Intellectual Space: Our Paradigm for Growth
UWM Spring 2007 Plenary Speech
January 25, 2007
Chancellor Carlos E. Santiago
Podcast (requires iTunes installed on your computer)
I would like to welcome everyone back from our winter holidays to the start of this new semester. A number of you, of course, have not been away from the university at all, or very little, in the past month.
Wedged between holiday observances, family celebrations, travel, and an astounding number of football "bowl" games, many faculty were teaching UWinteriM classes, preparing grant proposals, conducting research, and developing their classes for the upcoming semester; administrators were busy administering; advisors advising; and students, well, at least some students were taking those UWinteriM classes.
But most of us did take some time to decompress our lives during what has been, and will continue, to be a challenging year for UWM. As you know, my own challenges this year have included more than just professional ones. I can assure you that I am back on the job, full-time, fully recovered and with as much energy as I had before. I do want to express my gratitude to all of you for your kind messages, cards, and expressions of concern and well wishes.
Before discussing with you the main topic of my talk this afternoon -- our university's growing and urgent need for space, broadly conceived, I would like to make a few announcements, call attention to some campus news items of special interest, and update you on the major funding initiatives that I outlined last September.
These efforts reflect, not a change in our fundamental missions of student access and opportunity and of research excellence, but several hard economic facts: 1) UWM has never been funded as a research university; 2) State funding as a percentage of our operating costs has steadily decreased; 3) Student tuition and fees have dramatically increased and now are the largest single support for instruction; 4) Our potential for resource growth lies in our ability to successfully leverage our intellectual capital to effect scientific innovation and economic growth.
Our success will depend greatly on our ability to convince government, business, and our other community and professional partners of this core truth: economic growth in a region is derived directly from the intellectual capital exercised by an enterprising, innovative research university. I have spoken with you before about how university research, especially in science and engineering, is the key to creating 21st century industries and jobs. University research and instruction also are the keys to creating the workforce for those industries and jobs. The report, "Tough Choices or Tough Times," released last month by the National Center on Education and the Economy states that we are in an era globally, "in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life, in which high levels of education … are going to be the only security there is."
So, in this context of global connectivity and competition, how do we envision that this institution will be not only intellectually but also spatially ten or twenty years from now?
In this, our 50th anniversary year, we are poised to dramatically address our needs for "intellectual space," by which I mean the following: Intellectual space is the sufficient and most effective "connectivity" with our students and working partners necessary to do intellectual work. To expand our intellectual space, we need to expand our boundaries. These boundaries are partly geographic, but they are much more than that. They reflect new configurations of relationships, new ways of educating students using pedagogy that integrates the full potential of electronic connectivity, and new ways of applying the creative potential of the academy in support of our highest ideals.
Until late in the 20th century, the primary model to connect intellectually in higher education was centripetal, with students and faculty coming together to a central location. The model for the 21st century, however, is increasingly centrifugal, with students, faculty, and their intellectual constituents and partners distributed from a primary hub geographically and electronically across regions, and often across the globe.
To accommodate the continued increase of our student population and to succeed with our ambitious research and graduate education initiatives, UWM will require space and facilities that are commensurate with 21st century, rather than mid- 20th century, innovation. All of the objective data shows that UWM is geographically constrained. We have over 28 thousand students on 93 acres; UW Madison has over 41 thousand students on 933 acres. The comparative density ratio (students per acre) between Wisconsin's two public doctoral institutions is pretty dramatic: 44 students per acre at UW-Madison; 302 at UW-Milwaukee. A comparison with 13 other research universities located in an urban area tells a similar story: the average campus size of these 13 peer research universities is 354 acres, and only one (Georgia State University in Atlanta) has a smaller campus and a higher density ratio (371). We are the most densely populated campus in the UW System with the lowest percentage of residential beds available for our students. Roughly one-third of our students reside on or around the East side campus. It is unconscionable to accept that UWM currently educates more Wisconsin undergraduate and graduate students but cannot accommodate their desire to reside on our campus and become fully integrated into the life of the University.
