Don't get between Rebecca Blank and a piece of university grant funding.

That's the lesson UW-Madison learned when Blank, now a finalist for chancellor, staged a competitive bid for federal funding against UW-Madison's Institute for Research on Poverty, long a recipient of the money.

Blank, then an economics professor at Northwestern University, won most of the bid to establish a poverty research center in Chicago.

Madison's institute didn't come away empty-handed. But later, when Blank was dean at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, she helped the University of Michigan get full federal funding and the title of National Poverty Center.

Now she's one of four finalists for the UW-Madison chancellor job.

"If you can't beat 'em, get 'em to join you," said Ron Haskins, who has worked with Blank and is a visiting senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, on leave from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where Blank was dean of the Ford School.

It may seem like a leap to go from dean of a school within a major university, to leading a whole university.

"Some people are prepared to take bigger steps than others," said Sheldon Danziger, Blank's co-director of the National Poverty Center. "That's my view about Becky. To use a sports analogy, some players go right from college to the major leagues."

Blank, a Midwesterner, is a nationally recognized labor economist. She worked as a professor at Northwestern University for 10 years and was the first director of the Joint Center for Poverty Research there.

She was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, one of three congressionally approved advisers, before becoming dean of the Ford School in 1999 and co-director of the National Poverty Center in 2002.

Blank has experience navigating bureaucracy and working across party lines, Haskins said. A Democrat, she was involved in naming the University of Michigan's school of public policy after Republican President Ford and raising money from his friends and associates.

In the mid-1990s, Blank testified before Congress about a controversial overhaul of the welfare system.

"She was spectacular," Haskins said. "She just sounds like she knows the answer. The partisan juices were definitely flowing. She opposed the Republican bill. She was very clear the bill would put kids at jeopardy."

At Michigan, Blank raised $50 million in a significant fundraising campaign and added doctoral and undergraduate programs to the school of public policy, which had previously only served students seeking master's degrees. She brought the school, which had been scattered among buildings, into a new building that now serves as a gateway to the southern end of campus.

Blank, a straight-talking public speaker, said she thinks raising tuition might be a solution to retaining quality faculty.

"I look at UW-Madison and compare it to other Big Ten schools and other universities I know," she said. "You do have remarkably low in-state tuition. You've got the best deal in the country, in terms of what people get here. I think one has to think about whether that makes sense in this state for all people."

She added that a tuition raise should come with more financial aid for low-income students.

Blank also expressed a strong commitment to diversity. At the University of Michigan, she was involved in a summer program for college students from under-represented backgrounds interested in studying in a public service field.

"Becky's commitment to this program and to diversity as a whole is particularly noteworthy because at the time Michigan was at the center of the affirmative action debate," said Lloyd Grieger, a graduate student at the Ford School. She "showed incredible leadership and strength of conviction in standing up for minority students through even the most difficult times."