We and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett would have preferred that the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents had decided Friday to simply put aside plans by the UW Medical School to establish a school of public health in Madison and explore the idea of creating such a school in Milwaukee.
Instead, the regents settled on compromise. But by so doing, they not only applied some badly needed brake pressure to the UW Medical School proposal to rename itself the School of Medicine and Public Health but gave Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee a month to make their case that they need more resources to deal with Milwaukee’s pressing public health problems. And they should take that month to again try to convince the regents that one of those resources should be a school of public health in Milwaukee.