With the University of Wisconsin System under intense fiscal pressure from the statehouse to cut costs and find efficiencies, the quality of a UW-Madison education is decidedly threatened.

Under the current system of university governance, UW-Madison is lumped into the heap with all other UW System schools when it comes to divvying up pieces of the fiscal pie. Madison, which is responsible for 40 percent of the System’s revenue (through tuition, patents, and licensing), currently receives about 40 percent of the money allocated to the System in the state budget. When state coffers are robust, capital projects, tuition levels, and enrollment projections can remain consistent with planners’ expectations.

UW, for all intents and purposes, is treated much the same as any other state agency.

As it stands now, these and all other UW-Madison expenditures are subject to the political whims of the state legislature and the governor-appointed Board of Regents. While we agree with and generally commend the way the current budget situation is being negotiated, there might be a way to avoid this mess for UW-Madison in the future.

Faculty here are underpaid relative to their peers at Michigan or Berkeley. Faculty turnover is twice that of competitive schools, and a healthy portion of baby-boomer faculty members are expected to retire over the next decade — and new recruitment and retention will come at a cost.

Much as it may seem redundant to point to Michigan again, UM’s status as a charter institution is one of the principle reasons for its success as an academic institution on the national stage.

Chartering the university would place the authority for its governance under a constitution of sorts: a “charter.” Instead of placing control of the university under the political arm of state government, such an arrangement would give the Madison campus much greater financial control — including the ability to take lump sums of state funding while keeping generated revenue for internal use. The university would be free to alter tuition levels, allocate research funding and set enrollment targets. In a nutshell, the school would be responsible for itself.

The benefits of such a system should be obvious. For example, advising is a perennial problem at this campus, but officials can’t rectify the situation because of budget constraints. If UW-Madison were responsible for making spending its own budget, you can bet officials, knowing their jobs could be in jeopardy if the school didn’t draw students, would come up with a way to solve the problem. The same principle could apply to faculty, building, research and every other component of a successful university.

A citizen/alumni board would still have ultimate power over policy, with the chancellor to act as executive: As much as we may criticize him from time to time on points of policy, this place wouldn’t be so bad with John Wiley totally in charge — as opposed to, in this case, a Board of Regents responsible for more than a dozen other schools.