In a meeting with campus press Monday in her recently unpacked office atop Bascom Hill, new University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank stressed the importance of building relationships with the campus community and legislators, upholding responsibility to the state and utilizing new revenue streams.
Blank, who previously served under President Barack Obama as Secretary of Commerce, began her tenure as chancellor in July, succeeding David Ward. She said she is eager to begin the year ahead and has many plans for UW-Madison.
In terms of building relationships, Blank said it’s important for her to get to know the university by seeing firsthand how it operates.
“I’ve visited every one of the schools and colleges,” Blank said. “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.”
To welcome students to campus, Blank said she is looking forward to visiting the dorms on move-in day Wednesday, talking to students at convocation and celebrating the first football game in true Badger fashion.
“I’ve got a tailgate at my house on Saturday and … there’s some students invited to that,” Blank said.
Blank also said she is concerned about her relationship with legislators “at the other end of State Street.”
“I really need to … feel like we have pretty open lines of communication, and that’s not something you do with one visit,” Blank said. “That’s something you do over time, getting to know people.”
Still, she said her predecessor Ward did an “excellent job” of maintaining relationships with these politicians, so she doesn’t feel much need to do catch-up work.
Beyond Madison, Blank feels the university has an obligation to give back to Wisconsin.
“I’m quite committed to the idea that we have responsibility to the state, that’s just fundamental to our very founding,” Blank said.
Blank said the university does provide benefits to the state in many ways, such as the Medical School’s clinics and the School of Education’s training for teachers. In addition, she said UW-Madison has an economic impact on the state. For instance, many companies come to Wisconsin because they want connections with the research university.
However, she said she feels the university has not done a good job with talking publicly about these benefits.
“Most people out there aren’t very actively thinking … ‘Gosh, I wonder what the University of Wisconsin’s doing in my community,’” Blank said. “If we don’t tell them, they don’t know.”
In regard to tuition and funding, Blank said she believes the school has done a good job of leveraging state money, tuition and federal research dollars, but a fourth piece, private donor funding, will need more emphasis.
To increase these donations, she said the school should work with the alumni foundation to launch a major fundraising campaign. Blank said certain projects around campus may appeal to private donors, most of which should not be funded by state and tuition dollars.
“Some of that is building some buildings that the state is not going to fund, like an art museum… but the right thing to fund with private donor dollars,” Blank said.
Overall, Blank said she’s missed the energy of the college experience and is glad to be back.
“The fun parts of universities are that there are students here,” she said. “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’re with all of these middle-aged people and you just say, ‘Is there no one young around here? Can we not have some other conversations?’”
Read the full interview here.
