’d like to get down to for out of state?
RB: I don’t know that I’m ready to put a specific number on it. I don’t want to be at $40,000 but increasingly, there are a number of schools that are around the $34,000-$36,000 range. I think that’s really — with a number of step functions — where we should be aiming. By the time we get there, it’ll have gone up another $10,000, and you have to put some of that additional money, plow it back into financial aid. Because you [cannot have] students who need aid, who are coming from outside the state, who you want to admit, but may not be able to afford this. So anytime you raise tuition, some amount of that goes back into deepening the financial aid pool.
BH: Going off that, how can UW, while keeping the cost, still seek out international and out-of-state students and be accessible?
RB: There are good number of out-of-state and international students who can afford higher tuition because I know where they go when they turn us down, so I don’t think we’d be seriously threatening our admissions pools by raising out-of-state tuition. That said, I want to repeat again, I do need to be able to attract low-income student both internationally and out-of-state to the University of Wisconsin. We want that. We want that for diversity purposes. We want that because I don’t want to be a university that only attracts the rich kids. It sets the wrong environment here. So that’s … the issue is not what’s your market price, but the issue is [a combination of] what’s your market price and how much are you able to subsidize that for certain groups of students. So if I could raise prices and raise financial aid, to me that’s the ideal world because then the people who can afford higher prices pay it and those who can’t, get the additional financial aid.
BH: I want to ask about a headline from Vox.com. It said Harvard University is better at admitting low-income students than public universities raising tuition prices. What are your thoughts on that and how that affects low-income students?
RB: I found that an odd article and probably not worth arguing about. Even though the title is about admissions, the article wasn’t about admissions. It was about students who came so “matriculants” as opposed to … so it wasn’t about who you were admitting. It was about who actually came. And it picked out a relatively few number of very wealthy schools which, who basically don’t have to charge tuition at all from what I can see, and said that they were really able to subsidize a substantial share of low-income students. You know, I wish I could do that.
I don’t think our admissions numbers look as different. Even though the article is about admissions, it is true that there’s a number of students who I don’t have enough financial aid to bring here and who would need more financial aid if they were going to come here. Some of them don’t go to college at all, some of them go to other state schools in the state of Wisconsin, some of them will be able to get offers from some private schools with substantial financial aid. It’s a pretty small number of students who get to those private schools because there aren’t very many of them who can afford those sorts of subsidies.
In that sense it was an odd article because it sort of implied there was hundreds of thousands of students going there and none of them were coming to the publics. If you look at the absolute numbers there’s a lot more low-income people here than there are in the privates but that’s just because we’re so much bigger. Most people who come to college are going to end up in the one of the publics, and our ability to fill the need gap for low-income students is important. We do it for a good number of students. I just can’t do it for everyone in the way that Harvard or Princeton can.
BH: That article linked to a report that pointed to Oregon basically wanting to attract these elite students and they talked about how that’s impacted low-income students. Are you concerned that we are attracting these elite students and we won’t get the financial aid for them or are you concerned about what they called “an arms race” between public universities?
RB: I’m not sure what you’re saying. There are a number of publics that are increasingly admitting more and more higher-income students and fewer low income students because as their state dollars shrink, they don’t have financial aid and they need those tuition dollars. Wisconsin has by and large tried not to do that, and I think it’s very important that we stay [that way] certainly for within the state. My goal inside the state and — we are nowhere near where we should be on this — is that any student who is admitted here should come — if they’re going to come or not come, let it not be about the cost.
I would like to be able to fund full need for any student in-state who has the quality to be admitted at the University of Wisconsin. There may be other reasons why they don’t come but it shouldn’t be because the price. I cannot do that right now. Some of that is because state provides fewer financial aid dollars in this state than elsewhere. Some of it is because I need to work harder on raising some private gifts and other scholarships, but to me, that is really important in-state. Out-of-state, I also want those sorts of funding. That’s not quite as high a priority there but it’s not an unimportant priority. I’ve got to have some scholarships for out-of-state students who could not afford otherwise to come here because I want that mix of students whether it’s overseas and what they bring or whether it’s elsewhere in the United States.
DC: So you were talking about how pricing and market value. How else would you determine market value besides just pricing and how do we strike a balance between universities who need money and ways to potentially make business but also an educational institution?
RB: So the problem is top educational institutions provide a lot of resources. Putting together volunteer experiences through places like the Morgridge Center for Public Service. There’s always a trade-off here. What set of problems can you provide and at what cost? We’re a pretty lean university if you look at our administrative costs and what number of staff we have doing things. I’m proud of that because I think as a public university that is our responsibility. But you’re always on the balance of where can you save costs and where do you really need to provide programs. Look at the new dorms we built. Those rooms aren’t big. They aren’t much bigger than the old dorms. We didn’t build high-end … the closets are bigger. That’s the main difference; kids come with more stuff.
So we do try to make choices that are fiscally responsible, but rising inequality says that high school people’s salaries are going up faster than the average salary in this country. The university is filled with high skill people. If you want to hire top scientists, you pay a lot more for them now than you did 20 years ago, and it’s gone up at a rate much higher than inflation. If I’m going to be a competitor as a first rate university I have to be making the same offers that they’re making in Shanghai and in Germany and in Cambridge, Massachusetts to attract those scientists here. So that is driving my costs up, and I have to find a way to fund that or I give up on being a first-rate research institution. So this has to be at both ends. I’ve got to find ways to keep this university affordable, particularly to Wisconsin residents. At the same time, I want to keep this university at a level of excellence and reputation that it has held for 165 years. That’s a tough job. And we have been talking about various ways to do that.
BH: I wanted to ask, you’ve seen these Race to Equity reports. What’s the university’s role in or how much can it do in addressing these disparities in the city of Madison and Wisconsin?
RB: First of all, I think big public universities have been at the center of trying to provide opportunity to people from middle-income and lower-income families for centuries. You’ve seen where our students come from here and what their families’ incomes are and the opportunities that you get after you receive a degree here are very large. And so we are doing a lot just by what we’ve always been doing to try to open up opportunities for people who might not otherwise have them and who will never be able to pay for private school tuition.
So that’s comment number one, but if you’re talking about the city of Madison, let me say a couple of things — and I take this very seriously. We have an enormous presence in this city. There is always more that we can be doing and the question is how do we prioritize that. So Badger Volunteers we have 1,300 students out there, the majority from which are actually tutoring at the schools and that’s one way to address this issue. That’s not an answer by itself but certainly those volunteers are helpful on the problem.
One of the things that I did this past winter because I took this Race to Equity debate so seriously, is [allocate] about $1,500,000 of my discretionary funds — and I don’t have much in the way of discretionary funds — and I turned that into a three-year project for the School of Education to partner with the Madison Public School District to try to say, “What can we do together to try and address the Race to Equity concerns?” The Madison Public School District actually raised money through CUNA, the Credit Union of North America, so they brought matching funds to the table and the [School of] Education and MPSD have put together a program around, particularly, training for new teachers to give them more culture competencies, to work with a more heterogeneous group of students in the classroom, to give them mentoring so they can deal with issues they may not have faced while student teaching, learning about being a teacher. We have a lot of teacher drop-outs, and they often occur in the schools with the most problems. So this program which I think is called Forward Madison is a very direct response to this whole Race to Equity. Is it a complete answer itself? Of course not. The university has to keep engaging in this conversation, but I take this responsibility, particularly in this community because this is where we all live, to be very important.
