Mnookin: “Nearly everyone I’ve met shares a deep sense of pride in this university.”

Jennifer L. Mnookin started her job as UW–Madison chancellor on August 4, and she wasted little time immersing herself in Badger culture. She served Babcock ice cream at an all-campus party on Bascom Hill, posed for pictures with her new friend Bucky Badger, and scheduled listening sessions with faculty, staff, alumni, student groups, legislators, tribal leaders, and community members. Mnookin also took time to tell On Wisconsin about her unique approach to creating a vision for the UW’s future.

How are you adapting to life at UW–Madison after 17 years at UCLA?

It’s been an exciting first few months, a whirlwind but wonderful. I’ve been soaking in as much as I can about our university, our broader community, and the state. That’s involved many meetings with faculty, staff, students, and alums, and opportunities to do things like meet with fruit farmers who partner with one of our agricultural research stations, hold a baby pig at a county fair, and start to meet community leaders and legislators in Madison and across the state. Provost Karl Scholz has teased me that every time he asks me, “How’s it going?” I respond with some enthusiastic version of “Great!” and then share with him some interesting tidbit that I’ve just learned about this amazing university.

What’s so striking is that nearly everyone I’ve met shares a deep sense of pride in this university. Though we might sometimes have different ideas about priorities, virtually everyone does want to see us continue to grow and thrive, and I’ve already benefited from hearing a variety of thoughtful perspectives about UW–Madison’s next chapter.

I’ve also been grateful for the many suggestions about how my husband and I should best embrace our first winter in Wisconsin. I’m hearing that lots of layers are even more important than the perfect winter coat! (I still do have a little time before I actually need that winter wardrobe, right?)

What are your top priorities for your first year at the UW?

My top priority right now is to listen and learn. The best vision for the university’s next chapter isn’t going to emerge from a 10-point list from on high; it’s going to grow out of building a genuinely collective vision for the university’s future. I’ve been asking everyone I meet two questions: What is working well here? And where do you see the most meaningful opportunities for change?

I want to hear ideas that are feasible and concrete, and I also want to hear ideas that are ambitious, creative, and innovative.

I am deeply committed to making sure UW–Madison is a place where we can discuss everything — the ideas we strongly agree with and the ideas we strongly disagree with. That’s sifting and winnowing, and it’s part of what both academic freedom and freedom of speech are all about. At the same time, I want to make sure our students feel safe and supported and know that they belong here even when they’re in discussions with classmates who might have very different worldviews. Both the university as a place of vibrant and sometimes challenging intellectual exchange, and the university as a space of belonging for those who are with us, whatever their identities, backgrounds, or political perspectives, are very important to me.

How do you see UW–Madison leveraging its strengths to make a difference in the world?

I’ve spent my academic career at top public universities, and they all have a mission to make a difference in the world — but here at UW–Madison, that mission is even a bit stronger and more foundational to our identity and sense of purpose. There are several reasons, I think, that we’ve been able to build this culture and to engage in real-world problem-solving in an energetic way.

The first is our dedication to working across disciplines to solve complex problems. We have veterinarians working with physicians, pharmacists, and engineers, for example, on research related to animal health that also has major implications for human health in areas like cancer treatment and animal–human disease transmission. Cross-disciplinary work can be enormously challenging, but we know that bringing creative researchers together across disciplines to work on critical problems can spark extraordinary discovery and innovation. There’s a serious interest in thinking across here, and that’s a great thing.

Related to this is a second important value, the Wisconsin Idea. Our commitment to public service shapes the way we teach and drives many of the crosscurrents that make our research enterprise extraordinarily broad, deep, and excellent. As we approach our 175th anniversary next year, we have an opportunity to celebrate the Wisconsin Idea in a way that further builds UW–Madison as a national and global model for what a great public university can be.

Finish this sentence: “I’ll have a brat, cheese curds, and …”

A scoop of Babcock Dairy’s orange custard chocolate chip!

