Chancellor Mnookin looks to restore UW-Madison’s status
Republican legislators’ assault on University of Wisconsin System campuses’ diversity, equity and inclusion offices failed to address the problem the politicians purportedly wanted to solve: Ensuring the state’s universities, particularly UW-Madison, help grow Wisconsin’s economy.
Led by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, legislators in 2023 held up $800 million for a new UW-Madison engineering school and employee pay raises — their bargaining chip to force closure of public universities’ DEI offices.
“If they want to increase their funding, they have to show they can prioritize things to grow the economy, not grow the racial divide,” Vos (R-Rochester) told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The deal that finally released the $800 million has the System making concessions – reclassifying 43 DEI jobs, removing diversity statements from student application processes, seeking donor funding for a UW-Madison faculty position focused on conservative political thought, and more.
And the Wisconsin economy?
It’s obvious the DEI stunt had nothing to do with growing the state’s economy. It was political fodder – copycat nonsense aping a movement that started in Texas and lives at the Claremont Institute, a California think tank filled with cynical, misogynistic political hacks trying to roll back the clock. Want proof? Look at the more than 5,000 documents showing correspondence between Claremont staff, academics, politicians and activists that the New York Times obtained through open records requests.
Rethinking the future of UW-Madison and its role in the state’s economy
The issue in Wisconsin isn’t those 43 DEI jobs or whether student applications include diversity statements. The real issue — as Vos suggested but didn’t pursue — is that we need to rigorously re-think the future of our flagship university and its role in the state’s economy.
That process appears to be underway at the direction of Jennifer Mnookin, UW-Madison’s relatively new chancellor. In her February address to the Board of Regents, Mnookin acknowledged the university has fallen from its once premier status among the nation’s top five research universities to No. 8. And she declared a goal of climbing back to No. 6. She did her homework, aptly describing the competition – including UCLA, her previous employer, which surpassed UW-Madison in the rankings several years ago.
Mnookin said she wants UW-Madison to be more strategic and better aligned with research funding opportunities, both public and private. She’s launched the Wisconsin RISE initiative to coalesce research around grand challenge problems. And she’s declared artificial intelligence (AI), environmental sustainability and entrepreneurship as key focus areas.
Former UW-Madison chancellors spent a lot of time on, let’s call it, the politics of independence. They focused on trying to raise tuition, cluster hiring, investing in low-income communities, getting bonding authority, and “liberating” the university from the regents. Real progress was always out of reach, a failure rationalized with a litany of excuses − faculty governance, a difficult legislature, uncollaborative researchers, budget cuts, even student groups intent on protesting.
Unfortunately, despite the aspirations of the Wisconsin Idea, UW-Madison’s research prowess has stayed locked up by an insular culture that assigned the dirty job of commercializing research to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
Past chancellors measured metrics like research funding and student job placements and salaries. And they buried telling metrics – like the growth of administrative vs. faculty jobs – in layers of complication. Here’s the sorry truth: In the last decade UW-Madison has added 3,550 net new positions, just 109 of which were faculty positions, according to its Data Digest.
To upgrade research and teaching talent, Mnookin plans to hire up to 150 new faculty across campus, with as many as 50 of them focused on AI.
Can Mnookin transform UW after others have failed?
Her approach is a welcome change. Will it go far enough?
Everything is true at 60,000 feet. Can Mnookin and her team bring it down to ground zero where some things work, and others don’t?
For our state and the broader economy of the Great Lakes region to benefit from UW-Madison’s scientific and technical prowess, the university’s culture must be less insular and more open to the outside world, particularly to business.
UW-Madison brought in just $40.4 million of business-funded research in fiscal 2022, according to National Science Foundation data. That’s the lowest among the top 10 research universities and makes UW-Madison one of just three top 10 universities with less than $100 million of business-sponsored research.
Just 12 UW-Madison spinouts have gone public or been acquired this century, according to WARF’s summary of successful exits. The only two with IPOs were TomoTherapy in 2007 and Third Wave Technologies in 2001.
Mnookin has formed a committee to explore ways to better support campus entrepreneurs. But how she plans to expand on that start is not obvious.
New hires are an encouraging approach
In many ways, the measure of Mnookin’s success will depend on her ability to drive the necessary cultural change. One encouraging sign: She’s begun assembling an impressive team from outside the university, some replacing people who’ve been at UW-Madison for 30plus years. Provost Charles Isbell came from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. Diana Harvey, the new vice chancellor for strategic communication, came from UC-Berkeley, Duke and University of Minnesota. Mnookin is also hiring a new vice chancellor for research and graduate education and a new School of Medicine and Public Health dean. At this point, new blood seems like a great idea.
Speaker Vos said that if Wisconsin universities want more state funding, they must prioritize helping to grow the state’s economy.
Unlike her predecessors, Mnookin is taking aim at some of the most entrenched tenets of UW-Madison’s organizational culture. And she appears to be coalescing a team to drive the kind of changes Vos and so many of us want to see.
In the highly competitive, global economy of the 21st Century, every good idea has a date stamp. Large corporations are slow to compete and tend to be run by financial executives who prefer acquisition over innovation.
UW-Madison has a treasure trove of good ideas. At the heart of this is entrepreneurship. Without it, the science won’t matter.
Kathleen Gallagher was a business reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Milwaukee Sentinel for 23 years. She was one of two reporters on the team that won a 2011 Pulitzer Prize for the One in a Billion series. Gallagher is now executive director of 5 Lakes Institute, a nonprofit working to grow the Great Lakes region’s high technology entrepreneurial economy and culture. She can be reached at Kathleen@5lakesinstitute.org.