An Alternative Proposal

In a recent post, I explained that there are viable ways to deal with significant budget cuts while providing a high-quality postsecondary education to students at UW-Madison and throughout Wisconsin. Here, I expand further on that option.

There are several things that academics in the Research I world tend to hold dear. These include a low student/faculty ratio, autonomy to decide what one teaches and when, and a reward structure that emphasizes on research accomplishments over teaching accomplishments. I want to suggest that while these are important values in many ways, they come into conflict with undergraduate learning.

To be more specific:

(1) Keeping the student/faculty ratio small is intended to make sure students get a lot of attention from faculty. It's often interpreted to mean that classes are small and advising frequent, and thus is a marker of quality. Yet as many freshmen would attest, even when the ratio is low, classes are large and faculty interaction infrequent.

(2) Decision-making authority over teaching is intended to allow faculty to teach what they are best at teaching, giving them the ability to connect their research to teaching in meaningful ways, helping them stay motivated and engaged, etc. But it also means that often students don't know who will teach what and when. It also doesn't do anything to make sure that faculty are teaching the things they're truly good at teaching.

(3) The reward structure (including tenure) places more emphasis on research than teaching. This is more true in some parts of universities than others, but overall it's accepted. Also, in public institutions it's common to emphasize scholarship rather than fundraising, partly because of concerns that scholarship shouldn't be driven by fundraising and partly because opportunities for fundraising are inequitably distributed across areas of study. This provides too little incentive for faculty to devote a lot of time to learning to teach effectively (time is a very scarce resource), and also to pursue grant funds that could provide postions for undergraduates and grad students on research studies.

So those are some of the problems. What are some possible solutions, and in particular how might they save us money without turning the UW into a place faculty don't want to be?

(1) Increase the student/faculty ratio from 13:1 to 19:1. Do this with a combination of admitting and retaining more students and over time reducing the size of the faculty a little. As I explained in my prior post, this saves a ton of money, and we can even afford to increase faculty salaries and student support services somewhat.

(2) Grow the size of classes where the students enrolled have the fewest remedial needs. Do this in a data-driven way-- try it out (experimentally-- with random assignment), collect data and evaluate the effects. Try doing this with upper-level students in particular.

(3) Give faculty the incentives and support to learn to teach more effectively and efficiently using technology (see below for how to pay for it). Reward them for doing so (e.g. make this more important to tenure decisions, and to awards given to senior faculty). This will increase capacity to teach larger classes and to do it well.

(4) Demand that all departments carefully coordinate the provision of required courses. Strike a better balance between giving faculty choices about when/what they teach, and what students need.

(5) Increase the grant buyout rate, so that the university gets more money when a professor is released from a course. Use that money to support professional development (see above). I say this knowing it will anger many, and hurt myself- but it's too cheap in many areas of the university to get out of teaching. Make this a nuanced rule however-- release people for prestigious fellowships and activities that will really support their scholarship AND teaching, but make it more expensive to be released solely to work on a single project.

(6) Give faculty incentives to fundraise. For example, change tenure guidelines so that in areas where grant opportunities abound, professors are expected to raise at least a minimal amount of money by the time they go up. Do this carefully, by first working with faculty to assess the landscape in a field and update it every few years. In areas where grant opportunities are not plentiful, consider whether fellowships and scholarships are. To be clear, the goal is to measure success relative to opportunities-- if you are a "star" is it reasonable to expect you to have earned at least one accolade (that comes with at least some funds) during your tenure period? This will help bring more money into the university, offset the cost of faculty salaries, improve rankings, and provide more opportunities for students. Another idea is to start giving a small percentage of indirects to PIs-- as many other institutions do.

(7) Assign faculty to mentor undergraduates. Praise them for doing so. In particular, I urge UW to consider assigning a faculty member to each Pell grant recipient. This would require perhaps 2 hours of work for each professor each month, and would make much better use of our Pell dollars and increase graduation rates. We could be first in the nation for doing this, and I'm betting it would also improve faculty/student relations.

There are cost savings associated with all of these steps. There are benefits to both faculty and students. Yes, there are some costs to. Every new way of doing work comes with these.

This is the kind of thinking we need to be doing to solve our current dilemmas. Flexibility and control over our existing money is not going to improve the quality of undergraduate education. That should be our focus right now. Nothing-- nothing-- is more important to Wisconsin's future.

The Consequences of Speaking Out

I am under attack

Educators need to stop telling students what they should learn and should start asking them what they want to learn. How crazy an idea is that?

I am in London as I write this. I have been riding the trains to get to places like Brighton and Sunbury for business meetings. I love riding trains.

Now, ordinarily the fact that I love trains would be of little interest to anyone, but there is more to the story.

Some years ago, when I was trying to get my father, who was over 80 and visiting me at the time, to do something he didn’t want to do, I told him we could ride the Chicago subway to get there and he immediately agreed.