Mnookin (right) has been struck by how much people at the UW care about the institution and each other. Jeff Miller

Every incoming UW–Madison leader professes to understand the Wisconsin Idea, the guiding principle that the activities of the university should have a positive and lasting impact on the state and world. New chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin grasps it in a deeply personal way.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mnookin donated a kidney to her father. A transplant solution developed at UW–Madison allowed the organ to be shipped from Los Angeles to Boston for successful transplantation. He’s doing well today.

Mnookin has been struck by the commitment to the Wisconsin Idea and the spirit of the academic community that she joined on August 4.

“Two things make this place so special. One is just the incredible range of research activities across so many fields at such a high level,” says Mnookin, who succeeds Rebecca Blank. “The second is just how much people care about each other, the community, and the institution.”

Mnookin had been dean of the UCLA School of Law since 2015. She was a professor at UCLA, the University of Virginia School of Law, and Harvard Law School.

Those who know her best credit Mnookin with being a transformative leader at UCLA, fully prepared to transition from a successful deanship into the UW chancellor role.

“Jennifer was born to be the leader of a great research university like the University of Wisconsin,” says University of Oregon president Michael Schill, who previously served as UCLA law school dean. “She is incredibly smart, strategic, inspiring, warm, and collaborative. She has been an amazing dean of one of the nation’s best law schools and has moved it dramatically forward in a short period of time.”

Mnookin says she won’t shy away from challenges ahead and describes an engaged leadership style that will draw in an array of voices to solve problems.

“Vision comes through collaboration and engagement — working together to find common purpose. We will look for ways to improve the institution that you love and that I am coming to love.”

In reality, Holley’s thoughts about UW–Madison are mixed. He met terrific friends on campus and received a great education, he says, but he also remembers regularly being called racial slurs on State Street at bar time and watching a fellow Black student pack up and leave school after being aggressively harassed because of his race while walking to his dorm. The administration, he says, didn’t seem to care very much.

Recently, when a researcher with UW–Madison’s Public History Project contacted Holley to discuss his time at the university, he agreed to sit for an oral history interview, intrigued by the prospect. As he shared his experiences as a student of color on a predominantly white campus, he appreciated the opportunity to have an extended discussion about complex issues.

“They really wanted to hear from me in an in-depth way,” says Holley, a Chicago attorney. Since fall 2019, researchers with the Public History Project have completed 140 oral history interviews with alumni and current students. They’ve dug deep into the university’s archives, scoured decades of media coverage, and read 168 volumes of the Badger yearbook and the Daily Cardinal.

The effort is intended to give voice to those who experienced and challenged prejudice on campus. Over the past three years, the project’s researchers have shared their findings through campus presentations, special events, and blog posts.

The project will culminate this fall with an exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art and a companion online gallery and archive. Spanning more than 150 years, Sifting & Reckoning: UW–Madison’s History of Exclusion and Resistance (September 12–December 23) will make space for the university’s underrecognized and unseen histories. The title plays off “sifting and winnowing,” the iconic phrase that has come to represent the fearless pursuit of knowledge at UW–Madison.

“Reckoning is an active, participatory process, and that’s so important when thinking about this project,” says Kacie Lucchini Butcher, the project’s director. “We have to know this history and grapple with it — even if it’s uncomfortable and hard to face — because that’s part of making the university a more equitable place.”

The challenge was to figure out how best to approach this sensitive subject.

A Clean Break

The project has roots in the university’s response to the 2017 white supremacist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the wake of the tragedy, UW–Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank denounced the ideologies of all hate groups and said it was time to confront racist elements in the university’s past and make a clean break with them. She appointed a study group to look at two student groups that bore the name of the Ku Klux Klan around the 1920s.

One of the groups, a fraternity house, was found to be affiliated with the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The other, an interfraternity honor society composed of student leaders, had no documented connection to the national KKK and no known racist ideology. Its name remains inexplicable.

