After being recommended for University of Wisconsin’s chancellor early last week, acting U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce, Rebecca Blank shared her goals for the university in a conference call Friday.
Blank emphasized the importance of building relationships for her first year in office, adding she hopes to spend several months meeting campus leadership, staff, faculty and students as well as community and state leadership and those within the UW System’s Board of Regents.
“An important part of this job is really establishing relationships with the key people that you’re going to be working with for the years ahead,” Blank said. “That sort of listening, in turn, creates a good sense of what the agenda is and I feel Wisconsin has a very good set of strategic goals that have been defined.”
By the end of her first year, however, Blank said hopes to be ready to announce a number of priority initiatives for her first four or five years on campus.
A key piece to this, Blank said, would be launching a major fundraising campaign.
Noting such a process will take up a portion of her first year’s work, Blank emphasized such an initiative would incite collaboration between the administration and the UW Foundation, the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
There are four streams of revenue for a place like UW, Blank said, specifying state revenue, tuition, research dollars and donor gifts.
For Blank, launching and strengthening a major campaign around gifts, is the most important factor in increasing revenue streams.
Although sympathetic to Wisconsin’s stagnant incomes, and aware of the importance of UW’s accessibility, Blank said she wants to ensure out-of-state tuition is competitive with UW’s peers. She said there may be reasons to have slightly different tuition, for out-of-state, instate and at the graduate level.
Everyone whose children are admitted to UW in the state of Wisconsin, should be able to be able to attend, Blank said.
Minnesota, however, will not be considered out-of-state in her book, Blank said, citing the reciprocity agreement UW shares with students from Minnesota. She added that the percentages of “true” out-of-state students, not including Wisconsin or Minnesota, is a discussion worth having.
“There’s not a right answer as to what the percentage of out-of-state students should be,” Blank said. “We simply need to stay open to asking whether we’ve got the right number at any point in time.”
Despite noting the financial and diversity-focused advantages to having out-of-state students, Blank said ideally she would want a majority of the university’s open slots to be for qualified instate students.
Given the demographics of the state of Wisconsin, Blank said, it is important to consider geographic, racial, ethnic and international diversity.
“That chance is very important to the student body experience and enhances instate students’ opportunities and what they learn when they come on campus and meet a very different friendship set,” Blank said.
Referencing her past political and economic experience, Blank, who noted she is not a partisan politician, said her work on economic competitiveness is relevant to UW and the chancellor position.
“I would like to believe that I come to this job more as a policy person, rather than someone who’s in politics,” Blank said.
