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The UW-Madison Board of Trustees would be a complex animal.

It would serve as board of directors for the university if, as Gov. Scott Walker proposes in his 2011-13 budget, it’s granted independence from the UW System and allowed to reestablish as a public authority.

tom loftus

The board would have 21 members – 11 of them appointed by Walker – and at least 13 of the 21 would have to be UW-Madison alumni.

At a recent forum put on by the PROFS group, a membership organization representing UW-Madison faculty, UW System Regent Tom Loftus, a former Assembly speaker who opposes the split, said requiring that so many alumni sit on the board “leaves out one heck of a lot of citizens of this Wisconsin.”

He puts the total number of alumni at 17, which you get if you also include the student representative (elected by fellow students), the non-faculty university employee representative (elected by fellow non-faculty employees) and the two faculty representatives (elected by fellow faculty).

All members would serve three year terms except for the student representatives, who would serve two-year terms.

Under Walker’s plan, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Wisconsin Alumni Association and the UW Foundation would appoint two UW-Madison alumni each. State law would also require that seven of Walker’s eleven appointments be alumni. (He would also have to appoint one regent to the board and one member “who represents agricultural interests in this state.”)

This all sounds a little cliquey to Loftus. “The real trustees and builders of Madison are the people of this state. They paid the taxes, sent their kids, forked over the tuition and cheered the teams,” he said at the forum. “If Madison were to become a quasi-private authority as Gov. Walker now proposes, it would probably remain a great school, but I question whether it would still be the state’s school.”

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