In compiling its report, the study group identified a broader pattern of exclusion. It concluded that the history the UW needed to confront was not the aberrant work of a few individuals or groups but a pervasive campus culture of racism and religious bigotry that went largely unchallenged in the early 1900s and was a defining feature of American life in general at that time. Blank commissioned the Public History Project as one of several responses.

“The study group’s findings pointed to a need to build a more inclusive university community through an honest reckoning with our past,” Blank said at the time. The project comes as the university seeks to make sure all members of the campus community feel welcome and respected. A first-ever campus climate survey in 2016 found that historically underrepresented and disadvantaged groups, while reporting generally positive experiences on campus, consistently rated the climate less favorably than students from majority groups. The survey was repeated last fall with similar findings. Both surveys also revealed that students value diversity and that it’s important to them that the university does, too.

The Public History Project is uniquely suited to advance this goal.

Putting History to Use

Lucchini Butcher describes public history as an approach that seeks to elevate the stories of community members — especially those previously ignored or discounted — and share them in accessible, pragmatic ways.

“I think of history as a tool, and I’m always trying to think about how we can put it to use for people,” she says.

UW–Madison is far from alone in scrutinizing problematic parts of its history. The University of Virginia, for example, leads a research consortium of more than 80 higher education institutions with historic ties to slavery. Harvard University, one prominent consortium member, announced in April the creation of a $100 million fund to study and redress its early complicity with slave labor.

Even amid this widespread reckoning, UW–Madison’s effort stands out, says Stephanie Rowe, executive director of the National Council on Public History. While many such projects focus on a particular strand of a university’s past, UW–Madison is employing a broader lens. And while many begin as faculty-initiated research projects, the UW created a public history project and hired a full-time director to see it through. The project is expected to cost $1 million and is being paid for with private funds, not taxpayer money.

“We don’t often see a university initiate and support a public history project of this design and this magnitude,” Rowe says.

Sifting & Reckoning: UW–Madison’s History of Exclusion and Resistance makes space for the university’s underrecognized and unseen histories. Capital Times / UW Archives; Daily Cardinal / UW Archives (2)

Wrongs and Rights

In the Chazen exhibition, the Public History Project unflinchingly faces the university’s past.

Visitors will see the large “Pipe of Peace” used by students a century ago at ceremonies that parodied Native American life. They’ll view posters for campus minstrel shows and watch an undercover film from the 1960s that documents housing discrimination in Madison. The film was thought to have been destroyed by the university but actually sat for decades out of view in UW Archives.

They’ll meet Weathers “Sonny” Sykes ’50, the first Black man to enter an otherwise all-white fraternity at UW–Madison when he joined the Jewish fraternity Phi Sigma Delta in 1949, and Liberty Rashad, one of the organizers of the 1969 Black Student Strike.

They’ll learn about law student Brigid McGuire JDx’96, who in 1994 contested the physical inaccessibility of UW classrooms by removing a portion of a desk with a circular saw to create room for her motorized wheelchair — amid applause from her fellow classmates. And Mildred Gordon, a Jewish woman, who sued the owners of the private Langdon Hall dormitory after arriving in 1929 and being told her room had been given to a non-Jewish person.

Other components of the exhibition explore fraternity and sorority life, Badger athletics, student activism, and prejudice in the classroom. There are deeply shameful incidents, like the campus “gay purges” between 1948 and 1962, but also stories of bravery and resilience as marginalized groups claimed their rightful place on campus.

The exhibition also captures times when UW–Madison as an institution, and especially its students and employees, landed on the right side of history. The Groves Housing Cooperative, founded by the university in 1944, had no racial or religious restrictions and was the first interracial housing cooperative on campus. In another example, many UW–Madison professors and students fought to admit Japanese American students to the university during and immediately after World War II, against stiff government opposition.