OK. So my father and I both like trains. I loved riding down to Florida when I was a kid and waking up in Jacksonville after an all night trip from New York and seeing the sun shine and feeling warmth everywhere. My father and I rode together while my mother slept in a sleeping compartment. My love of trains started early. So just childhood unconscious emotional stuff right?

Except both of my grandsons, ages 5 and 3 as I write this love trains. Actually obsessed with trains is more like it. One lives in New York City and the other in Washington D.C. They each know every train and route in their respective cities and generally demand to watch trains when I play with them on Grandparent Games.

Is there a train-loving gene? Certainly it would have to be a very recent mutation, so it is a silly idea. And besides, my daughter, whose son is the 5 year old in New York, never seemed to be fascinated by trains.

Of course, I left out my son, the one who has a PhD in transportation and runs a Transportation policy think tank in Washington. My son was so obsessed with trains as a kid that when I showed him the Paris Metro when he was 10 (we had just moved there for a year) he said “why have you been keeping this from me?”

Train gene or not, the point of this story is to talk about education of course, and to talk about how school needs to be re-structured. My son did fine in high school but he wasn’t passionate about much. He decided he wanted to be a history major when he arrived at Columbia University as a freshman. (He chose Columbia because there were trains he ride there of course. He almost died when I suggested Cornell or Princeton.)

I was (and am) a non-typical father, one who always felt happy to direct my children’s pursuits and one who was a college professor and knew a bit about universities. So I told him history was off the table as I saw no point in studying it, and that he should major in subways. He was shocked. “How do you major in subways?” he asked. I said I was sure there were people who did transportation at Columbia and to find them. He signed up for a graduate seminar in his first semester there (putting off a required humanities course) and figured it out from there, later going to MIT for a Masters in Transportation and returning to Columbia for the PhD.

My son loves his work because he is, and always was passionate about trains (and later on planes).

Schools need to allow children of any age to follow their passions. Educators need to stop telling students what they should learn and should start asking them what they want to learn. How crazy an idea is that?

As for the genetics I don’t care really. But there is solid male line of train loving in my family.

Call Off Biddy and Her Goons

The Badger Advocates have begun their work, and ladies and gents, it's not pretty.

Wonder what the New Badger Partnership will really do to relations throughout the state and the image of UW-Madison?

Look no further than the Badger Advocate's latest statement, slamming UW System President Kevin Reilly for misstating the size of the enormous budget cut planned for UW System. For pete's sake, Brandon calls President Reilly "intellectually dishonest" and accuses System leadership of stupidity!

Had Brandon simply asked President Reilly why he said System was taking a $340 million cut instead of a $250 million cut, he would have gotten a very reasonable answer. The $250 million is a cut to System's operating budget, but there's another $90 million cut to the UW System in the 2011-13 budget, reflecting higher health/retirement contributions. It's money removed from System's budget because it's removed from their employees paychecks. Given the challenges that all System institutions face in recruiting and retaining faculty, this second cut matters just as much as the first, as it will fuel outflow of talent and undermine the ability to educate students.

The childish name-calling Brandon engaged in is but one effort initiated by Chancellor Biddy Martin and her team in the last week, intended to alienate and shame all those who do not agree with her initiative.

Her other efforts include:

--Inappropriately urging her faculty, staff, and students to take political action if they agree with her. The clear implications of this message, sent via university email, is that enough discussion's been had and now it's time to act. Except this violates tenants of shared governance and simply isn't true-- the faculty and students are divided not united on these issues, and having the Chancellor lean on her campus isn't helpful.

--Vice-Provost Aaron Brower said at a Wednesday night forum that perhaps the reason the Regents hadn't proposed a public authority model is that they do not wish to relinquish their own powers as a board. (To clarify, Aaron is a friend and a very good person trying to deal with a tough situation- I am NOT calling Aaron a goon.)

--I've been in three different campus meetings where students indicated being told that if the NBP does not pass, Kevin Reilly will take action against Madison and its faculty and students in retribution for Biddy's actions.

This is nuts. Anyone who's ever met Kevin Reilly or a regent knows how crazy these accusations are. They hold open discussions and follow the rules, they don't sneak around or try to intimidate people, and they do not intentionally lie. Sure they are imperfect and System doesn't run as well as it could-- but that does not excuse the attacks being initiated by UW-Madison's leadership right now.

Lest you think I'm being unfair to attribute these actions to Biddy, recall that at a recent PROFS meeting, Badger Advocates Brandon and Pete said explicitly that their only mission was to act on behalf of Biddy Martin, to advocate for whatever direction she thought was best for the UW. Asked if they would continue to act on behalf of a future chancellor, both men demured, and Pete said "We were formed to do what Biddy needs done."

This is not what leadership looks like. It's one thing for independent citizens to write about their own opinions in emails, blogs, comments online, etc. That's freedom of speech. It's another thing entirely for a university leader to act to destroy relations throughout a state. Chancellor Martin should be stopped.


