The Milwaukee
Idea:
Now More Than Ever
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The Milwaukee
Idea: |
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UWM
Chancellor Nancy Zimpher used the 2003 Regents Meeting held in Milwaukee to
restate the importance of The Milwaukee Idea (http://www.uwm.edu/MilwaukeeIdea/),
UWM's initiative to forge vital and long-lasting community-university partnerships
that enhance the quality of life for all.
In her June 6 presentation to the Regents, she was joined by
Chancellor Zimpher then returned to discuss the future of UW-Milwaukee:
And now for the rest of the story!
Five years ago, I was sitting across the breakfast table from Katharine Lyall. As she talked, I wrote down the benchmarks that have guided my activities as chancellor of UW-Milwaukee over the past five years:
1. Help make UWM a presence in the community.
As you've heard from Steve, Allen and Carey, we have become a community presence in metropolitan Milwaukee. Now, when I speak in the community, I'm always provided by my audience with a homegrown definition of The Milwaukee Idea. And they almost never get it wrong. All definitions are acceptable as long as they link UWM to our community!
2. Enable better linkages with elementary and secondary education.
Arguably, we have one of the most substantial PK-16 partnerships in the state, and, I dare say, in the nation. The Milwaukee Partnership Academy (http://www.uwm.edu/Org/MPA/index.htm)—our urban initiative to close the achievement gap and prepare high quality teachers—has been allocated more federal dollars than any single partnership of its kind in the country, and continues to be recognized as a model for other partnerships nationally.
3. Provide for an enhanced development function.
We hit a home run in development when we hired the former director of development for the Milwaukee Art Museum, Lucia Petrie, last fall, straight from the successful $100 million capital campaign for the Calatrava addition. And, we've strengthened our "bench"—we have reframed our investment policies, are recruiting only "paying members" to our foundation board, and have already attracted more than $2 million in venture funds to underwrite our forthcoming capital campaign.
4. Generate more support for graduate education.
Perhaps one of UWM's greatest success stories is our growth in federal grants and contracts over the past five years, clearly an indicator of our ability to adequately support our masters and doctoral program array. We not only met our ambitious Investment Plan goal to grow our grants by 15% a year, we blew it out of the water! We have realized a 67% growth in federal dollars from 1999 to present, and, thanks to a relationship with WARF through WISYS, have logged 52 invention disclosures and 29 patent applications.
5. Build strategic alliances with other higher education institutions.
TechStar is perhaps our most striking institutional alliance, accomplishing what many said was the impossible: we got Marquette, MSOE, and the Medical College of Wisconsin to partner with UWM and our sister institution, UW-Parkside and today have a powerful public/private partnership in tech transfer. The second significant UWM alliance is our College Connection, which today allows us to offer UWM bachelor degrees on nine (soon to be 10) of the UW College campuses and three technical colleges, with 300 students in the pipeline and 54 graduates to date!
6. Ensure more high quality programs. And finally, with regard to enhancing the quality of our programs, during the past five years UWM has become a destination campus. We've fulfilled our pledge to build an "academy of scholars" by expanding our Honors Program, and as you heard yesterday, we are committed to excellence in teaching and learning through our Carnegie initiative and the Black and Gold Commission on the Student Experience.
Our success in these areas has been enabled, in part, by the inspiration of Ernest Boyer, from whom the title of the book in front of you was taken. He wrote "As we move towards a new century, profound changes stir the nation and the world....It is a moment for boldness in higher education."
Or, as Claire Gaudiani, former president of Connecticut College is wont to say, "don't dream scrawny," and we have not. Our 6-year Investment Plan (in your folder) which our faculty, staff and students adopted in 2000 to ensure that we have the pocketbook to fund our ambitions, is still significantly "on course."
We've taken a look back and now I'd like to look ahead to a vision for the next five years at UWM. But first this caveat. I am, if you will, driving without a license and "on my ‘hog' without a helmet." The ideas I want to share with you are my musings, but have surely been triggered by conversations I'm having with our deans, students, faculty and staff. But I share them with you today to lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive plan we intend to deliver by December of this year.
As some of you will recall from last year, I have a tendency to rail against rankings, most notably the US News and World Report annual exercise in misplaced priorities. But rankings have helped us review the achievements of our peers and select those against whom we wish to benchmark our progress. We've chosen four: the University of Pittsburg, the University of Illinois-Chicago, the University of Cincinnati and Virginia Commonwealth University.