UW-Milwaukee cannot serve the students of this region, create tomorrow's workforce, and be the catalyst for regional economic growth if we continue to work almost exclusively from an acutely compressed, 93 acre East side campus. As our student population has grown and taken on a much more residential nature, space for on-campus student residence, parking, classrooms, laboratories, and research has been stretched to near capacity. The increased density also at times has exacerbated our relations with the residential neighborhood: we are too many people, doing too much, in too little space. UWM needs new geographic space and facilities not only to meet future growth needs but also to decompress our East side campus and the neighboring community.
But as we move vigorously ahead to expand our geographic and facility footprints in the region, it is essential to think of this effort not just as a real estate issue. Rather, it is only one manifestation of the same core concept: the need to significantly grow our connectivity with our students and working partners; the need to acquire sufficient intellectual space to fulfill UWM's core missions. To illustrate this point, let me
note several other ways that we are expanding our intellectual space.
One way is imbedded in the notion of community as intellectual space. Quoting from the organizers of the University of Illinois-Chicago conference entitled, Community as Intellectual Space 2006: From Community Organizing to Community Building:
The concept of "Community as Intellectual Space" recognizes the myriad ways that people develop creative, collective, and liberating means to meet challenges and achieve goals in local settings. Certainly we can see public spaces that nurture intellectual growth in our schools, museums, libraries, and other places where people come together to talk, explore, and learn. But communities also themselves serve as curriculum and laboratory, a space where people can come together to investigate social, cultural, and economic issues within the context of past and present lived experiences.
One of UWM's core missions is precisely to create community as intellectual space. In recent years, the Milwaukee Idea initiatives have emphasized UWM's commitment to developing intellectual spaces in local community settings.
Another way of growing our intellectual space is creating and expanding our partnerships within enterprise corridors. Regionally, UWM must assume a leading role with universities and businesses within what has been dubbed the Interstate 94 "I.Q. Corridor," a developing regional powerhouse of interconnected innovation that reaches from Ann Arbor, to Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, and Minneapolis. The seven county southeastern Wisconsin region currently is the weakest economic link in this "I.Q. Corridor." UWM will continue to create regional public and private partnerships to invigorate our regional link in this corridor.
Enterprise corridors also exist internationally. As I noted after participating in a Milwaukee educational and trade mission to China in 2005, "in the interconnected world… enterprise corridors can exist between any points on the globe and are defined not by geography but only by the imagination and will of the people who create them."
UWM has growing instructional partnerships, faculty and student exchange programs, business relationships, and research collaborations across the globe.
The value of regional and international enterprise corridors has been dramatically underscored this week with the announcement of a $1 million grant to UW-Milwaukee by Rockwell Automation. The principal part of this grant will be seed funding, through the UWM Research Foundation, to spur faculty research in advanced automation. Our goal is that these efforts will lead to engineering-related patents, business spin-offs, and other entrepreneurial science-engineering-business collaborations. To accomplish this goal, UWM will require state-of-the-art engineering facilities. I enthusiastically embrace this strategic partnership with Rockwell Automation, a Milwaukee-based technology leader with extensive world-wide connections.
Finally, our intellectual connectivity is growing through the rapid development of e-learning. In recent years, UWM has increased its courses and degrees in both fully online and hybrid or blended formats that combine online and face-to-face instruction.
UWM's e-learning initiatives extend the University's reach. They expand our intellectual space by making it possible to teach more students in a high-quality active learning environment regardless of their location or schedule constraints. It's also important to understand that, as UWM develops new geographic footprints and regional partnerships,
this electronic connectivity and its increasingly sophisticated software will be an essential linkage to enable all manner of our intellectual work (instruction, administration, service, and research) across this region.
Although we are actively engaged in these multiple activities to increase our intellectual space, UW-Milwaukee remains severely geographically constrained. Certainly, we now have more than one location: the downtown campus houses our School of Continuing Education; the Great Lakes Water Institute conducts its research in a near-South side site (as well as, of course, in Lake Michigan and other freshwater locations!); the UWM Field Station near Saukville provides natural communities for research and instruction; and we have recruitment offices, nursing clinics, and a research and teaching presence across the city. But these facilities, as important as they are to our core mission, have not fundamentally helped us decompress our East side campus. Nor do they allow for our required programmatic growth. We cannot resolve our geographic space and facility needs in a piecemeal fashion.
