UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank doesn’t have much patience for talk about any academic rivalries between UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee. 

“We have to get past this whole discussion about competition between these two cities,” she said during a panel discussion at the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium, held Wednesday and Thursday at the Monona Terrace Convention Center in Madison. 

“We are only going to move forward if we can work together. And we are already collaborating on a number of fronts,” she said during the Thursday morning plenary session, which drew several hundred people. Total attendance at the symposium was a record-setting 560, said Tom Still, head of the Wisconsin Technology Council, which coordinated the event.