What, you ask, do these institutions have that we don't? Each has a medical school (but more on that later). They have a strong doctoral array—an average of 51 programs across the four (we're at 19). Of those doctoral programs, each has more than 10 graduate programs in the top 20 rankings of US News and World Report. UWM is off to a strong start with four, including our Architecture, Film, Library Science, and Occupational Therapy programs.
Our four benchmark peer institutions have more students, with an average enrollment around 30,000. We're scheduled to hit that equivalent in 2006. And finally, they have strong collegiate athletic programs. Several are real powerhouses in one or more sports. We're on our way!
With our profound campus-wide commitment to community engagement; access to statewide linkages; and extensive institutional partnerships; The Milwaukee Idea, now more than ever, has readied us to set our sights on meeting, matching—and exceeding—our nation's highest achieving public urban research institutions.
How to get there? I'll be honest. It will be a stretch: for UWM, for you—the Regents and System—and for our metropolitan and state partners. But, as that great philosopher, Gracie Allen once said, "they laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went ahead and built it anyway."
With those words in mind, I offer you five, easy-to-remember STRETCH goals for UWM, place-holder visions to help shape our own rethinking of the UWM and yours of the UW System.
We have set our sights on a 30,000 student enrollment target. With applications up 21% from last year—and 55% over the past five years—our growth potential is solid. We're proud that our top 30 feeder high schools are Metropolitan Milwaukee schools. But Panther wannabes are growing in number across the Midwest, Wisconsin, and even Madison, where our spring reception drew 400 guests. In short, UWM is HOT.
Furthermore, we repeatedly hear the mantra: my parents want me to live in the dorm. But increasingly getting a freshman residence room at UWM is really the victory of hope over experience.
There are no quick solutions here—the dedication of our long-awaited fourth Sandburg tower was the culmination of a 13-year building program. Columbia Hospital conversion to 450 residence rooms could extend to 2009, and Kenilworth's grad student housing will likely not be available until 2005.
Which brings me, nonetheless, to our STRETCH goal: increased residential housing—now. I've even come up with ideas for what to call this project: LoftStar, ResiStar, BunkStar. No matter what we call it, it will allow us to build—and build fast. And where? Likely along Oakland Avenue or Capitol Drive. Both locales could also dramatically reduce housing demands in our already overcrowded adjacent neighborhoods.
At the same time, we will continue to move forward with our "click and brick" initiatives. In addition to our bright on-line future, we have the potential to attract more international and out-of-state students. While our original goal of 30,000 students by 2006 was ambitious, it may turn out to be a low estimate by the end of the decade. "Don't dream scrawny."
If you were to have a 20-year-old under your roof, as I do, you'd know what "bulking up" means. You start your day with a protein drink or two, you lift weights and you buy t-shirts that are a size too small. Why? ... to display bulk, of course! For a 21st century urban public research university like UWM, that translates into a four-step process to champion at least 20 graduate programs in the top 20 rankings by 2020. First, prioritize programs that you want to see grow; add a degree of cross-disciplinarity; allocate positions against programmatic priorities; and then watch the graduate program rankings grow.
In a nutshell, this is the UWM Bulking Up Plan, one that builds on our most recent program array review, the academic roadmap presented in our 2000 Investment Plan (http://www.uwm.edu/MilwaukeeIdea/publications/rttr.pdf), our self-study for North Central Accreditation, and of course, the confluence of interdisciplinary First Ideas of The Milwaukee Idea.
As we move forward, we intend to focus our resources on the 3E's you've just heard Steve describe: education and the arts, environment and health, and economic development. And we will actively seek more endowed professorships— including more Shaw and Vilas professorship funds—seek more capacity to reallocate funds to laboratory start-up costs, initiate more cluster hires, and, quite frankly, remind the legislature that funding for The Milwaukee Idea is incomplete.
We are currently witnessing the rebirth of the neglected Menomonee River Valley as the future home to sustainable redevelopment. The blueprint calls for entrepreneurial companies producing jobs with family-supporting wages. And we want to be part of the renaissance. The valley offers UWM a symbiotic environment in which both university and community benefit. It's an ideal location for expansion of our engineering and applied sciences that can never be adequately met on the UWM "L". At the same time, we have important resources to offer the valley. We can be a major innovation engine to revitalize and reinvent manufacturing and lead technological advances. It's a dynamic, win-win partnership opportunity called "TechStar Valley."
