Chancellor Rebecca Blank sat down Monday with The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald and answered questions on a range of student issues. Read The Daily Cardinal's article here. Here’s what your new chancellor had to say:
University and state relations
I was reading your blog post before I came over here, the one about building relationships, and I was wondering whether you think—coming in—do you think relationships are damaged between the university and the state? Because I know that was a really common criticism of Biddy Martin’s tenure with the university and are you finding that you’re rebuilding?
Chancellor Rebecca Blank: The legislature hasn’t been in session, so I’m really just launching in these next several weeks; I’m getting to meet people and to know them. I can’t speak out of any personal conversations I’ve had with anyone yet. Everything I’ve heard is that David Ward really did an excellent job of creating relationships with the legislature, that he was a trusted person, many of them knew him from his previous time. So, I don’t feel like I’m coming into a situation where I have lots of catch-up work to do. On the other hand, it was clear that this was a bad spring, and people particularly seem to be mad at the system more so than mad at us here in Madison. And there are a lot of tensions as a result of that I really need to be sure that I know the leadership both in the governor’s office as well as at the other end of State Street, and that they know me. And feel like we have pretty open lines of communication, and that’s not something you do with one visit. That’s something you do over time, getting to know people, showing up at things they care about, inviting them over to see you, and really building a sense of ongoing communication.
Getting to know you
What are your plans with getting acquainted with the student body and the university?
Blank: My first responsibility for building relationships is here on campus. I’ve spent a lot of the last six few weeks getting to know deans and faculty and staff. I’ve visited every one of the schools and colleges. I wanted to go physically over to where they were as opposed to having the dean come here into my office. I want to see where people live. And it gave me a chance not just to talk to the deans but to meet the staff. And many of those who live in one or two buildings sort of really took me all around the building and introduced me to some of the people who are running projects and doing work there, and that was great. So, now with students coming back this week, I’m doing a number of things this week, I met with the group of students that work with CEO (Center for Educational Opportunity) this morning. I’m going to be going out for several hours on Wednesday and going to some of the dorms and welcoming students and parents as they come back. It’s going to be 95 degrees from what I can tell. And convocation is Friday, which I’m really looking forward to. And I’m hoping I can hang around a little bit afterward and greet people as they come out and say hello. There’s just a series of events: I’ve got a tailgate at my house on Saturday, and I know there’s some students invited to that. This is one where I know there will be a number of groups that I’m meeting with over time in these first couple of weeks. So, just starting to make those connections.
Relationship with student government
During Chancellor Ward’s tenure, there was a strained relationship between the student government and the administration over things like non-allocables, and I was wondering what, coming into this position, what your perspective was on what parts students have over those kinds of things.
Blank: So I admit, nobody’s briefed me on this one, so I’m not going to be able to answer that very well. I do hope that I can work well and in partnership with the student organizations. I’m not so foolish as to say there aren’t going to be tensions, there are always going to be some student demands that I’m just not going to be able to meet, for a whole variety of reasons. And there might be some things that I ask of students that they’re not going to be very happy about. So, I’ve got to take this issue by issue, but it does go back to the same thing I said about the state. I’m not going to agree with everything that’s going on at the state Capitol, and they’re going to do some things that I don’t like, and I’m going to do some things they don’t like. What I want to be sure of is that doesn’t stop communications and that we can keep talking. And make sure that we at least understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, or why you’re doing what you’re doing. And work through that, and when the next issue comes up, start again on trying to create some common ground and some consensus.
Ratings system
Last week President Obama introduced a plan to try to distribute federal financial aid to colleges based on a system of ratings in areas like grants and student loans. The idea would be to give more grants and loans to students who attend higher-rated universities. What’s your take on this idea?
Blank: I mean this is one where the devil is always in the details, right. There is no rating system out there right now. I believe that yes, the Department of Education under Arne Duncan’s oversight—just look at various alternative rating systems and see what they can put together. This is going to be very hard to do. The higher education institutions are incredibly diverse. Metrics are often ... some metrics we have that are pretty good, like time to graduation, that’s a pretty firm metric. Other metrics, we don’t have very good metrics of, like value added. They're really hard to get, people have been trying to work on value added metrics in the K-12… it's really a hard thing to do.
