Amid discussions of who should set tuition in Wisconsin and how the UW System should be structured, UW-Madison Chancellor David Ward told members of a state task force Wednesday there is no ‘one size fits all’ model for flexibilities needed across campuses system-wide.
Ward said individual institutions would benefit from having “university councils” to facilitate communication between the campus community, the Board of Regents and the state.
The councils, which Ward suggested include members of the Board of Regents and campus alumni, would be able to understand and communicate the needs of the institutions. The councils would not have the authority to set tuition.
“The key to change in higher education is that we have mutual respect in every facet of the system,” Ward said. “We’re all in this together.”
While members of the council had different opinions as to who should set tuition at institutions, Ward said raising tuition is a “zero sum game,” because as tuition increases, state support typically decreases.
Ward said to increase accountability between the system and the state, the institutions need to determine how they impact communities in the state and what the state gives them back in return.
Associated Students of Madison Chair Allie Gardner said if the state and system communicated better, the system could plan for situations such as the current budget cuts from the state the system is facing.
“That’s really what’s at the root of all this,” Gardner said. “There’s no 5-to-ten year projection on what the relationship between the state and university is, and without being able to predict that, how can the university plan?”
Gardner said members of the task force talked about access and quality as if increasing one would decrease the other, which she said might not necessarily be the case.
“It was proclaimed that we were one of the top five best values for universities in the country. I’d like to know what we’re doing that got us that rank and dig deeper in those things, and I’d like to know why we’re not number one, and why that’s not the conversation,” Gardner said.
