Transcript from video
Hi, everyone; thank you very much for listening. I’m Biddy Martin, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
During my first six and a half months as chancellor of UW-Madison, I’ve spent many enjoyable and productive hours talking with students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, state leaders, business leaders as well as political leaders, and citizens. And those hours have been so enjoyable because of the enormous pride and appreciation that people obviously feel for this great institution.
Those conversations and the forums that I sponsored last semester for the campus community have also made me aware that we have some challenges we need to address right away.
I’ve come to you today in order to announce a new initiative: the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates and I want to tell you a little bit about the need for the initiative before I give you the details.
In my discussions with students, staff, faculty, alumni, citizens of the state, it has become apparent to me that we have two sets of challenges that we need to address right away.
The first is the quality of undergraduate education. The second is access and affordability.
Let ‘s start with the quality of undergraduate education.
I’m going to divide the challenge of undergraduate education into two parts, and talk first about education in the stricter sense, and then about badly needed student services.
In Letters and Sciences in particular — where most of our undergraduate teaching actually is done — students are having an increasingly difficult time getting the courses and the majors that they want and they need. Partly, this problem arises because of the number of faculty we’ve lost over time in these high-demand disciplines. They’re not only in high demand at UW-Madison, they’re in high demand at competitor universities, and unfortunately we’ve lost some faculty to some of these competitors. Because of budgetary pressures, Letters and Sciences and some other units have not been able to replace those faculty, and the result is felt by the students, who have less contact with faculty, and are increasingly closed out of courses required for their majors, and from particular majors in general.
What we need to do is add faculty and instructional support, using some of the funding that we derive from this tuition differential. We also need to transform undergraduate curriculum and pedagogy, ensuring that our teaching and our content keep pace with the extraordinary advances in research in the sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts.
Some of the funding will also build on successful programs that ensure students have faculty-led courses that are small enough to build relationships with tenured and tenure-track faculty.
The student services that are most urgent at UW-Madison, and which we will support with the funding from the tuition increase, include counseling, academic advising, career advising and peer mentoring programs. We will invest in those programs in order to ensure that in these extraordinarily difficult times, students are prepared for what will continue to be a very difficult, challenging job market.
Let me turn now to access and affordability.
Though UW-Madison’s tuition is one of the two lowest in our peer group, the total cost of education has become unaffordable for too many Wisconsin families. The answer to the affordability problem, as I have said many times, is not reducing tuition or trying to hold it flat.
Unfortunately, many families are already unable to afford the tuition we have; keeping it flat will not help them. Moreover, preserving our quality, and preserving the quality of our students’ education, preserving also the contributions that our research university makes to the state, require that we increase tuition.
The answer to the affordability problem is need-based financial aid.
The university has some need-based financial aid, but does not have a long history of building a need-based financial aid fund. This Madison Initiative for undergraduates will increase tuition at UW-Madison above the System-wide tuition increase in order to help provide a significant fund for need-based financial aid, ensuring that this university is open to all equally.
For every dollar we get from tuition to build our need-based financial aid pot, we will raise a dollar in private gifts. Moreover, students with demonstrated need from families earning $80,000 or less will be held harmless from this Madison-specific increase for each of the four years the initiative lasts.
It’s important to note that once this tuition plan is fully implemented in 2013, our tuition at UW-Madison will still be among the lowest in the Big Ten.
I think it’s important to the state of Wisconsin that the University of Wisconsin-Madison remain the high quality research and educational institution it is. We want to ensure that we prepare students for the workforce in Wisconsin, and we want to make sure that we continue to help create jobs through the transfer of our ideas technologies.
I think it’s critical that we pursue this initiative now not only despite the difficult economic times but, in part because of them.
I look forward to hearing your feedback; I look forward to interacting with you. I hope you’ll support this initiative, which I think is critical to the future of the University of Wisconsin-Madison but to the wellbeing of the state and beyond. Thank you very much for listening.