I think my main concern is that we engage with the other parts of higher education—with the Department of Education—to think about this. In general, I really believe that higher education has probably been more closed than it should be to performance measurement and to holding itself accountable. You know it’s always easier not to. But we do have to be serious about making sure we really have credible metrics that measure what we’re really doing here. You know that’s not going to happen easy or quickly. And if we have such metrics, tying federal funding to that make some sense. But I want to get to a point where we’ve got a rating system that everyone really agrees is one that measures the right things. I don’t have any problems with this, but we do have to do it right if we try to do this.
Labor dispute issues
Kind of shifting gears, one of the things that there was a lot of pressure about ... Ward right before he left office was with two particular labor disputes: the university’s contracts with both Palermo’s and adidas. And with a lot of pressure from students and members of the community. I was just wondering how, you know as students are getting back and I’m sure that will all ramp up again, how you plan to proceed on those labor dispute issues.
Blank: I’m hoping that the Palermo’s issue has largely gone away. The NLRB, as you know, came out with a ruling. The NLRB is the National Labor Relations group here—is the right group in terms of doing a full investigation and overseeing this. Since that ruling came down, my understanding is that Palermo’s has come to an arrangement for either rehiring or providing compensation to the—I think there were 11 people left, too. So I’m hoping that that resolves the Palermo’s issue. I’ll hear otherwise if it doesn’t, right.
The adidas one, there are going to be an ongoing set of issues around labor standards in all the contracts that we sign, and I know that. You know we have responsibility to make sure that we are signing contracts in ways that there is some oversight, and I know we’re part of the Workers’ Rights Consortium that does oversight over companies. And I think belonging to those sorts of groups is exactly the right thing to do.
It is also true that I will say, we do sign contracts and those contracts do have legal force. And we can’t cancel contracts. Often times, and I understand the appreciation, something happens and students want us to act immediately. You do have to go through an investigation. You have to make sure the facts are right, and often early information is hazy. And then you have to make sure you’re not. I have the responsibility of not putting the university at real risk in my ability because we cancel the contract and have a countersuit that’s gonna face us. My general impression is that Wisconsin, like a number of the other [universities], have taken these issues pretty seriously. You know we’ve worked as closely as we can with groups like WRC. And there is a real concern that we work with companies that are doing the right thing in terms of labor and business practices. There will continue to be disputes that come up. And I don’t quite know where, again, what people, if anything, are going to be upset about with regards to some of the current contracts, whether it's adidas or something else. We’ll find out, I suspect, in the next few weeks.
Working with students
Say a conflict like this does arise. Do you have plans in place to kind of meet with these groups and try to come up with a solution that directly deals with the students? I know that was one of their previous frustrations.
Blank: There’s two things you want. Most cases, me meeting with them doesn’t accomplish a whole lot. I mean, which is not to say it's not worthwhile for me to listen to their concerns and bring some of my senior executive team in. But then to work this out does mean it involves the lawyers, it may involve the provost, it may involve the chief administrator. The group that works this out is the group that should, on the ground, have the responsibility for making things happen. And I hope that I can set that in place. I’m not going to promise that I’m going to be at all negotiation meetings, that would not be my right role. But again, it’s a matter of making sure that we stay in communication. And sometimes you get to the point—and this does happen on some issues—where you just disagree. That we think we can’t take an action and someone else wants us to take that action. And then move on to the next issue if you can… we’ve got to make sure we here in Bascom Hall listen to the real concerns that the students have and take them seriously. Sometimes that means taking an action that might be different from the action the student originally asked for because again, we have certain constraints on what we can do, but that’s okay.
University and state roles
Another interesting thing I noticed in your blog posts was talking more about what the university does for the state. And I think one of the sticking points in kind of debates during Ward’s tenure at the state level were kind of what is the role that the university should pay to the state. Do you think the university has a duty to be a job creator to the state? Or do you think it's kind of far more than that?
