A University of Wisconsin-Madison vice chancellor says the university needs to do a better job of explaining how academic research benefits the state after the state Assembly speaker suggested changes might be needed.
Speaker Robin Vos said Republicans wanted to make sure UW professors were focused on classroom instruction and research that grows the economy, not studying the “ancient mating habits of whatever.”
Marsha Mailick, who’s the interim vice-chancellor for research at the UW-Madison, said research at the university totals a little over a billion dollars a year.
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“Very, very little of the billion dollars is state money. So essentially the research enterprise contributes money to the state economy — it doesn’t take money from the state contribution to the university,” said Mailick.
Mailick said it’s important to understand that some of the basic research of today can drive economic innovation years down the road. For example, she said a UW mathematician conducted research on algorithms decades ago that eventually led to the development of Google.
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