These are its properties: a physical location near emerging and evolving state-of-the-art manufacturing entities, wherein would be housed incubator business start-ups, and R&D offices for local manufacturing and industry. Picture research laboratories for bio-imaging and bio-informatics, ... expanded joint programming for entrepreneurial programs,...co-location of venture capital firms, ... our workforce development and diversity initiatives, ... and sighting for our Intelligent Maintenance Systems consortium (http://www.uwm.edu/CEAS/IMS/index.htm) and our Milwaukee Industrial Innovations Center (http://www.uwm.edu/MilwaukeeIdea/initiatives/miic.htm), both of which focus on advanced manufacturing.
The details may shift—and other sites might eventually be better suited—but today I ask you to consider our intent to move into a major capital initiative that will give TechStar (http://www.tsearlyventures.com/index.cfm) the incubator focus that has heretofore been missing.
Here's a visual image that might help to illustrate how we can translate what Robert Zemsky, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research on Higher Education, refers to as higher education's "public purpose" to our urban mission. Thirty-five miles outside Tucson, near Oracle, Arizona, sits Columbia University's Biosphere 2, a glass-enclosed research facility dedicated to studying global environmental and climate change. What a noble, scientific pursuit! Would that we could duplicate that endeavor by enclosing our urban environment under a geodesic dome to put our urban challenges under scientific scrutiny.
But that's exactly what we are doing at UWM. We lack the distinctive glass dome, but we are applying the same scientific expertise to our studies of the human condition as it exists in the city. And, since all prognostications are that 75% of the world's population will reside in cities by 2025, we'd better step up our efforts. And for that, we will need your help.
Please understand that our commitment to Milwaukee and to urban issues is not limited to our mission of service, but is integral to our founding mission of discovery as well. We adamantly reject the dismissive view that such work is not "science," or that the intellectual study of the problem-rich environment of our metropolitan region does not require investment in traditional disciplines. We are an "urbansphere" institution, with the city a fitting partner in inquiry and exploration, as well as service.
Recall that all four of our peer benchmark institutions have medical schools. Is that what UWM needs? Not exactly. After all, UWM already has a fine partnership with the Urban Medical Program of the UW-Madison, through a jointly sponsored Center for Population Health. And, we sit on the Board of the Medical College of Wisconsin's Blue Cross, Blue Shield initiative. Further, the Medical College is a member of TechStar and we have other allied health programs across the UW System.
Still something's missing - our ability to compete in the health sciences. Hard to do in the current health care delivery model. But listen to the potential embedded in a "disruptive innovation."
In a very provocative article in the Harvard Business Review (http://www.iterations.com/protected/dwnload_files/disruptive_healthcare.pdf) Clayton Christensen and his colleagues argue that a disruptive innovation in health care is just what's needed to solve our current and persistent health care crisis. Our current health care model is built around sophisticated health care needs most of us don't have, provided by the most expensive experts and equipment. But should greater and greater portions of health care be delivered less expensively and conveniently—say by clinical health professionals like nurses in community settings—instead of focusing only on physicians and hospitals, we will cut health care costs by making health care more assessable to more people.
What if we could help to create the impetus and the means to shift all but the most serious care from hospitals to community- and neighborhood-based health care centers (http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Nursing/ncenters.htm)? There, allied health professionals—like those we prepare in nursing, occupational therapy and rehabilitation—can provide services where people live, all the while building capacity in preventive health.
Such an innovative approach builds on our institutional strengths and positions us well for future directions in federal funding. It allows us to take a leadership role among our colleague medical schools and hospitals, and to advance an agenda that has far-reaching social and public health implications. A major disruptive innovative? Perhaps. But it's a lot less expensive than asking you for a medical school ... or a football team!
This morning we've had a chance to look back over the significant achievements of this institution during the past five years and also to look forward and dream big. As I warned, our STRETCH goals are still in the formative stages. They are UWM's "heads-up" to you because they are goals we intend to pursue—creatively, with vigor, and in partnership with you and the State.
We believe now, more than ever, that the values of The Milwaukee Idea can help us become leaders among our peers. Now, more than ever, UWM can be the economic, social and academic driver for our region's future. Now, more than ever, your support of positive, disruptive innovation at UWM is essential to moving forward.
Now, more than ever.
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