Blank: Well I think it's far more than that—the answer is yes, and we are a public university. We do receive substantial amounts of money from the state, and we’re created in part to provide services to the state.
If you look at the University of Wisconsin, we just look differently than privates. You can tell we’re a public by just looking at what are the schools and colleges here. There’s almost no private universities that have 14 schools and colleges. And we have a nursing school, we have an education school, we have a school of medicine, we have a school of pharmacy.
Somewhere in the state those things have to exist to serve the state and they are rightfully here.
We are fundamentally public and … I love the widespread use of the Wisconsin Idea phraseology to refer to, in some sense, that public responsibility. That we’re not just about thinking great ideas and teaching great things, though we are about that. But we also are about thinking about how those ideas and how that learning relates back to the community around us. And sometimes that’s the nation and the world, and not just the state.
So I’m quite committed to the idea that we have responsibility to the state, that’s just fundamental to our very founding. We do a whole lot in the state already, whether it is the education school and all the work that they do in terms of teacher training and student teachers and all of that. Whether it’s the work that CALS does, you know the agricultural industry and individual farmers, or the medical school, which has clinics all around. And my sense is we’ve not done a very good job of talking about this publicly in recent years. So most people out there aren’t very actively thinking about gosh, I wonder what the University of Wisconsin’s doing in my community. If we don’t tell them, they don’t know. One of the things I hope to do is do a better job of messaging all the ways in which this university affects not just Madison but all of the communities around the state. And you know some of that is through direct programs, some of that is through our impact on the economy. And companies come here because they want the connections with the research university, and they stay here because of that. And we just need to do a better job of talking about this. And to the extent there’s some things we should be doing and we’re not that would be useful to the state—and where we have expertise—we should be engaging in those as well. So my general sense is I want to do a better job of being visible to the state, not just me personally, but the leadership, the deans, the department chairs when they go out that they know how to talk about what are the things that this university is doing depending on what part of the state they’re in. And I do want to actively try to listen in my conversations with state leadership, with community leadership, in trips around the state, to what are some things that people want us to do that we aren’t doing that might make sense and think about that as well.
UW-Madison’s identity in the UW System
Do you view Madison as the flagship of the UW system?
Blank: Absolutely. We’re the largest, we’re the big research university. Absolutely.
Do you think that carries any particular responsibilities to the state?
Blank: We serve the entire state in a way that most of the other colleges don’t. You know, most of the other colleges and universities are more regionally focused. Even Milwaukee, which is clearly closest to us in terms of type and nature, is still much more of a regional institution than a statewide institution. And we are statewide. We have been statewide since the time we were founded. So I do think we have responsibilities that go across the entire state. We’re not just about the five county areas around Dane County, and we can’t be.
On reciprocal tuition agreements
So every year in some form or another, there is talk of getting rid of the reciprocal tuition agreements, especially with Minnesota. And the idea, you know is that it would increase tuition revenue out of state and it would let us focus more on in-state recruiting. Would you be in favor of that?
Blank: You know, I don’t know enough about this. We clearly long had this reciprocal arrangement with Minnesota. My understanding is that there are about equal numbers of students who go both ways. As long as the numbers are balanced, there’s no cost to us, right? You know, if the students who go to Minnesota that would have come here and the students that have come here instead of going to Minnesota and the numbers are equal, it actually doesn’t matter what system you’re under in terms of dollars.
I personally think it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to charge less than Minnesota tuition, I mean for the students who come here. To be honest, I went to the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin is a better school. We shouldn’t be selling ourselves cheaper. The difference is a couple thousand dollars, and that’s something we can work on, in particular with the Minnesota exchange. I think there are a lot of advantages to having these sorts of exchanges with our local neighbors, and I certainly wouldn’t want to start in by saying we should get rid of these. I think we should look at them, and we should make sure they are serving us well, that they are organized the way they should be, but in general, I think they’re very good agreements, for what I know and for what they’ve done for us and for the students of Wisconsin as well, giving them another option.
