Departing Chancellor David Ward offers his insights on how far we’ve come and where we’re going

Chancellor David Ward will be returning to the faculty this January after nearly eight years as chancellor. In this special section of Wisconsin Week, we take a look back and a look ahead, beginning with these remarks from the chancellor. (More on the Ward years)

This academic year marks yet another milestone in the exciting and energizing history of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. We are entering a new century, an occasion that offers an ideal time to reflect on our legacy and consider how to build on our achievements in education, research and outreach.

We are committed to continually review our mission “to create, integrate, transfer and apply knowledge.” Through the recent process of self-study we have learned from each other and, together, charted new and creative options for meeting opportunities and maintaining long-standing traditions.

At this stage, as I prepare to step aside as chancellor, it seems appropriate to reflect on the last 10 years, and look forward to the next 10 years as we create a future for the university. Let me briefly summarize the progress we have made during the past decade and outline our most recent efforts to implement new approaches.

It has been a decade in which we have seen more change in higher education than in any time since World War II – and in many areas. It has been a decade in which maintaining the reputation of the institution at the top tier of universities in higher education has been extremely difficult.

We have faced challenges in obtaining resources, in the new area of instructional technology, in the demographics of our students, and of course, the place of the university in what increasingly has become a global village. We are held more accountable for what we do, especially by those who provide funding to the university. And finally, I think there have been changes in the endeavor of intellectual labor.

As we look over the campus today – in the area of genomics, the biological sciences, cultural studies, women’s studies, international studies – there is remarkable reconfiguration going on. Some of this has been within departments and sometimes among and between departments.

I think we underestimate the power of this intellectual division of labor to change what we are as an institution. We tend to emphasize resources, when in fact what we do, and the advancement of learning itself – brings great change as well.

To the degree there has been any strategy on this campus – and there are those outside the university who think that university life and strategy just don’t go together – it has been made apparent through the accreditation process.

Future Directions
In 1989, coming out of a self-study by faculty, staff and students, there was a document known as “Future Directions,” which was a sort of indictment of this campus – a self-indictment, particularly of the quality of undergraduate education, particularly of the university’s relationship to the state, and in a variety of other areas where it was felt we were simply not coping very well with our future.

Out of that, we tried to update our goals and to set a course for the university. And eventually, I was brave enough to suggest I had a vision for the campus, again based on the feedback from the self-study and various responses to the accreditation review of 1989.

In 1995, I introduced “A Vision for the Future.” At that time, I said, “We have a tradition of excellence upon which to build and much to preserve, but I believe it is time for the university to start doing some things differently, not just doing the same things better.”

I am pleased to report that our schools and colleges embraced this idea, examined their current environments and identified how they might do things differently. During the past few years, dozens of innovative ideas have been introduced, discussed, revised and implemented. Some of these grassroots efforts and their results are summarized elsewhere in this issue of Wisconsin Week. While by no means comprehensive, the results demonstrate the level of commitment and innovation that pervades the campus today.

Strategy yields results
What results can we show from our efforts to strategically manage our way through the 1990s?

• Clearly, we have done a better job of focusing on undergraduates. And we’ve clearly done a better job of persuading the public and the state that knowledge and technology transfer is occurring.
• We updated the physical campus, with more buildings built this decade than the preceding 25 years.
• We have reestablished the niche that we have in the UW System. Unlike many systems, we have a system with an enormous range of missions, and in which the niches occupied by the campuses vary significantly. Unless the system accepts that mission differentiation, it is very difficult for this campus to compete effectively with its peer group, which includes others in the Big Ten and large public research universities.
• And we responded strongly to the resource crisis of the mid-1990s with a public-private investment partnership that helps guarantee a basic level of public financial support for UW–Madison beyond its UW System budget appropriation.

Evidence of our success in more actively managing this complex institution abounds in many corners of campus. Just a few examples:

• Undergraduate research fellowships have provided unique learning opportunities and helped educate the public and lawmakers about the special properties of our undergraduate programming.
• Residential learning communities have elevated the intellectual life of students.
• The new Arts Institute is a center for a broad range of artistic activities on campus and, particularly, a means for collaborating better with artistic life in the city.
• Strategic appointments give departments the power to create new interdisciplinary specialties.
• The flourishing International Institute coordinates international activity at the campus level, advises on international university linkages and partnerships, and manages several cross-college, interdisciplinary initiatives.
• Master’s level capstone degrees provide specifically tailored training and education to liberal arts students who do not go on to a professional degree but want to move forward in their careers.

Finally, in 1999, we underwent the next 10-year accreditation, and again a self-study preceded it. That self-study, called “Targeting Tomorrow” and written by Joe Wiesenfarth, an emeritus professor of English, is a much more strategic document than Future Directions. I think it will provide my successor, and the deans and faculty, some remarkable clues about the options we have in front of us.

“Targeting Tomorrow” represents the future, but it is also built on the efforts of the last decade. It does not set a specific course, but it gives us a strong set of options.

Fiscal challenges remain
But even as we move forward, we are ever mindful of our fiscal challenges. At the bottom of all this is the transformation of our budget. From 1973 to 1997, state support dropped from 40 percent of total budget to 27 percent. This has happened in virtually every state in the nation.

What we now are trying to do is balance out state support with increased private gifts and grants. So we have developed, whether we like it or not, various mosaics of public-private partnerships. We have, for example, the three “stars” of our capital projects program: WisStar, HealthStar and, now, BioStar for the life sciences.

And in terms of operating budgets, the university has always provided a margin of excellence from endowment resources and from the success of faculty in obtaining extramural funding. The key to our future is to guarantee a level of basic support from state appropriations and tuition that, at minimum, equals the average of our peer institutions.

We have taken steps toward that goal with the Madison Initiative, which seeks to get us to the Big Ten median in terms of expenditures. The state has committed, over four years, to put in the $57 million that will get us there.

It seems to me that once we’ve achieved this, the next goal would be to insist that we be in the top quartile of the Big Ten. We must raise that bar.

The Madison Initiative phase one, of which we now are nearly through, comprises five initiatives: strategic hiring, competitive compensation, financial aid, facilities renewal and academic infrastructure.

This initiative made possible, in my view, the most competitive compensation package over the last several years. The Madison Initiative provided a very significant supplement to this campus.

So how do we move forward to phase two of the Madison Initiative? Connecting to “Targeting Tomorrow,” there are four initiatives that we felt were consistent with the self-study and the accreditation: broadening student learning opportunities, enhancing Wisconsin’s economic development, maintaining affordability for students through increased financial aid and continuing the strategic hiring program.

Truly world-class
Like any great research university, we have worked to develop some means of coping with fairly dramatic changes in the 1990s in the nature of the public-private partnership that has made up higher education. What has happened in the last four or five years has been a realignment of a greater degree than perhaps the previous 100 years.

Nevertheless, I think that at UW–Madison, this realignment has been done strategically with excellence in mind, and it has been done to leverage the state to come back into the equation with conviction.

What I see in the Madison Initiative is the return of the state investment in higher education. What I see in BioStar is the return of the state to invest in a great research university.

Finally, something that came to my attention through the accreditation route: This state of modest size and wealth – it is not like Michigan or Illinois or Pennsylvania or California – has nevertheless managed to build and maintain a truly world-class institution. Our vision and priorities reinforce our intention to preserve UW–Madison’s distinguished academic reputation, along with the effects of that stature on the welfare and growth of the state.

I look forward to stepping up to the faculty, feeling that my successor inherits the resources, and in my view, the directions, that set this university to be as good in the first decade of this century as it did when Charles Van Hise set this university on a great course of advancement at the beginning of the past century.