States must give up some control over their public universities so the institutions can continue educating the masses, former University of Wisconsin System President Katharine Lyall says in her new book.
“The state-agency model is failing as a functional management concept for universities; it is driven forward by untenable, long-term fiscal realities,” writes Lyall and her co-author, former UW System administrator Kathleen Sell, in the book, “The True Genius of America at Risk.”
Lyall, who retired in 2004, imagines the state university of the future as a quasi-public, not-for-profit “public-purpose university,” freer from political interference and needless bureaucracy by the state government.