Affordability and budgets
During the search and screen process, both affordability of the university and budget for the university became buzzwords. Now with the two-year tuition freeze, what initiatives are you putting in place or how do you perceive the balance between affordability and an increased budget?
Blank: The budgets of public universities have become much more complex in the last 20 to 25 years. There was a time where state dollars plus tuition funds funded 80 percent of what we did here. That wasn’t all that long ago—50s, 60s. That’s just not true anymore. States have faced very, very difficult times. The budgets have dropped in every state. This is not just at Wisconsin. One response to that in many states has been higher tuition. And that creates some real problems because you need to have affordable tuition for the residents of states or you certainly don’t have the “public” university.
There are several ways to deal with that, one is to generate other revenue streams. And I think the university has done a really superb job of trying to focus on other revenue streams. Particularly bringing in federal research dollars. And as I’m sure you all know, we’re one of the top recipients of federal research dollars and that supports students, that supports faculty. It really leverages the state dollars and the tuition dollars. We’ve done an OK job, not as well as we should, on the fourth piece. If it’s state dollars, tuition dollars and federal research dollars, the fourth piece is private donor funding. And as I’m sure you’ve all read, that one of the things that I think is absolutely incumbent upon me is to work closely with the foundation to launch a major campaign for Wisconsin. And the question is, what is it that donor dollars can do that in turn leverage the federal research dollars, the state dollars and the tuition dollars. We’re not talking about … I read somewhere that the people thought I had said we should replace state dollars with donor dollars and that’s just the wrong statement. And if I said that, I misspoke.
What I want to think about is, what is it our donors can be interested in doing that adds to this campus that we shouldn’t be doing with state or tuition dollars? So, for instance, receiving money to provide a chaired name professorship. We are not going to use state dollars to do that. That is something that you can, however, get donors to do. It helps you to leverage your state dollars, get some additional research sources, to really top research and teaching faculty and keep them and retain them. It’s a wonderful complement to the base dollars that you have for salaries coming in from the state and through tuition. So you want to be looking for those opportunities where donors can add to what’s here and leverage the other sources of funding. Just as you want to leverage funding with federal dollars, and my role as chancellor on budget is balancing those four revenue streams and trying to make sure that they all work. Tuition is only one of those.
I am very concerned, and I know you’ve read this if you’ve read my stuff, that particularly for resident in-state students, that given incomes have not risen greatly in Wisconsin, that we continue to make tuition affordable and/or make sure that we have substantial amounts of financial aid, because even at current tuition levels, as you all know, there is some number of people we admit that couldn’t come here if we didn’t have financial aid. So the financial aid piece and the tuition piece are put together in some ways.
But I do think there are some tuition streams we need to be looking at.
Blank: We’ve got professional schools that are tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than their competitors, and we’re as good as the competitors. That’s a market, I’m an economist, we should be pricing those at the right level. And I feel different about tuition at a professional school and where it’s going than I do about undergraduate in-state tuition. So the issue is the right balance of all this stuff and you know, it’s the art of running the finances of an institution, is looking at all those sources and figuring out where you have leverage and where you really should leave things as they are. You know, I don’t go out to private donors and say gosh, you should support my faculty or give me money to run basic classes. I mean, that is the responsibility—I think—of how you use state dollars and tuition.
What I want private donors to do, is give me things that the state and the tuition dollars shouldn’t be spent on. Some of that is building some buildings that the state is not going to fund, like an art museum that I think is a wonderful museum, but the right thing to fund with private donor dollars. Faculty chairs, like I noted, I think is a wonderful example of this. It adds on to and retains your top faculty using private dollars in ways you could never use your other dollars—federal, tuition or state. You could think of some financial aid options that again you’re not likely to get the state to fund, but certain donors can be quite passionate about. Or research institutes that go across campus and really create synergies. You know the federal dollars tend to fund different specific things, and I want to pull together multiple things happening across campus, in terms of research, that’s usually not state or tuition dollars. But I can imagine a donor who says, ‘Yeah that’s a great thing to do, let me try to help you set that institute up that will coordinate and make everything operate a little better because there is some central funding.’
