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UW chancellor search: Blank offers unique perspectives

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/16/2008 5:22 am

In the contest to be named the next chancellor at UW-Madison, Rebecca Blank is an outsider in more ways than one.

Of the four finalists to replace John Wiley as leader of Wisconsin's flagship university, Blank is the only one who has never spent at least a couple years in Madison -- although she was a visiting fellow at the UW in the fall of 1985.

Blank is also the only candidate who has significant experience working outside the academic world. Although her most recent job was as dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan from 1999 to 2007, prior to that she was on the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Clinton from 1997-99. The renowned economist, with expertise in social welfare and poverty, currently is on leave from Michigan as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

"I was working at the White House for a couple of years, which is a little bit like being on the other side of the moon if you're used to being a faculty member around a university," said Blank. "The White House really is different.

"The Council of Economic Advisers in a three-person group that is sort of senior advisers to the president. You're appointed by the president, you go through a Senate confirmation hearing and you don't have any programs or policies that you are in charge of. You basically have an open seat for any issue that the White House is dealing with that relates to economics -- and if you're an economist, all issues relate to economics.

"And a lot of the job is basically persuading many people, who are more politicos in the White House, of why they should invite you to the table and why they should listen to you and what it is that you have to bring. Often times it is news that they don't want to hear, of course, telling them that what they are thinking about might have some negative effects here and there. Working with the White House was always an honor and a great experience. But it was also great to go back to a university campus and work with students and faculty and the staff."

Starting Monday and running through Thursday, each of the finalists to become the next UW-Madison chancellor were to spend a day interacting with faculty, academic staff, students and community leaders.

Thursday was Blank's day on campus, and following a public reception in the Main Lounge of the Memorial Union, she met with members of the media.

Despite her time away from the world of academia, it didn't take Blank long to make her mark at Michigan.

"I have spent the last eight years of my life really doing a new start-up on campus at the University of Michigan -- the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. We are a new school. And during the period that I spent there we started a Ph.D. program, we started the first undergraduate degree program that anyone in living memory had started on campus. It was hard to get things going because people didn't know how to do them. There was no one there who had ever initiated a new undergraduate degree program.

"We started research centers. I did a lot of fundraising. We built a building, which is the new entrance to campus on the south side of Ann Arbor (Mich). And I generally tried to raise the visibility and the presence of public policy as an area of study and as a career preparation at the University of Michigan."

Although Blank received her undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota in June of 1976, she had little contact with major public universities over the next 20-plus years as she earned her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983 before working at first-rate private universities such as Princeton (1983-1989) and Northwestern (1989-1999).

"When I went to Michigan, I didn't take the job because it was a public university, I took the job because it looked like a great job," she said of being named dean of the School of Public Policy. "But I was really struck within months of arriving on campus of how familiar it felt to be back at a big public university and how much fun it was to be at a place with this scope and this size and with the variety -- it's 20 schools and colleges at Michigan, it's very similar to Wisconsin on that front.

"The number of people working on so many different issues and the intellectual energy that came from that was really fun and much better than being at these smaller, private schools. ...

"Upon finishing my job there as dean there is no question that public universities, I was quite convinced after those eight years, really are where some of the most interesting things are going on."

One of the issues Blank has heard the most concern about during her visit to Madison is that of low pay for those working at UW-Madison, at least when compared to those at peer institutions.

"Clearly there are a lot of people that are feeling pretty anguished about that and pretty worried about it," Blank said of the relatively low pay scale. "That has to be a major priority to be chancellor. Now I have to say that's not something that's going to be solved in the first six months. It's going to take some additional fundraising of one sort or another or some redirections of funds, and neither of those things are easy. But clearly stating that as a key goal is important and it's going to be important for the new chancellor to do that, in part to gain credibility and support on campus."

Yet if UW-Madison is serious about getting its pay rate in line with those of peer institutions, Blank said she would consider raising tuition.

"I would certainly want to talk about what the alternatives are in terms of tuition," she noted. "And see whether there is some possibility here of thinking about tuition increases that would be linked in one form or another with increased aid, so you don't limit access. I think if you ask people around the Big Ten and other universities, ... one of the first things everyone will say is, 'You know Wisconsin's tuition is too low given the quality of the university and what they offer, and what their competition is offering too.'

