Committee exploring option to spin off UW-Madison
(The Center Square) – There is more talk about releasing the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the University of Wisconsin System.
The Legislative Study Committee on the Future of the UW System submitted a plan that would transition the UW-Madison campus into a new agency within state government, give the university borrowing power and spin the state’s main campus away from the other 12.
“Madison is an outlier among system campuses in every major respect,” the Study Committee’s report states. “And, as a consequence, Madison has policy and governance needs unlike any other UW university. Madison should therefore be established as its own state agency.”
Supporters of the plan point to Madison’s enrollment, which at more than 50,000 students is twice as large as the second largest school – UW-Milwaukee.
UW-Madison also has the largest budget, spending $4.5 billion of the $7.5 billion total university budget. And Madison has the UW’s only law school and medical school, and is ranked as an R1 research institution.
“Madison overshadows all other campuses and thereby skews system data in ways that frustrate analysis of the other 12 institutions. For instance, system administration each year presents the regents with a monolithic budget proposal that covers the entire UW enterprise but lacks solutions focused on campuses troubled by declining enrollment and/or budgetary pressures,” the Study Committee proposal adds. “In many respects, Madison is the problem because the System is forced to balance the characteristics and needs of one enormous, financially successful campus with 12 others that are much smaller and face recurring budgetary and enrollment problems. A better governance approach at system would allow regent, gubernatorial and legislative attention to focus on the wellbeing and future of the non-Madison universities.”
“It’s really hard to understand what’s happening out at the other 12 institutions,” former UW vice president and Study Committee member Jim Langdon said at the meeting. “The system schools, Milwaukee and the 11, would really benefit from having that shadow taken away so the Legislature and the public, frankly, can understand what’s happening at those institutions.”
UW President Jay Rothman, however, opposes spinning Madison off on its own.
“Our universities are better together,” Rothman said in a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “At a time when we need to address all the challenges in higher education comprehensively, adding more governance, complications, and inefficiencies would not serve Wisconsin families and taxpayers well.”
UW-Madison’s chancellor and some Democratic lawmakers are also against the idea.
Former Gov. Scott Walker suggested spinning-off UW-Madison in 2011 for many of the same reasons, but the idea died because there wasn’t enough support either at the university or in the State Capitol.