On a UW-System president’s characteristics
Kevin Reilly recently stepped down from the UW System, and just what kind of characteristics are you hoping to find or look for in a successor?
Blank: So the job of system president is a really tough job. You want someone who understands higher education because that individual is working with campuses as diverse as us and UW-Superior and UW-Eau Claire. Those are three very, very different campuses, and this individual has to have some judgement as to how these differ and in what ways do we need different types of support from the system. So that’s number one.
Number two, you want someone who really has some pretty good political skills. And this job, as we saw this spring, is one where their relationship with the governor and the legislature with the state is very important. So you want someone who can really do a good job on that front.
And thirdly, you are managing some pretty big programs here and so understanding higher education, having some management administration experience of being able to run things and provide some vision, as well as do the political side of the job. You know, it’s going to be a real mix of skills, and I think it’s going to be hard to hire. There are not a lot of people out there who have that whole mix of skills. And I very much hope that they find someone who does and that we’re all going to enjoy working with.
Updating campus facilities
John Horn (director of Rec Sports) said several of our buildings are barely up to state code for safety. Do you think the time is right to be thinking seriously about rebuilding those facilities and I guess—and it might be premature to say—but would you support a referendum to rebuild those?
Blank: The real question is not would I support a referendum, but are students willing to move forward on a referendum in terms of some sort of fee thing? It is really clear that we are behind our peers with regards to our recreational facilities. I’ve been in some of the new facilities that a couple of our peer campuses have built. My husband, the first week we were in town, he went to the Natatorium and we went to the SERF. And he sort of came back and he said, “Becky, you don’t need to go here.” You know, they were crowded. This is a piece of campus that matters. Participation in fitness activities, sports participation, you know, not only is that sort of good and healthy for students and faculty, but it really helps learning. The research is pretty unambiguous that you want to provide opportunities to make it easy for people to be physically active. Particularly, you know, when they are doing late nights and eating junk food in the dorms, and not that any of you would do that.
So we really have to look at this seriously, at what exactly where this is going to land and how would you put the funding together, how much of it you do through student fees or bonding. Or how much can you go through the state and ask for money, or are there options for private donors? Clearly, that is conversation we have to have.
I think there is no doubt in my mind that at some point over the next few years, we need to be real serious about certainly rehabilitating our existing facilities, to which I mean there are code issues where we will have to close them if we don’t do that, but secondly, if we’re going to do this thinking in a larger sense of what should we have on campus. Rather than just keeping the current facilities operating like they are now with new paint or whatever, you know, isn’t the right way to think. The right way to think is, what’s the recreational mix of facilities we need and how do we go about putting that together. That may be a long term job, but we ought to have that vision and that master plan in front of us.
Joining the Twittersphere?
When Biddy Martin was chancellor, she had a really public presence, attended sporting events, she had a Twitter account. How do you think students will see you in your time as Chancellor?
Blank: I don’t know, you’ve got to ask in another year or so. Biddy clearly just enjoyed spending time with students. You know, I hope that I am going to do some of that as well. You know, the fun parts of universities are that there are students here. And it’s one of the things I have really missed in the last five years that I’ve been away from the universities. You know, you’re sort of with all of these middle-aged people and you just sort of say, “Is there no one young around here? Can we not have some other conversations?” So I’m really looking forward to having students here, and I hope that I will get to a whole variety of events and other things going on. How well I do that and whether people want to meet with me or talk to me, you’ll have to come back in a year and find out.
Do you plan to join Twitter?
Blank: I will probably do some Twitter. I admit that I have not done any tweeting up until now. I should say, the Secretary of Commerce has a Twitter account, but I never touched, I never knew what they sent out. It’s clear that there are so many students who participate in this, it’s just a way that you have to communicate with students these days. I do find it—I do like writing the blogs, where I feel like you can actually say something that explains it, but you know, that’s a different form of communication.