“We share in the legacy of what our university has been in the past, whether we realize it or not,” says Joy Block PhDx’23, a doctoral candidate in history who researched Japanese American Badgers for the project. “What I really like about this project is that you get a fuller picture of that history. Sometimes that reveals our failures, sometimes our successes. And sometimes it just reveals our humanity.”

Essential Discussions

Supporters of the Public History Project anticipate criticism, expecting that some will question its value or view it as unnecessary or revisionist history.

John Dichtl, president of the American Association for State and Local History, says it may be helpful for people to view history as a form of detective work.

“To think critically, you need all the information, the full sweep of the past,” he says. “The term revisionist history is often held up as bad, but this is what historians are always doing. Like detectives, they build their cases step by step over time, then revise and update their conclusions based on new evidence, questions, and perspectives.”

It is especially important that institutions of higher education do this work, Dichtl says.

“How can a university call itself a center of learning if it is not fully honest about its own past and its own history?” he asks. “Engaging students in critical thinking about these issues is important for its own teaching mission.”

UW–Madison history professor Stephen Kantrowitz, who chairs the Public History Project Steering Committee, says the project is providing curricular materials to instructors and encouraging them to tour the exhibition with their students.

“My hope is that all of these things the project has identified and collected — the research, the analysis, the interviews, the archives — will enable generations of students and teachers here to use the university’s own history as a laboratory for their study of how people have lived and interacted, how they’ve resolved conflict, and how they’ve worked to change society,” he says.

Kantrowitz likens the project to sitting down with an elder and learning the full sweep of your family’s history, including the worst parts.

“All those painful silences around the dinner table suddenly make more sense,” he says. “That’s what we’re doing here. We’re collectively sitting down with the family photo album and trying to figure out why we have these ongoing conflicts — conflicts over questions that are not unique to the campus but are fundamental American struggles, about race, about gender, about sexuality, about disability, about all sorts of questions that continue to be socially difficult for us.”

LaVar Charleston MS’07, PhD’10, the university’s chief diversity officer, views the project as a beginning, not an end. Its findings will provide a common starting point for essential discussions about how the university addresses or redresses these long-standing issues.

“We have a tendency as a society to act like things didn’t happen, to sweep things under the rug,” says Charleston, who leads the Division of Diversity, Equity, & Educational Achievement. “This is the opposite of that. This is the university taking the initiative and confronting the ghosts that have haunted this campus for decades. Of course, we’re going to unearth some things that may look bad, but I’m proud that we’re being proactive about understanding our history. It’s the only way to make the necessary adjustments so that the impact from discrimination doesn’t continue to happen.”

Finally Being Heard

Charles Holley’s name will be familiar to many alumni. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s, he chaired the UW–Madison Steering Committee on Minority Affairs. The committee’s final document, which became known as the Holley Report, was a forerunner of 1988’s Madison Plan, the university’s first formalized diversity plan.

Holley says the histories of institutions like UW–Madison are often told by those with money, power, and influence. The Public History Project serves as a needed corrective. To those who may criticize the university for “airing its dirty laundry,” Holley has a response.

“It’s already out there. It’s certainly out there in the communities that I care about. If you haven’t heard about it before, you might ask yourself why not.”

By interviewing current students and recent alumni, the project underscores that prejudice remains an issue today on campus. Ariana Thao ’20, who is Hmong, says other students sometimes taunted or mocked her as she walked down State Street. They’d yell “Ni hao” — Chinese for hello — or loudly joke that she probably didn’t speak English.

Thao shared these anecdotes with a researcher and says the experience proved cathartic. “It felt so good to finally be heard,” she says.

Geneva Brown ’88, JD’93, a campus activist in the late 1980s as a member of both the Black Student Union and the Minority Coalition, hopes the Public History Project exhibit will inspire current students to keep working to improve the campus.

“There’s never a past tense to racism and discrimination,” says Brown, a faculty lecturer in criminology at DePaul University. “When students hear, especially nowadays, that we acknowledge the past and understand how it impacts our future, we’re creating an atmosphere where we’re not just giving lip service to diversity, we’re trying to do something about it. I think UW–Madison, with this project, can take the lead on that.”

