Reaccreditation sets stage for visionary thinking about UW–Madison’s future

A blueprint for UW–Madison’s future is beginning to emerge through the 2009 Reaccreditation Project, and the conversation will continue this fall around six newly identified core themes and a more universal goal: Staying true to the Wisconsin Idea.

Nancy Mathews, director of the project, says that this fall will be one of the most active times in the reaccreditation process, as six “theme teams” hold meetings and conduct surveys to gather feedback from the campus and community about the newly defined focus areas. Each team has two co-chairs who are charged with spurring discussion with students, faculty, staff, alumni, business leaders and the general public, and producing a final document to include in the 2008 self-study.

The core themes and leaders are:

• “Rethinking the Public Research University,” led by English department chair Michael Bernard-Donals and astronomy Professor and University Committee chair Robert Mathieu;
• “Integrating the Processes of Discovery and Learning,” team leaders pending;
• “Creating an Impact and Shaping the Global Agenda,” led by environmental studies Professor Jonathan Foley and history Professor Jeremi Suri;
• “Preparing Global Citizens and Leaders of the Future,” led by engineering Professor John Booske and curriculum and instruction Professor Marianne Bloch;
• “Becoming a Welcoming, Respectful and Empowered UW–Madison Community,” led by College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Assistant Dean Sarah Pfatteicher and soil science Professor Terese Balser; and
• “Institutional Integrity: Being a Responsible and Sustainable Public Institution,” led by Director of Housing Paul Evans and library sciences Professor Louise Robbins.

These themes were drawn from a wide range of input last spring and summer, says Mathews. The project gathered more than 6,000 responses from a combination of campus and alumni surveys, and more than 50 meetings with organizations and governance groups. That process led to the identification of 25 specific themes and, ultimately, the six integrated themes.

What was very exciting — and unexpected — was the emergence of the Wisconsin Idea as a unifying theme, something that is reflected in every aspect of the university’s mission, Mathews says. “This became a very sophisticated way of thinking about how all of these themes relate to one another,” she says.

“I think that reaccreditation is going to start the conversation in a pretty significant way about what it means to serve the state as a public institution,” Mathews adds. “At the same time, it’s going to raise awareness that the campus as a whole is concerned about (state priorities), that we are paying attention to our critics and we want to address public concerns.”

The Wisconsin Idea holds that the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state and beyond, and in practice emphasizes problem-solving and relevance in teaching, research and service. Staying true to the Wisconsin Idea really means recognizing the changing needs of state citizens and adapting work to serve those needs, Mathews says.

Certainly, most universities have community outreach, but the reaccreditation efforts to date revealed a widespread view that the Wisconsin Idea legacy defines the character of the institution. As one survey respondent commented: “The Wisconsin Idea is what separates us from other universities. This speaks to the focus of our research and outreach educational programs, but more importantly (to) a student body that embraces commitment to the community and the betterment of society.”

Another survey respondent, who attended UW–Madison during the Vietnam War era and has two daughters attending today, says the university’s academic tradition of challenging the status quo must remain intact. “We leave it to UW–Madison’s extraordinary faculty and community to advocate for a better world. Academic freedom, freedom to re-think the world’s great questions and dilemmas, is the key to developing better solutions.”

A second strong focus of the project will be in transforming UW–Madison into a truly global institution. Indeed, two of the six themes deal directly with global issues, whether they focus on major challenges such as poverty, environmental threats, energy and security, or preparing Wisconsin students to succeed and lead in a multicultural and globally interconnected economy.

Suri, who is part of the global agenda team, says that the university is at a “major crossroad” and needs a new funding structure and organization that reflects the extensive globalization that has occurred in the past two decades.

“We want to make the university a global agenda-setter,” Suri says. “This involves encouraging more creativity, more interdisciplinarity and more risk-taking. We need to streamline bureaucracy and internal hindrances on innovation. We also need to integrate the exciting work in different corners of the campus behind some common and mutually beneficial themes with broad global resonance.”

Mathews, who argues that the process behind reaccreditation is as important as the final product, says the value of the project will rest on engaging as many people as possible in the conversation. That broad participation will bring more credibility to the results, which will form the raw material for a new campus strategic plan and inform tough decisions on how to prioritize resources.

The co-chairs of the project are “amazing and dynamic people” who will have free rein to take their teams in creative directions, Mathews says, adding: “We’re asking them to be visionary and to think about what the world’s going to look like in 10 years.”

Several co-chairs say they expect the project to have a meaningful impact on the university. Booske, for example, notes that one prerequisite to setting new directions is to more fully understand the university’s strengths, and the reaccreditation process will make him more intimately informed of excellence across many disciplines.

“UW–Madison has emerged as one of the nation’s best universities for nurturing collaborative, cross-disciplinary learning and research, and I hope to help it become even better in this regard,” Booske says.

It is also, without question, a time of major change in the world and the university, Booske says, and such times create anxiety and opportunity, and “best-case” as well as “worst-case” scenarios. “Thus, I am drawn to the opportunity to help manage the inevitable changes, to find the positive opportunities hidden within the threats of these tides of change.”

Bernard-Donals says he has been impressed by the energy of Mathews and the steering committee. “This reaccreditation effort has the potential to be much more than a certification effort, in which we check the boxes — ‘yes, we do this, yes, we do that,’” he says. “It has the capacity to lay the foundations for an exciting strategic plan for the university over the next 10 years.”

In his role in “rethinking” the public research university, Bernard-Donals notes that universities are “public places par excellence” that can help infuse civic responsibility in its students and produce works that advance the public good. “So the question, in the context of reaccreditation, is how well has the university — in the classroom, in the laboratory, in the community — fostered this sense of civic engagement, and how can it do so in new and innovative ways?”

Embedded within the six themes are some interesting developments, Mathews says. For example, in the third theme of shaping the global agenda, the team will be charged with creating an in-depth model for how the university’s wide-ranging talents can be brought to bear on a single, complex global issue. In this specific case, the group will be creating a model around the challenge of environmental sustainability — something that is already an academic strength at UW–Madison.

One of the most inspiring themes was the last one, Mathews says, on making ethics and integrity a universal priority. “It really blew me away when this one came up,” she says. “It reflects our core values and a feeling that ethics are so critical to everything we do.”

The integrity theme is an important message to reinforce with the public, says Eden Inoway-Ronnie, executive assistant to the provost and deputy director of the reaccreditation project.

“Inherent in the reaccreditation process is something that the Legislature has been asking for, which is more accountability,” she says. “We will be able to use this process to show that we are accountable to our many constituents, but perhaps more importantly, also demonstrate our impact not only in Wisconsin but throughout the world.”