Pandemic blog 18: The Wisconsin Idea

The Wisconsin Idea: the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state. They drill this into you right when you are arrive; that we are not just here to teach things to the 18-22-year-olds in the room with us, but to contribute to the advancement of the state as a whole. Then after a while you start to realize it’s not just a slogan; it’s the actual value system of the institution.

I’ve been seeing it this last month. UW-Madison faculty members are doing swift and amazing work, sometimes visibly, sometimes behind the scenes. Not me, really. It’s not a time for pure math. But my colleagues! Song Gao from geography made this dashboard showing changes in mobility by county based on cellphone tracking data. Colleagues in statistics and engineering worked with the state government to pin down exactly what was meant by “14 days of decline in cases,” one of our criteria to start opening businesses. Speaking of opening businesses, Noah Williams from economics and his team at the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (caw!) wrote a report about the economic costs of the pandemic to the state and the ways we might go about opening more businesses, balancing production and safety. A friend at the med school is collecting blood from recovered patients so we can start to see how antibody levels relate to time since recovery. Thomas Friedrich from veterinary pathology is studying the genomes of viral samples around Wisconsin to understand how the disease is moving within the state. (It turns out that viruses, just like people, don’t actually move between Milwaukee and Madison that much.) My colleague/neighbor Mike Wagner from journalism just launched COVID-19 Wisconsin Connect, to foster discussion among the general public of what we’re going through. And the UW Library is working to document and archive the experience of the campus and the state during the pandemic, because we think we’ll remember exactly how this was, but we probably won’t. The Library will.

Two CAREER awards at Wisconsin

I always post about our great new faculty members when we hire them, but it’s worth mentioning that they keep being great once they get here.  Of the 27 CAREER grants awarded by NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences this year, two went to the UW-Madison math department:   Benedek Valkó for “Random eigenvalue problems and fluctuations of large stochastic systems” and Andrej Zlatoš for “Reactive Processes and Turbulent Flows.”

In which I am impressed by Biddy Martin’s political savvy

The University of Wisconsin, like all big public institutions, faces a future of declining state support.  And, like all big public institutions, we have to figure out how to keep doing our jobs despite that.  Chancellor Martin’s proposal is a New Badger Partnership, under which UW would be allowed to set its own tuition, as Michigan does.  The sticker price of a Wisconsin education would go up, and the extra revenue would be plowed back into financial aid in order to keep college affordable for middle-class students and their parents.

I don’t know enough about higher education policy to comment on the merits of the plan.  But it’s kind of a work of political genius, isn’t it?  To the Democrats in the state government, Martin can say “UW needs to do much, much more to give working families a chance at a world-class education, even if rich Chicago parents take a hit. ” And to the Republicans, she can say, “I came here to run this university like a business, and that means charging market rates.”

Why it’s genius:  because she’s right on both counts!  The ultimate free-market dream is differential pricing:  charging each customer the maximum they’re willing to pay.  Most businesses don’t get to examine their customers’ bank balance before naming a price.  But UW does.  If the university can be more capitalist than the capitalists, redistribute wealth downward, and reduce our dependence on legislative whim, all at the same time, why shouldn’t we?

What does Republican state government mean for the University of Wisconsin?

Well, we have to talk about the election a little, right?

Governor-elect Scott Walker today, telling the regents of UW not to expect any increase in allocation from the state:

“It isn’t just always about more money. It’s going to be about finding ways to take the dollar we have, finding ways with flexibility, innovation and creativity, to apply those dollars in the best way possible to meet those goals.”

Jim Doyle has been in the Capitol ever since I moved to Wisconsin.  So I really have no sense of what a Republican governor, state senate, and state assembly means for UW-Madison and the UW system.  Will the university lose whole departments?  Is embryonic stem cell research at UW kaput?  Will Walker back Chancellor Martin’s plan to charge market-rate tuition?  (The Daily Cardinal says yes.)

Give predictions in comments.  Or tell me about your own state university system, and how it fares under Republican governance.