UW System split battle wearing on Biddy

UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin looked out at the room of faculty and explained once again why she wants to break the state’s flagship university away from the University of Wisconsin System.

But this time, she went off script.

“If you feel like you can’t get behind this, you just need to let me know,” she said at the end of a two-hour Faculty Senate meeting this month. “Because, you know what? I’m tired. If I’m out there completely on my own, I need to know that so that I can make the choices that will be best for the university.”

Martin, 60, has spent the last two months fighting for a controversial plan that would make UW-Madison a “public authority,” a unique public entity with its own board of trustees. In the process, she alienated her bosses, the UW Board of Regents, and her contemporaries, the other chancellors in the UW System, who oppose the plan. On her own campus, opinion is mixed.

Her strongest political ally is an unlikely one: conservative Gov. Scott Walker.

Read more from the Wisconsin State Journal.