I wish we had more of this kind of introspective thinking in the UW System.
Southern Illinois University’s enrollment is in “free fall,” and the chancellor knows whom to blame. No, not the usual suspects — a stingy legislature, rising costs, tapped-out donors.
“Why is this (enrollment drop) occurring?” SIU Carbondale Chancellor Carlo Montemagno said in October. “It’s occurring because we are not offering programs that are distinctive and relevant to today’s students.”
Boom.
Montemagno uttered these heretical (to defenders of the status quo) words as he proposed a dramatic reorganization that would lop off departments and department heads in the name of better serving students and allocating money. You don’t often hear such blunt it’s-us-not-them talk from Illinois public university presidents. They and their friendly enablers, too many pols in Springfield, battle to preserve state spending on university fiefdoms in their districts. Whether students go out of state, or enroll here and fail to succeed, are secondary concerns.
When faced with the same problem of declining enrollment in the UW Colleges, the UW Regents have decided to shuffle the organization, but leave everything else pretty much the same.
You don’t give Walker enough credit. He stacked the Regents, appointed Cross, gave all the chancellors big raises and new bennies, are already in the second weird attempted re-org of the two-year schools, created the Thompson Center for Cronies, whined about there not being enough safe spaces for conservative students… they’ve done plenty.