When Lucchini Butcher gives presentations on campus about the Public History Project, she sometimes reminds people that UW–Madison bills itself as a world-class institution. Ultimately, the project can elevate, not diminish, UW–Madison’s reputation by making sure it lives up to its promise, she says.

“None of this means you have to love UW–Madison any less. You can critique the things you love. You can love something enough to want it to live up to your standards and your expectations.” •

McInnes: Linguistic justice would mean that every Indigenous child has at least the right to learn their own language. Bryce Richter

A new campus initiative is fostering awareness about the first languages spoken in Wisconsin.

Enwejig (pronounced ain-WAY-young) Indigenous Language Advocates is a group of professors, graduate students, and other campus partners who are committed to the preservation and promotion of Indigenous languages. Enwejig is an Ojibwe word meaning “those who speak.” Paramount of the group’s many goals is bringing linguistic justice to languages that have named nearly every corner of the state, but whose speakers are few.

“Under 500-some years of colonization, not only has there been a hope that Indigenous languages would disappear, but there has been active work to destroy and to outlaw those languages,” says Brian McInnes, an enrolled member of the Ojibwe nation, descendant of the Wisconsin Potawatomi tribe, and associate professor of civil society and community studies and American Indian studies at the UW. “Linguistic justice would mean that every Indigenous child has at least the right to learn their own language.”

Enwejig’s efforts encompass myriad facets of language revitalization, both on campus and across the state. Their programs include Project ENABLE, which incorporates Diné Bízaad — the language of the Navajo people — into the study of biological concepts; Nisinoon, a cross-linguistic database of words that compose the Algonquian languages; Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums, a partnership with the Information School (iSchool); and increased signage in Indigenous languages around campus.

According to McInnes, this work on the UW campus, which occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, can serve as a starting point for reckoning with a fraught past.

“When we try to think of truth and reconciliation, [we think about] our history — but what can be our future?” McInnes says. “Sometimes we don’t have a starting place, [but] this is something we can do: the restoration of Indigenous languages, the sign-posting of Indigenous terminologies and expressions and ideas, and the learning and use of those things by our campus community.”

For Enwejig, a hopeful future includes degree programs built around Indigenous languages so that students can take this work across the country.

“We have a dream of ensuring that our tribal language is the first language of our community,” McInnes says, “that the notions and the philosophies and the wisdom within our tribal languages enrich who we are as a people, how we do things, how we relate to each other, and how we are defined on the earth.”

Blank: “Certain things that are unique to this job are enormously fun.”

After nine years as chancellor, Rebecca Blank will leave UW–Madison in May to become president of Northwestern University. She admits to mixed feelings about packing up her Badger mementos. On the one hand, Blank feels she has done what she set out to do during her long tenure and is ready to make room for new leadership. On the other hand, she will miss a university that provided her with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities — and that even named a tart ice cream flavor after her. Given the serious challenges the chancellor faced on campus, from budget crises to COVID-19, she has a surprisingly joyful piece of advice for her yet-to-be-named successor.

How do you feel about leaving UW–Madison?

I will miss many aspects of this job. My husband and I regularly go to the Terrace on summer evenings. There’s not another spot like that on any college campus in the country. Football Game Day in Madison is unique, and the Field House when the women’s volleyball team is playing is just so much fun. I also love interacting with Bucky whenever he shows up. On the other hand, I’ve been here nine years. I feel that I have moved forward those things that I have the skills and ability for, and that it’s time to let someone else lead with a different set of skills and the ability to do some things I haven’t done.

What was it like to come to campus after serving as acting secretary of commerce in the Obama administration?

It was a wonderful job to come into. The Wisconsin Idea is unique here, and people cherish it. I remember during my first weeks, as I walked across campus, people would say, “Are you the new chancellor? Say, have you heard about the Wisconsin Idea? You’ve got to know about that!” I thought, “They’re really serious about that here, aren’t they?”