We also know that our region does not have a research infrastructure commensurate with the region's size and importance within the State of Wisconsin. The largest research infrastructure in this area is on the grounds where the Medical College of Wisconsin is located. This fine institution generates approximately $125 million annually in research expenditures. Next is UWM with approximately $26 million in federally funded research, and then Marquette University with $8 million. Thus, academic institutions in this area, in the aggregate, generate approximately $160 million in external research funding. All of the objective indicators show that our regional research infrastructure is simply insufficient for this area to have a viable economic future as we move to a knowledge-based economy.
The University of Illinois at Chicago is one of many possible examples that shows the other end of the area research infrastructure scale. UIC, with a medical school, contributes approximately $300 million in research expenditures alone to the Chicago area. It is also notable that Illinois provides twice the per student support to UIC that Wisconsin provides to its second research university.
Our decisions regarding space should be based on a number of fundamental principles. First, any new location must create synergy such that a new enterprise must be greater than the sum of its parts. Second, it must have willing partners who recognize that collaboration is the key to regional success. Third, it must provide new and exciting research, teaching, and clinical opportunities for our students and faculty. Fourth, it must fundamentally help decompress our East side campus. And, fifth, in light of Wisconsin's fiscal reality, it must incorporate new models of investment and support based on public-private partnerships.
Our geographic region has strengths and needs in three basic areas that are linked to economic development. The first is biomedical sciences, as exemplified in the regional medical campus in Wauwatosa; the second is in automation, as illustrated by the continued strong manufacturing presence in this region; and the third is health care, given the current patient care infrastructure. These are precisely the three areas toward which our legislative funding request is aimed-broadly defined as the sciences and engineering.
Although many of our new funding requests are focused on the natural sciences and engineering, I want to emphasize again that this focus in no way diminishes UWM's commitment to and support of K-12 education, the arts and fine arts, public policy, business and entrepreneurial education, and the wider cultural institutions in this region. Those areas are, and will always remain, core components of our institutional life and mission.
As we look across the regional landscape, it is clear that UWM could make significant contributions, add real value to the region, if parts of our academic enterprise were located on or near the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center and the Milwaukee County Research Park. The Medical College of Wisconsin, Children's Hospital, the Blood Research Institute, GE Healthcare and other research-intensive enterprises would benefit from a strong UWM science and engineering presence in their geographic proximity. UWM would benefit from their proximate clinical and applied research. And most importantly, the citizens of this region would realize an enormous economic benefit from the creation of this collaborative research powerhouse at this strategic location.
At the same time, UWM needs to be closer to a clinical population that is essential to the academic areas that require a clinical setting and clinical experience for our students. Whether it's nursing care, support for the aging, addiction and behavioral science, counseling and school psychology, clinical and experimental psychology, occupational and physical therapy, public health and other health science disciplines (and perhaps even pharmacy), we need to find a location in or near downtown Milwaukee that provides a concentration of patients and a first-rate environment for clinical training and research.
In the coming months, we will continue to explore potential locations that meet these needs and opportunities. Currently, we are actively engaged in discussions with potential private donors in this effort. I should note that these efforts align closely with the objectives of The Milwaukee 7, a consortium of educational, government, and business leaders from the seven southeastern Wisconsin counties, the goal of which is to advance regional economic development.
I also will continue to work with our governance leadership to find solutions that lead to the decompression of our East side campus. If we are successful, the East side campus will benefit in a number of important ways-more green spaces, more room for living-learning communities for our students, smaller class sizes, more expansion opportunities on the East side campus for existing academic units, and yes, better parking.
In conclusion, let me reiterate that for UWM to fully realize its mission, we must dramatically expand our intellectual space: Our geographic footprints in other parts of this region. Our community ties. Our online connections. Our regional and international partnerships. We must create new "connectivity" with a local, regional, national, and global reach. And in so doing, we also will decompress and make optimal use of our historic East side campus.
A quotation in the novel The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears makes a trenchant point about connection: "Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless." Power in our institution is our ability to reach out, to engage, to connect; to take our knowledge, experience, innovation, and (I would hope) wisdom … and pointedly USE them to change the lives of the people of southeastern Wisconsin and society at large.
