The Madison Initiative for Undergraduates, the program raising tuition by $250 for in-state students and $750 for non-resident students, has the potential to decrease class sizes in bottle-neck courses and add much-needed faculty in high-demand areas. However the reality is that of the 114 proposals submitted to receive a portion of the MIU funding, only 31 were recommended to Chancellor Biddy Martin by the MIU Shared Governance Oversight Committee and the Student Oversight Committee.
Although it is true that Martin can pick any proposal she wants to receive funding, the fact is that the two committees spent time sifting through the proposals and recommended the ones they felt were most worthy of funding. Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning who also sits on the Shared Governance Oversight Committee, admitted in a recent news article that Martin will likely give more weight to the recommended proposals.
But what about the other 83 proposals?
As it turns out, almost none of the departments that submitted non-recommended proposals knew they were unlikely to receive funding. The reason they did not know is that the administration did not tell them. When asked why the departments were not informed, administrators said they did not wish to force Martin to choose only the recommended proposals, as she can pick whichever ones she wants.
But this leaves out the important caveat that those 83 proposals are extremely unlikely to be chosen. It also leaves out the hard truth that committees showed their priorities in what they chose to recommend as the top proposals.
This comes on the heels of administrators initially stating that the Shared Governance Committee was not open to the public as it was only ""advisory"" to Martin. Although eventually backing away from this claim and making later meetings open to reporters, when combined with the lack of informing departments about the recommendations, it shows a continual aversion to keeping the process transparent. In fact, neither the recommended nor the non-recommended proposals are even listed on the Madison Initiative's website.
To be fair, the departments and professors should have made the effort to find out the status of their proposals. But this does not negate the fact that if you are majoring in a department where the proposal was not recommended, you are still likely to see large class sizes or a lack of added faculty.
Students in political science and biomedical engineering have a right to know that their departments will need to look elsewhere for funding. To pass off keeping departments in the dark as helping the chancellor or in the best interest of the university is disingenuous. We ask administrators to make a sincere effort toward greater transparency, as students deserve to know what they are paying for.
