UW-Madison announces plan to up its research game
University has fallen in rankings
After a 15-year hiatus, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is launching a hiring program to recruit clusters of faculty from different disciplines to work together in emerging areas of research.
The news Chancellor Rebecca Blank shared in her Blank’s Slate blog at the end of the first day of classes Wednesday is significant because Wisconsin’s flagship university has been slipping in national research rankings in recent years and is competing with other universities across the country in an arms race for the kind of high-caliber faculty who drive great research institutions.
A similar UW-Madison initiative launched in 1998 led to 49 groupings of 143 faculty being hired in areas that included bioethics, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, energy source and policy, and visual culture studies.
This time, Blank said the university will hire three to five clusters of faculty per year for the next five years. She put out a call for interdisciplinary proposals from faculty, research centers and departments, and set a goal of hiring the first clusters in the spring.
The goal is to build faculty teams around emerging fields of knowledge, rather than the confines of traditional university departments, to bring varied perspectives to issues and innovation.
“We’ll provide substantial central support for salaries for these individuals, hoping to deepen our research strength on critical topics,” Blank said in her blog post.
Blank did not identify what those critical topics may be.
It’s possible there could be proposals connected to the research interests or workforce needs of the Foxconn Technology Group that has promised 13,000 jobs and a $10 billion flat screen display plant in southeastern Wisconsin, which has generated high stakes for what Wisconsin must provide in return.
In the cluster-hiring program that started in 1998, some hiring areas received nearly 200 applications for a single position, according to the university. UW-Madison also received calls from other campuses that wanted to clone the cluster-hiring approach.
“You’ve got to be investing on the front end. It doesn’t just come to you,” Blank told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in December, after new data was released that suggested UW-Madison isn’t keeping up with competitors.
“Everyone else is hungry for it, and if we aren’t hungry for it and reaching out and making ourselves better every day and more effective at that outreach, we’re falling behind. And that’s what’s happened by and large,” she said.
In a knowledge economy where innovation and cutting-edge research are key factors in a region’s ability to compete, UW-Madison is considered one of Wisconsin’s most potent assets.
Other universities in recent years have been able to poach an inordinately high number of UW-Madison’s best and brightest faculty because of nationally publicized state budget cuts, wages that have stagnated and divisive politics surrounding faculty tenure protections.
Budget cuts also have forced the university to replace elite researchers with lower-paid academics who are earlier in their careers, Blank told the Journal Sentinel.
Last November, UW-Madison fell out of the top five U.S. research universities for the first time in 44 years, slipping to sixth place overall, a seemingly small drop.
But it was among only four universities in the National Science Foundation’s top 30 — and the only one among the top 10 — to report a decline in research and development spending in the last fiscal year. Its 3.6% single-year slide was the largest among the top 30, the NSF data showed.
Two public universities in California ahead of UW-Madison in the NSF rankings — UC-San Francisco and UC-San Diego — have significant leads over Wisconsin’s flagship in business funding of life sciences research, which is by far the largest field supported by businesses.
One example of schools leveraging federal spending on emerging fields through interdisciplinary research comes from one of UW-Madison’s surging competitors.
UC-San Francisco won a $24 million grant from the National Science Foundation last September to start a new bioengineering center, known as the Center for Cellular Construction.
That center aims to adapt tools from engineering, the physical sciences and computer science to design automated machines out of living cells. It involves several universities and a major business partner.