What have you liked best about the job?

I love the size and scope of this place, which means you never get bored. Every day brings a new issue or problem.

COVID is a classic example of that. Within four months, we had to redo all aspects of the university: how we ran our buildings, how we ran our labs, how we ran our classrooms, how people worked. Everything changed, and I have never worked harder than I worked in that time period.

What’s been your biggest challenge?

It was in 2015, when the legislature took tenure out of state statutes and turned it back to the regents. The regents did the right thing, writing tenure rules that were very similar to our peers. But that took six to nine months. Meanwhile, the faculty wondered, “Is tenure gone?” That was a deep existential threat to this university. There were times when I thought it was quite possible that half of our faculty would be gone within the next few years. We lost some really good people, and it affected us. Within two years, we were back to normal retention levels, hiring great people. Three years later, we had the biggest new incoming class of faculty we’ve ever had. Our research dollars started growing steadily and strongly. But it took a lot of effort.

How do you think UW–Madison has changed under your leadership?

When I got here, it became clear to me that we had to be more in control of our future, particularly our financial future. So I launched a number of initiatives designed to create revenue that we could use to invest in this university, and those were all quite successful. We’ve moved faculty salaries from the bottom of the Big Ten to number five. We’ve moved graduate funding from the bottom of the Big Ten to above the median. We’ve been able to create scholarships and access programs like Bucky’s Tuition Promise, and we’ve invested in a number of big new ventures such as the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences.

I’d like to believe that we’ve had some cultural change, where people understand that there are ways to raise money and be entrepreneurial. We must do this if we want to remain a modern, topflight university.

I’m also proud of the sustained work we’ve done on diversity issues over my tenure. We’re doing a lot more programming, with more people thinking about and acting on these issues. We have more to do, but the culture is changing.

What kinds of changes do you think the university will undergo over the next few years?

I hope that whoever succeeds me will have the creativity to come up with the next round of ideas for how to generate investment income. One of the things we’ve been working on is real estate development, both on and off campus. We own a lot of land, much of it not being used very well. I think there’s a real opportunity for us to do something that serves our campus and the community better and also generates additional revenue. It’s an exciting new venture for the university, and it will be in the hands of whoever follows me.

Do you have any advice for the next chancellor?

Certain things that are unique to this job are enormously fun. There’s not another job in the country where you have commencements with 45,000 people in a football stadium and you’re the host of the show. Where you have convocations with all these wonderful 18-year-olds coming in, eager to start the next phase of their lives. Where you get an ice cream named after you. And then there’s the intellectual atmosphere on campus — being able to walk into any lab and talk to the faculty about what they’re doing. Enjoy all of that! Because there will be a lot of hard parts to this job as well. You have to renew yourself with the joy that comes with the good parts.

What stands out among “the good parts”?

We’ve gone to one Rose Bowl since I’ve been here, and that was an amazing event, different from anything I’ve ever done. Two nights before the game, they have this fancy dress-up ball, with dancers and singers — all the Los Angeles glitz, which we don’t do a lot of here in Madison.

Will you bring any UW keepsakes with you to Northwestern?

I have the basketballs from the two Final Fours that we were in. But, you know, it’s the memories that matter, not the things.

When you come back to visit, will you order your namesake ice cream from Babcock Hall?

I hate to say this, but, while I like Bec-Key Lime Pie, I’m much more into chocolate!

And the most important question of all: What will you do with all the red items in your wardrobe?

Half the red in my wardrobe I had before I took this job, so I’m not getting rid of all that. I like red too much.

A tour of the Humanities Building underscored the need for a new academic facility for the College of Letters & Science. Bryce Richter

In July, Wisconsin governor Tony Evers ’73, MS’76, PhD’86 signed the 2021–23 state budget with dozens of line-item vetoes, capping a months-long process that saw the legislature scrap his original proposal and craft its own. UW–Madison emerged from the process with several important wins, including new funds for a critical campus building.

