University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor David Ward told the Faculty Senate Monday the university must prepare to take action and develop a new vision to adapt to the current climate of higher education.
In his State of the University speech, Ward said the university is in a “fundamentally different” social compact now compared to the past due to decreased state support for higher education through last year’s budget lapse.
To offset diminishing state support, Ward said the university has had to increase tuition, which has left the public concerned.
“There is resentment among the public that we are mysteriously increasing tuition for our own greedy needs, rather than the idea that tuition is substituting for the loss of tax revenue from the state,” Ward said.
Ward proposed focusing on ways to increase the university’s flexibilities in the future, both internally and externally, to help combat dwindling state support.
Ward said the university can become more flexible internally through educational innovation and administrative improvements such as the Human Resources redesign, while more flexibility can be obtained externally through increased autonomy from the UW System and state.
Ward said he hopes the next chancellor, who will be selected this year and officially take over next summer, will be ready to start a new dialogue regarding these ideas.
Associated Students of Madison Shared Governance Chair Sam Seering said he thought the chancellor portrayed a very realistic view of the current state of affairs in the university.
“[Ward recognized] that state support is going down and it will be a very long uphill battle to reverse that trend,” Seering said. “Because of that, the university has started to lean on students more than they had in the past, which he recognized was not necessarily a good thing.”
Ward cautioned the university against “waiting around” for the public to reclaim the responsibility of supporting higher education, saying holding onto that hope “strikes [him] as disastrous.”
“Unless we find within ourselves the resources to rethink what we do, we really have some enormous challenges,” Ward said.