As a proud University of Wisconsin Class of 1991 graduate and lifelong Badger, I have watched my alma mater with a mix of pride and increasing concern.
A Dairyland Sentinel perspectives column by publisher Brian Fraley
Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announced in late January 2026 that she would be leaving UW-Madison after a relatively short tenure to become president of Columbia University. Her departure has once again left the flagship campus searching for new leadership.
The 2015 reforms to shared governance were intended to bring greater accountability and efficiency to the University of Wisconsin System. Prior to these changes, faculty, staff, and students held significant decision-making power. The reforms shifted more authority to campus chancellors and the Board of Regents, reducing the roles of faculty, staff, and students to primarily advisory positions. The goal was a university more responsive to taxpayers, less bogged down by internal politics, and better at managing public resources.
Yet the current Board of Regents is demonstrating that power without perspective can be both useless and dangerous.
For 95 days, the search for a new UW-Madison chancellor sat idle. While the flagship campus drifted without permanent leadership, the Regents were consumed by a bizarre internal power struggle to oust System President Jay Rothman. This was not leadership. It was a distraction that left the university rudderless at its most critical moment.
By firing Rothman without a clear, public explanation, the Regents have sent a chilling signal to potential chancellor candidates. UW-Madison appears to be a political minefield where ideological purity tests matter more than institutional stability.
Current leadership shows little interest in genuine ideological diversity, especially at UW-Madison. Promised conservative voices in key positions have been stalled. The search committee already looks set up for groupthink, with no urgency to meet, no public timeline, and no apparent concern for bringing different perspectives to the table.
This is not how you run a world-class public university. It is how you protect an insular bubble.
The Regents seem to have forgotten a basic truth: they do not own the UW. Taxpayers and the Wisconsin Legislature, which holds the purse strings, ultimately do. By ignoring lawmakers and the public they serve, the Board is jeopardizing the very viability they claim to protect.
The Wisconsin Idea was never meant to be an insular Madison echo chamber disconnected from the state that funds it.
Higher education is a brutally competitive market. Top talent will not sit around waiting while a Board takes three months just to assemble a search committee. Other flagship universities are aggressively recruiting. UW-Madison remains stuck in a self-inflicted administrative freeze.
The 2015 reforms gave the Regents the authority they needed to prevent exactly this kind of bureaucratic paralysis. Instead, they continue to defer to campus insiders.
We are witnessing a Board far more concerned with internal campus vibe dynamics and settling scores than with stewarding a great public institution. If this continues, the funding and autonomy required for UW-Madison to remain world-class will keep evaporating.
It is time for the Regents to step out of the Madtown bubble. The statutes were amended to create a more responsive university, not a walled garden for unelected officials to protect the ivory tower while the flagship’s future hangs in the balance.
Bottom line for the Board of Regents: Follow the law you were given in 2015. Exercise the authority granted with wisdom, urgency, and a genuine commitment to the people of Wisconsin rather than the prevailing campus orthodoxy.
The future of UW-Madison depends on it.
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