"The other thing I should say is this is not all just about state budgets and tuition. There are four ways that these sorts of universities make their money. One is state funds. One is tuition. One is research funding that gets generated for the university by the faculty and research staff. And the fourth is gifts and endowment. And you have to work across all of those fronts."

Another issue that continually came up during her visit to town, according to Blank, is the need to make sure the UW-Madison campus is a diverse one -- in every way imaginable.

"Diversity is hard," she said. "You've got to work on it all the time and you've got to work on it when you're in a majority white state, when you have smaller populations of color. There are several things that have to happen, and none of it is rocket science. It's just regular hard work that you do all the time.

"First of all you have to realize that critical mass matters. You've got to have enough people around campus that they don't feel isolated. And I'm not just talking about race and gender and ethnicity. I'm also talking about foreign students. I'm also talking about people from small towns vs. big towns. I'm talking about sexual orientation. There's a whole set of issues here. You want a healthy representation and a critical mass of students, as well a faculty and staff, across the board."

And as all the chancellor candidates have done, Blank also stressed the importance of developing a good working relationship with both the Governor's office and state legislature.

"There really is no substitute to getting to know people, for building a relationship and for knowing who people are, where they come form and what their agendas are," she said. "... Also, you don't sit on this hill and wait for them to come to you, you go to them.

"And number two, there really is no substitute from my experience in the political world to being on the ground. You have to sort of go hang out. There are certain receptions you have to go to. You have to get to know these people. And the way you get to know them is you are over there, at the Capitol, visibly present and therefore build a relationship over time. There is nothing that substitutes for a little bit of time spent there with some of the key people."

Are there any concerns Blank has of going from the head of a school within a university, to becoming the leader of a university -- especially when she has relatively little knowledge of the inner workings of UW-Madison?

"There are a number of aspects of the chancellor job that I've done quite a bit of and others where, clearly, one will go through a learning curve," she said. "... The one area where one always goes through the largest learning curve is the management. There is no question that you're changing in terms of scale and scope when you move from being dean of a school to being president of a university.

"... The key to coming in here is trying to figure out which moving parts you have to keep your eye on. Where are there people in place that you really trust, where are there initiatives and priorities and what evidence, what numbers, what centers, what people do you want to stay in touch with to have a sense of what's happening around the university on the issues that you, as chancellor, have to care about. And clearly the first few months have to be spent building the networks and figuring out which moving parts do you have to watch most closely on campus.

"At the same time you're developing your internal voice to the campus as well as your external voice to the community about the university, and what it has to offer, and then over time what are the changes and the initiatives that you and your team are going to work on."

Previously, the other chancellor candidates had their day in the spotlight on campus.

Gary Sandefur, the UW's dean of the College of Letters and Sciences since 2004, had his public reception and meeting with the media on Monday. Sandefur, who has spent the past 24 years on the UW campus, currently oversees 39 departments in the arts and humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. More than half of UW-Madison's students are enrolled in Sandefur's college, which employs about 3,000 people.

Carolyn Martin, the provost at Cornell University, an Ivy League school in Ithaca, N.Y., had her public reception Tuesday. Martin was a lecturer at UW-Madison in the early 1980s and earned her doctorate from UW-Madison in 1985 in German Literature before moving to Cornell.

Tim Mulcahy, who spent 20 years at UW-Madison before leaving to become vice president for research at the University of Minnesota in February of 2005, met the public Wednesday. Before leaving for Minnesota, Mulcahy held a range of jobs at UW-Madison, including as associate vice chancellor for research policy from 2002-05.

All four candidates interviewed Wednesday with UW System President Kevin Reilly and a Board of Regents search committee, led by chair David Walsh.

Reilly and the Regents' committee will meet again on May 21, when they hope to decide which candidate to offer the job to. An announcement of who Reilly and the committee picked as next chancellor could then come as early as late next week. The new UW-Madison chancellor won't officially be appointed until the next regularly scheduled Board of Regents meeting June 5-6 at UW-Milwaukee. Wiley, who is stepping down from his post in September, has been UW-Madison's chancellor since 2001.

For more information, including a complete resume for each of the finalists, visit the UW-Madison's chancellor search Web site at www.chancellorsearch.wisc.edu.

Todd Finkelmeyer  —  5/16/2008 5:22 am