We cannot remain within our current boundaries, our current intellectual space, and wait for the world to come to us. We must connect with people wherever people are. And, having connected, we must act boldly to change their lives for the better.
UWM Spring 2007 Plenary Speech
January 25, 2007
Chancellor Carlos E. Santiago
Podcast (requires iTunes installed on your computer)
I would like to welcome everyone back from our winter holidays to the start of this new semester. A number of you, of course, have not been away from the university at all, or very little, in the past month.
Wedged between holiday observances, family celebrations, travel, and an astounding number of football "bowl" games, many faculty were teaching UWinteriM classes, preparing grant proposals, conducting research, and developing their classes for the upcoming semester; administrators were busy administering; advisors advising; and students, well, at least some students were taking those UWinteriM classes.
But most of us did take some time to decompress our lives during what has been, and will continue, to be a challenging year for UWM. As you know, my own challenges this year have included more than just professional ones. I can assure you that I am back on the job, full-time, fully recovered and with as much energy as I had before. I do want to express my gratitude to all of you for your kind messages, cards, and expressions of concern and well wishes.
Before discussing with you the main topic of my talk this afternoon -- our university's growing and urgent need for space, broadly conceived, I would like to make a few announcements, call attention to some campus news items of special interest, and update you on the major funding initiatives that I outlined last September.
- UWM's Comprehensive Campaign now has raised $81 million in support of our programs and students. We are considerably ahead of our 2009 closing date, and I am optimistic that we can reach our $100 million goal in 2007.
- We also remain hopeful that our 2007-2009 biennial budget proposal, as part of the UW System's Growth Agenda, will be funded. This reinvestment in UWM, supported by the Board of Regents, was predicated on building our research infrastructure in the sciences and engineering. We continue to push this $10 million initiative as part of a six-year $30 million reinvestment in UWM, as Wisconsin's second research university. This proposal, as well as our support for the UW System's initiative to enhance faculty and staff compensation by 5.7% in each year of the upcoming biennial budget, is especially important to achieving our long-term goals. Severe salary compression on campus and loss of competitiveness in hiring faculty and staff must be addressed.
- The campus-wide strategic planning discussion that I intended to launch in 2006 will be largely shaped by the outcome of our State and private-sector investment initiatives. The process of inclusive planning discussions with campus groups and our external partners is necessary for us to move forward in unison. Provost Rita Cheng already has engaged the school and college Deans in preliminary planning for possible future scenarios. And once some of our key investment components are known with certainty, I will engage our campus governance system to begin a comprehensive planning discussion.
- We are now in the final stages of the second round of the Research Growth Initiative, the goal of which is to increase externally funded research expenditures through the mechanism of competitive seed funding. 184 proposals were submitted this year with a significant number being ranked at the highest quality level. The external panel review met in Chicago on January 13 and awards will be announced in mid-March. We are learning much about our campus' research potential from this process, and we look forward to evaluating our progress jointly with campus governance groups.
- The UWM Foundation has created a subsidiary organization to own, manage and develop the University's intellectual property. This non-profit, privately funded subsidiary is charged with integrating research catalyst grants, strategic partnering, graduate student and postdoctoral support, licensing and patenting, and business incubation.
- At its December meeting, the UW Board of Regents endorsed the creation of a new UWM School of Public Health. What this action confirmed is that UWM has significant strength in core areas that can support the creation of a new school of public health. Although the Regent's endorsement is not, at this time, a commitment for new State funding, we will begin a planning process, with a number of community partners to bring this initiative to fruition in the foreseeable future. Once established, the UWM School of Public health will be the first new school or college this campus has added since 1975
- After an extensive national search, Dr. Helen Mamarchev has been named Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs. Dr. Mamarchev, who has superlative experience in student affairs and residential life issues, begins her UWM appointment on March 12, 2007. Let me take this opportunity to thank Interim Vice Chancellor Jim Hill for his leadership over the last year.
- As reported in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article last Sunday, Access to Success matters. Last week, about 100 UWM faculty and staff attended an Access to Success retreat at which they reviewed data on Access to Success initiatives and talked with a panel of first-time freshmen. We will continue to evaluate and strengthen student recruitment and retention programs, including expanding scholarship support for both undergraduate and graduate students.