UPDATED on Saturday April 8 with some key budgetary details.

More on "Holding Low Income Families Harmless"

One of the central claims made by proponents of the New Badger Partnership is that the policy will maintain or even enhance access to Wisconsin's public flagship by holding families making less than $80,000 harmless from tuition increases.

That claim relies on several assumptions:

(1) Families understand, or can be educated to understand, tuition discounting. In other words, you have to believe that all families in Wisconsin will come to know that the real cost of Madison will equal sticker price minus financial aid.

(2) Increases in tuition will always be tied to increases in financial aid as part of a conscious financing strategy and not occur as a stop-gap measure in response to a fiscal crisis (for example caused by an unexpected decline in state contributions or shortfall in foundation funds).

(3) Demand for a UW-Madison education is relatively inelastic.

(4) UW-Madison will continue to have a significant capacity to price discriminate (e.g. to offer much bigger discounts to some students compared to others).

Let's consider the merits of each assumption in turn.

Assumption #1: Sticker shock can be overcome. I have expressed great skepticism this is possible mainly because there isn't any evidence of a sticker shock campaign that's worked, and because a misunderstanding of discounting pervades many aspects of society (e.g. how many people know that you don't often pay MSRP for a car?).

Assumption #2: Increases in tuition will always be made thoughtfully and the UW-Madison will always increase aid as much as it increases tuition. This is key, for as University of Pennsylvania and famous political philosopher Amy Gutman has written:

"A morally troubling risk of a high-tuition, full scholarship policy is that in times of austerity, the two parts of the policy may be decoupled...The risk cannot be eliminated without doing away with democracy or the autonomy of universities, but it can be minimized by policies that tie tuition to levels of support...The commitment to economic nondiscrimination is thereby expressed by a single policy, rather than being the coincidence of two policies with independent rationales."

The statutory language of the NBP treats tuition and financial aid as separate pieces, and does not speak of them as dependent on one another. Moreover, there is nothing in the NBP that would commit the Board of Trustees to maintain a very close tie between tuition and aid over the long term. Simple statements like "modest" increases and "affordable" education do not a commitment make.

Assumption #3: Demand for a UW-Madison education will continue to grow, despite these changes. This is generally reasonable, but there isn't much evidence to suggest this will continue to be true for high-achieving residents if prices get closer to the levels charged by private, out-of-state institutions. In other words, as we become less of a good deal, they may go elsewhere. And, there's little reason to think that offering a lot more aid is going to make a big enough difference in the numbers of low-income students enrolled at Madison to offset the potential loss of other students.

Assumption #4: UW-Madison's students and their families will tolerate significant price discrimination. There is already some pushback from students who feel it's unfair that they have to pay full price while others get a deep discount. That divide will grow further. Moreover, the difference in res/nonres tuition will also expand.


To claim that the NBP will hold low-income students harmless and even increase affordability is to believe that all four assumptions hold. Do you?

"A Pearl in a Pile of Crap" -- Or Just More Crap?

At a public forum on Madison's campus last night, Aaron Brower called the NBP "a pearl in a pile of crap." (Well, he said something a little stronger than "crap," but out of respect to kids everywhere, I'll use "crap.")

I have the utmost respect for Aaron, whom I've called a friend for nearly 7 years, and so I spent the night thinking about his contention that perhaps Scott Walker is offering UW-Madison the NBP because he views it as the "economic engine" of his state.

Like I said, I thought about it.

Then this morning, the answer presented itself once again-- thanks to Walker's cronies at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

In Walker's view, life is "Madison versus the rest of the state." And as a senior fellow WPRI puts it in the National Review, "Right now, government employees in Madison run Wisconsin. It’s up to Scott Walker and legislative Republicans to wrest control back."

No one said it explicitly, but it's not just government employees in Madison who run Wisconsin--it's also UW-Madison. At least that's what people believe.

Make no mistake--Walker wants control over UW-Madison. WPRI wrote the blueprint for the NBP (see the 2001 report “Chartering the University of Wisconsin-Madison”). Public authority status where Walker controls the Board of Trustees is a downright savvy way to get control. So much the better if he can work it so UW-Madison's leaders lobby for it. That strips them of any credibility later on when they realize what hell they wrought.


UPDATE: Further evidence of animosity towards UW-Madison among those who are pro-NBP: A comment from a reader of the Cap Times article, "The big chill? UW's Cronon sees 'intimidation' in GOP' records request."
"The universities indoctrinate the young minds with all the wacko liberal ideology. Never do they teach them that there is another and better way!! I'm all for spinning off UW Madison from the rest of the system. Less taxpayer dollars used to promote only liberal ideas!! Go Biddy Go!!!"

Posted on the Doors of the Sewell Social Science Building AND the Law School

I have no idea whose sign this is, but on behalf of those who believe UW-Madison is a common good, thank you.

UPDATED: Maybe this guy wrote it. A former Regent.