As part of the budget bill drafted by the Republican-led legislature and signed by the Democratic governor, the UW System Board of Regents regained its authority to set tuition rates for in-state undergrads. That ends an eight-year mandated tuition freeze at UW–Madison.

The budget also provides 2 percent pay increases for university and state workers in each of the next two years, plus $2 million for the UW’s Division of Extension to hire additional agricultural specialists.

Last spring, university leaders invited state politicians to tour a campus artifact with structural challenges: the Humanities Building (pictured above). The effort underscored the need for a new academic facility for the College of Letters & Science. The final budget obliged, covering roughly 70 percent of the projected $88 million cost. The new building, planned for the corner of West Johnson and North Park Streets, will feature 19 modern classrooms and consolidate departments and programs from seven campus locations.

“This new academic building will modernize the student learning experience and build research connections across campus, better serving the needs of our growing undergraduate population,” said Eric Wilcots, the college’s dean.

High on the list for UW–Madison was funding for a new engineering building that would enable the university to increase enrollment in the in-demand field by nearly a quarter. While funding for the building was not included in the final budget passed by the legislature, the budget does fund a major utility project on Engineering Drive, which signals future support for constructing the facility.

“We begin the new fiscal year with a solid budget that invests in our valued employees and provides funding for important new building projects,” said Chancellor Rebecca Blank.

During the past eight years, Blank has focused on enhancing the student experience and placing the university on firm financial footing. Jeff Miller

Chancellor Rebecca Blank will leave UW–Madison at the end of the 2021–22 academic year to assume the presidency of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, she announced in October. Blank has served as chancellor since 2013.

Her tenure is the longest since Irving Shain, who served for nearly a decade until his retirement in 1986. She has the second-longest tenure of any current Big Ten public institution leader.

During the past eight years, Blank has focused on enhancing the student experience and educational outcomes, further elevating the world-class faculty, and placing the university on firm financial footing through a combination of private fundraising and innovative strategies.

An internationally known economist, Blank worked in academia and in three different presidential administrations, most recently as deputy secretary and acting secretary of commerce under President Barack Obama. She served on the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton.

Between her service in government, Blank also served as dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She was on the faculty at Northwestern from 1989 to 1999, serving as director of its Joint Center for Poverty Research.

“I love Madison, and I also have deep ties to Evanston,” she says. “I served on the Northwestern faculty and was married in Chicago. My daughter was born at Evanston Hospital and returned 18 years later to attend Northwestern as a student.”

At the UW, Blank is widely credited with enhancing outreach to communities and businesses around Wisconsin, forging new relationships with the legislature and state government, managing questions about tenure protections, and taking multiple new steps to improve the university’s finances following a period of budget cuts.

“Leading UW–Madison and serving the people of Wisconsin has been an honor and a privilege,” says Blank. “Now it’s time to let someone else step into leadership. It was always my goal to leave this university stronger than when I came, and I believe that together we have achieved that.”

When he discovered the book Dance: A Creative Art Experience, Walker found his life’s calling.

Dance professor Chris Walker’s path to becoming director of the UW’s Division of the Arts was not traditional. As a young man, he hadn’t really thought of college but was a performer at the Jamaica Grande Hotel in Ocho Rios. There, a chance encounter with the book Dance: A Creative Art Experience inspired his life’s calling: he soon enrolled at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, then earned a BFA and MFA from the State University of New York at Brockport. In New York, another chance encounter aimed him toward Madison.

In 15 years at the UW, Walker has taught dance, dance history, and somatics; helped to found the First Wave hip-hop arts program; served as artistic director for the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives; and now takes the lead in a division charged with promoting arts engagement across campus and beyond.

What first inspired you to study dance?