- We continue to make progress on the construction of the 488 bed RiverView Student Residence Hall on North Avenue. This living-learning community will go a long way in providing an environment that will enhance student retention and graduation.
- The SECC campaign, with a campus leadership team of more than 60 people led by Vice Chancellor Joan Prince, is on track to exceed its 2006-2007 goal by 2 to 3 percent. I know that the many organizations in the Milwaukee community that benefit from the SECC appreciate this demonstration of UWM's commitment to the community.
These efforts reflect, not a change in our fundamental missions of student access and opportunity and of research excellence, but several hard economic facts: 1) UWM has never been funded as a research university; 2) State funding as a percentage of our operating costs has steadily decreased; 3) Student tuition and fees have dramatically increased and now are the largest single support for instruction; 4) Our potential for resource growth lies in our ability to successfully leverage our intellectual capital to effect scientific innovation and economic growth.
Our success will depend greatly on our ability to convince government, business, and our other community and professional partners of this core truth: economic growth in a region is derived directly from the intellectual capital exercised by an enterprising, innovative research university. I have spoken with you before about how university research, especially in science and engineering, is the key to creating 21st century industries and jobs. University research and instruction also are the keys to creating the workforce for those industries and jobs. The report, "Tough Choices or Tough Times," released last month by the National Center on Education and the Economy states that we are in an era globally, "in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to the good life, in which high levels of education … are going to be the only security there is."
So, in this context of global connectivity and competition, how do we envision that this institution will be not only intellectually but also spatially ten or twenty years from now?
In this, our 50th anniversary year, we are poised to dramatically address our needs for "intellectual space," by which I mean the following: Intellectual space is the sufficient and most effective "connectivity" with our students and working partners necessary to do intellectual work. To expand our intellectual space, we need to expand our boundaries. These boundaries are partly geographic, but they are much more than that. They reflect new configurations of relationships, new ways of educating students using pedagogy that integrates the full potential of electronic connectivity, and new ways of applying the creative potential of the academy in support of our highest ideals.
Until late in the 20th century, the primary model to connect intellectually in higher education was centripetal, with students and faculty coming together to a central location. The model for the 21st century, however, is increasingly centrifugal, with students, faculty, and their intellectual constituents and partners distributed from a primary hub geographically and electronically across regions, and often across the globe.
To accommodate the continued increase of our student population and to succeed with our ambitious research and graduate education initiatives, UWM will require space and facilities that are commensurate with 21st century, rather than mid- 20th century, innovation. All of the objective data shows that UWM is geographically constrained. We have over 28 thousand students on 93 acres; UW Madison has over 41 thousand students on 933 acres. The comparative density ratio (students per acre) between Wisconsin's two public doctoral institutions is pretty dramatic: 44 students per acre at UW-Madison; 302 at UW-Milwaukee. A comparison with 13 other research universities located in an urban area tells a similar story: the average campus size of these 13 peer research universities is 354 acres, and only one (Georgia State University in Atlanta) has a smaller campus and a higher density ratio (371). We are the most densely populated campus in the UW System with the lowest percentage of residential beds available for our students. Roughly one-third of our students reside on or around the East side campus. It is unconscionable to accept that UWM currently educates more Wisconsin undergraduate and graduate students but cannot accommodate their desire to reside on our campus and become fully integrated into the life of the University.
UW-Milwaukee cannot serve the students of this region, create tomorrow's workforce, and be the catalyst for regional economic growth if we continue to work almost exclusively from an acutely compressed, 93 acre East side campus. As our student population has grown and taken on a much more residential nature, space for on-campus student residence, parking, classrooms, laboratories, and research has been stretched to near capacity. The increased density also at times has exacerbated our relations with the residential neighborhood: we are too many people, doing too much, in too little space. UWM needs new geographic space and facilities not only to meet future growth needs but also to decompress our East side campus and the neighboring community.
But as we move vigorously ahead to expand our geographic and facility footprints in the region, it is essential to think of this effort not just as a real estate issue. Rather, it is only one manifestation of the same core concept: the need to significantly grow our connectivity with our students and working partners; the need to acquire sufficient intellectual space to fulfill UWM's core missions. To illustrate this point, let me
note several other ways that we are expanding our intellectual space.
