Back when Carlos Santiago was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee from 2024 to 2010, he would often comment, “Where are the cranes over the UWM campus?”
He was contrasting UWM, the state’s second flagship as a Ph.D. granting university, to UW-Madison where flocks of construction cranes are often flying high over new buildings. The disparity over the years has been glaring.
Santiago left in frustration in 2010 at the lack of effective support from the Milwaukee metro establishment and the UW Regents. He eventually became provost of SUNY, the whole New York university system. Nancy Zimpher, his stunning UWM predecessor, also frustrated, had preceded him out the door, eventually for the top job at SUNY.
They both would applaud the rare decision last week for investment in UWM. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican legislative leaders, in a welcome bipartisan compromise, included UWM in the capital budget with $189 million for the long overdue renovation of the old Columbia Hospital, known as the Northwest Quadrant. UWM bought it 15 years ago.
The plan for that addition to the campus is strategically powerful. It will be home to a health science cluster of departments that will position UWM at the center of the biggest economic sector in the country – health care. It constitutes about 18% of the U.S. economy, headed to 20%. (By comparison, manufacturing is about 10% and agriculture is about 5.5 %.)
UWM lacks a medical school, but it delivers many other health care disciplines, including by far the largest nursing school in the state at 1400 students.
Health care education is now spread over five locations at UWM. The renovated health care complex will pull them together in a coherent presentation to the world. That’s just what should happen as UWM strives to be known as a world class urban education university.
The occupants of the renovated complex should include the state’s only School of Public Health, health care economics and management, physical therapy, health care services for students and health sciences.
It’s obvious that UWM should establish a strong collaboration with the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). Co-location was tried on the UWM Innovation Campus just north of the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. The concept was for UWM’s engineering and business schools to become a complement to MCW, where clinical research abounds. That should hold true at some level even after the Trump Administration’s broad scale attack on university R&D.
UWM has been averaging about $60 million a year in research through its UWM Research Foundation. That qualifies it as one of 146nCarnegie R-1 research institutions.
On the other side of town, MCW leads or collaborates on more than 3800 research studies annually, including clinical trials by its doctors at Froedtert Health. A collaboration of these two research engines makes all the sense in the world.
Lesser research entities like Marquette University and the Milwaukee School of Engineering should be pulled into the health sciences collaboration. The Milwaukee region could complement research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a $1.7 billion research powerhouse center.
A commitment of the governor and the legislature to a health care breakout strategy at UWM is a no-brainer, especially since UWM has been a desert for major capital spending for a decade or more. The only recent big win for UWM was a new chemistry building in the 2021-2023 state budget at $118 million.
Other UW campuses have received far more generous funding over the years and did well in this budget as well. UW-La Crosse won $194 million for a science center; UW-Madison got $160 million for Science Hall; UW-Oshkosh won $170 million for its “Polk Learning Commons.
Enrollment declines at UW-Milwaukee are certainly part of the picture. UWM has dropped from a high of about 29,000 head count to about 23,000 today. With the exception of UW-Madison, the 11 other four-year UW campuses have also seen significant enrollment declines.
Wisely, the newly signed 2025-2027 budget looks past the UW’s demographic woes with major investment across the UW system. The total UW capital budget for the current biennium is a whopping $840 million. Wisconsin has long been an education state, and it makes strategic sense for the state to continue to develop medical talent in a global economy dominated by innovative breakthroughs.
UWM’s burgeoning partnership with Microsoft is a shining example of how our state can lead the world in innovation. Microsoft is concentrating on artificial intelligence in manufacturing in Wisconsin. Let’s persuade Microsoft to add its AI chops in the dominant health care sector as part of its collaboration with UWM.
(Torinus was the founding chairman of the UWM Research Foundation)