I picked up a book that was written by Margaret H’Doubler [1910, MA1924], who, remarkably, is the founder of the dance program at the University of Wisconsin. I was waiting on some friends for a performance, and there was this cream-colored book on a coffee table. I picked it up, opened the book to the middle, which I always do, then just read the first paragraph my eyes landed on, and it was about dance as art practice. And I remember feeling immediately, “This is what I do. There’s a whole piece of literature on this.” So I started to leaf through. When our director arrived that evening, I asked him about these possibilities and he was just so matter of fact. “Yeah, go to the school of dance.”

It’s a long way from Ocho Rios to Madison. What brought you here?

Claudia Melrose [’65] and the Wisconsin Idea. The Wisconsin Idea demands that research must extend beyond this space. It must reach out to the people in the state that it’s meant for, or across the globe. I was at [SUNY] Brockport and this older, white woman walks into the theater — big hair, tall, strong — and she outdances everybody on the floor, not because she’s performing harder, but because she understood the interiority of the movement. In the moment, I felt like I was looking at an elder. [Later, she] calls, offering a job at UW–Madison for a year. This is the place where that book was published. When she invited me, my mind exploded. I had to come.

Before you became director of the Division of the Arts, what did you teach?

I taught a technique course that is rooted in understanding the process through which you learn to do movement safely and efficiently. It’s an application of a wide range of discoveries in techniques over the last, maybe, 200 years.

You helped develop First Wave. Do you keep up with those students?

I collaborate with alumni and spend a lot of time reading works of the alumni of our program: Danez Smith [’12], Erika Dickerson-Despenza [’15], Deshawn McKinney [’17]. When I have free time, I try to get caught up with what they’re publishing.

What are your goals for the division?

I want to reinforce the value that is the Wisconsin Idea. Because of what the Wisconsin Idea demands, your work may travel around the world and impact communities you would not even look at twice. When systems and organizations believe in that, then you have a Chris Walker in Jamaica picking up his book. That’s what the division is able to do.

Somewhere in the universe, Langer is wearing Badger red.

Gayle Williams Langer ’83, former executive director of the Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA), passed away in September.

While spending her early years on farms in Waushara County, Wisconsin, Langer dreamed of attending the UW. She boarded a Greyhound bus at age 17 and headed for Madison with no funds, no job lined up, and no place to live. She eventually learned about a scholarship that allowed her to earn a marketing degree from the Wisconsin School of Business.

Fulfilling another dream, Langer married in 1958 and went on to have two children. She solidified her bond with the university when she joined the Wisconsin Alumni Association in 1959 as an executive assistant, working for WAA directors John Berge 1922 and then Arlie Mucks ’47. In 1979, she started the Wisconsin Alumni Student Board, an organization that prepares students to become alumni leaders and is still going strong. In 1989, she became WAA executive director, serving in that role until 2000.

According to Paula Bonner MS’78, whom Langer hired in 1989, one of Langer’s key contributions was reestablishing partnerships with the university, so that the association served not only alumni and students but also the campus. She also raised funds to renovate the Alumni Center, enhanced WAA’s alumni communications, and strengthened the association’s ties with international and diverse alumni.

Langer was a recognized leader in higher education, as well as a champion for women in the advancement industry. She was a trustee and officer of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). As the first woman to chair CASE’s Midwest district, she was the recipient of the organization’s Distinguished Service Award. She served as chair of the Big Ten Alumni Directors and as director of the Council of Alumni Association Executives, a consortium of 90 alumni associations throughout the country.

Donna Shalala, former UW chancellor and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, says that “Gayle taught me a lot about the university and the Wisconsin community. … I loved sitting in her office, following her around at tailgates, and absorbing her enthusiasm and love for the Badgers.”

In retirement, Langer remained active in numerous community organizations, including helping to start a Madison chapter of Gilda’s Club and serving as a grant writer for nonprofits.

Bonner, who succeeded Langer as WAA executive director, says that “Gayle was a leader who made a positive difference for WAA, for the university, and in the lives of many. There’s no doubt that somewhere in the universe, Gayle Langer is wearing Badger red.”