One way is imbedded in the notion of community as intellectual space. Quoting from the organizers of the University of Illinois-Chicago conference entitled, Community as Intellectual Space 2006: From Community Organizing to Community Building:
The concept of "Community as Intellectual Space" recognizes the myriad ways that people develop creative, collective, and liberating means to meet challenges and achieve goals in local settings. Certainly we can see public spaces that nurture intellectual growth in our schools, museums, libraries, and other places where people come together to talk, explore, and learn. But communities also themselves serve as curriculum and laboratory, a space where people can come together to investigate social, cultural, and economic issues within the context of past and present lived experiences.
One of UWM's core missions is precisely to create community as intellectual space. In recent years, the Milwaukee Idea initiatives have emphasized UWM's commitment to developing intellectual spaces in local community settings.
Another way of growing our intellectual space is creating and expanding our partnerships within enterprise corridors. Regionally, UWM must assume a leading role with universities and businesses within what has been dubbed the Interstate 94 "I.Q. Corridor," a developing regional powerhouse of interconnected innovation that reaches from Ann Arbor, to Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, and Minneapolis. The seven county southeastern Wisconsin region currently is the weakest economic link in this "I.Q. Corridor." UWM will continue to create regional public and private partnerships to invigorate our regional link in this corridor.
Enterprise corridors also exist internationally. As I noted after participating in a Milwaukee educational and trade mission to China in 2005, "in the interconnected world… enterprise corridors can exist between any points on the globe and are defined not by geography but only by the imagination and will of the people who create them."
UWM has growing instructional partnerships, faculty and student exchange programs, business relationships, and research collaborations across the globe.
The value of regional and international enterprise corridors has been dramatically underscored this week with the announcement of a $1 million grant to UW-Milwaukee by Rockwell Automation. The principal part of this grant will be seed funding, through the UWM Research Foundation, to spur faculty research in advanced automation. Our goal is that these efforts will lead to engineering-related patents, business spin-offs, and other entrepreneurial science-engineering-business collaborations. To accomplish this goal, UWM will require state-of-the-art engineering facilities. I enthusiastically embrace this strategic partnership with Rockwell Automation, a Milwaukee-based technology leader with extensive world-wide connections.
Finally, our intellectual connectivity is growing through the rapid development of e-learning. In recent years, UWM has increased its courses and degrees in both fully online and hybrid or blended formats that combine online and face-to-face instruction.
- Our College Connection program is a very successful collaboration between UWM and 13 UW- College and WTCS campuses. The program, which started in 1998, has 200-250 students taking UWM courses each semester and has graduated 183 students in three majors using a hybrid, or blended learning, combination of classroom and distance education.
- UWM has just received a $500,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Blending Life & Learning initiative. By offering a general education sequence, 11 bachelor's programs, a certificate program, and three master's programs in the hybrid format, the Blending Life & Learning initiative will increase access to higher education for adult students and working professionals.
UWM's e-learning initiatives extend the University's reach. They expand our intellectual space by making it possible to teach more students in a high-quality active learning environment regardless of their location or schedule constraints. It's also important to understand that, as UWM develops new geographic footprints and regional partnerships,
this electronic connectivity and its increasingly sophisticated software will be an essential linkage to enable all manner of our intellectual work (instruction, administration, service, and research) across this region.
Although we are actively engaged in these multiple activities to increase our intellectual space, UW-Milwaukee remains severely geographically constrained. Certainly, we now have more than one location: the downtown campus houses our School of Continuing Education; the Great Lakes Water Institute conducts its research in a near-South side site (as well as, of course, in Lake Michigan and other freshwater locations!); the UWM Field Station near Saukville provides natural communities for research and instruction; and we have recruitment offices, nursing clinics, and a research and teaching presence across the city. But these facilities, as important as they are to our core mission, have not fundamentally helped us decompress our East side campus. Nor do they allow for our required programmatic growth. We cannot resolve our geographic space and facility needs in a piecemeal fashion.
We also know that our region does not have a research infrastructure commensurate with the region's size and importance within the State of Wisconsin. The largest research infrastructure in this area is on the grounds where the Medical College of Wisconsin is located. This fine institution generates approximately $125 million annually in research expenditures. Next is UWM with approximately $26 million in federally funded research, and then Marquette University with $8 million. Thus, academic institutions in this area, in the aggregate, generate approximately $160 million in external research funding. All of the objective indicators show that our regional research infrastructure is simply insufficient for this area to have a viable economic future as we move to a knowledge-based economy.
The University of Illinois at Chicago is one of many possible examples that shows the other end of the area research infrastructure scale. UIC, with a medical school, contributes approximately $300 million in research expenditures alone to the Chicago area. It is also notable that Illinois provides twice the per student support to UIC that Wisconsin provides to its second research university.
Our decisions regarding space should be based on a number of fundamental principles. First, any new location must create synergy such that a new enterprise must be greater than the sum of its parts. Second, it must have willing partners who recognize that collaboration is the key to regional success. Third, it must provide new and exciting research, teaching, and clinical opportunities for our students and faculty. Fourth, it must fundamentally help decompress our East side campus. And, fifth, in light of Wisconsin's fiscal reality, it must incorporate new models of investment and support based on public-private partnerships.
Our geographic region has strengths and needs in three basic areas that are linked to economic development. The first is biomedical sciences, as exemplified in the regional medical campus in Wauwatosa; the second is in automation, as illustrated by the continued strong manufacturing presence in this region; and the third is health care, given the current patient care infrastructure. These are precisely the three areas toward which our legislative funding request is aimed-broadly defined as the sciences and engineering.
Although many of our new funding requests are focused on the natural sciences and engineering, I want to emphasize again that this focus in no way diminishes UWM's commitment to and support of K-12 education, the arts and fine arts, public policy, business and entrepreneurial education, and the wider cultural institutions in this region. Those areas are, and will always remain, core components of our institutional life and mission.
As we look across the regional landscape, it is clear that UWM could make significant contributions, add real value to the region, if parts of our academic enterprise were located on or near the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center and the Milwaukee County Research Park. The Medical College of Wisconsin, Children's Hospital, the Blood Research Institute, GE Healthcare and other research-intensive enterprises would benefit from a strong UWM science and engineering presence in their geographic proximity. UWM would benefit from their proximate clinical and applied research. And most importantly, the citizens of this region would realize an enormous economic benefit from the creation of this collaborative research powerhouse at this strategic location.
At the same time, UWM needs to be closer to a clinical population that is essential to the academic areas that require a clinical setting and clinical experience for our students. Whether it's nursing care, support for the aging, addiction and behavioral science, counseling and school psychology, clinical and experimental psychology, occupational and physical therapy, public health and other health science disciplines (and perhaps even pharmacy), we need to find a location in or near downtown Milwaukee that provides a concentration of patients and a first-rate environment for clinical training and research.
In the coming months, we will continue to explore potential locations that meet these needs and opportunities. Currently, we are actively engaged in discussions with potential private donors in this effort. I should note that these efforts align closely with the objectives of The Milwaukee 7, a consortium of educational, government, and business leaders from the seven southeastern Wisconsin counties, the goal of which is to advance regional economic development.
I also will continue to work with our governance leadership to find solutions that lead to the decompression of our East side campus. If we are successful, the East side campus will benefit in a number of important ways-more green spaces, more room for living-learning communities for our students, smaller class sizes, more expansion opportunities on the East side campus for existing academic units, and yes, better parking.
In conclusion, let me reiterate that for UWM to fully realize its mission, we must dramatically expand our intellectual space: Our geographic footprints in other parts of this region. Our community ties. Our online connections. Our regional and international partnerships. We must create new "connectivity" with a local, regional, national, and global reach. And in so doing, we also will decompress and make optimal use of our historic East side campus.
A quotation in the novel The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears makes a trenchant point about connection: "Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless." Power in our institution is our ability to reach out, to engage, to connect; to take our knowledge, experience, innovation, and (I would hope) wisdom … and pointedly USE them to change the lives of the people of southeastern Wisconsin and society at large.
We cannot remain within our current boundaries, our current intellectual space, and wait for the world to come to us. We must connect with people wherever people are. And, having connected, we must act boldly to change their lives for the better.