Interview with Scott Bouffleur

LEH: All right. This is Lena Evers-Hillstrom. I'm interviewing Scott, is your last name pronounced Bouffleur?

SB: Bouffleur (Editors note: sounds like Buffler)

LEH: Bouffleur. For the UW Oral History project on restructuring. Scott, could you say your name and then spell out your last name?

SB: Yeah. Scott Bouffleur. B-o-u-f-f-l-e-u-r.

LEH: Okay. It looks like the sound is good. All right. So my first question is what brought you to the UW Colleges?

SB: What brought me to the UW Colleges? I was, I came to the UW Colleges in the fall of 2000. And I was involved in the technology industry at the time. I had recently moved to Wausau, Wisconsin. And a position became available at the UW Marathon campus in the area of instructional technology and distance education. And it just seemed like an interesting field and an interesting job. And so I applied for it and was offered the position. And that's how it all started.

LEH: All right. And what was sort of your trajectory with the colleges after that? And how long did you hold your position before restructuring started?

SB: Okay. And just to clarify, when you talk about restructuring, there were actually several kind of restructurings. Are you referring to the restructuring of the colleges to its regional model? Or are you referring to the restructuring of the actual, of the phasing out of the colleges and Extension?

LEH: I have kind of used that term as both. The phasing out of the colleges and then the movement into branch campuses.

SB: Okay.

LEH: If you want to like clarify how you're using that term, feel free.

SB: Okay. So but basically the question what was my career path throughout the, my entire time at the colleges? Or just during that period of restructuring?

LEH: Both. Whatever you want to talk about.

SB: Okay. All right. So I started as an instruction technologist and I was responsible for management of the distance education and instructional technology program, just at the Wausau campus. And then the next step 00:03:00on my journey was a partial appointment to the campus and then to the central office of the UW Colleges at the time, which was, that's when Colleges and Extension were still separate institutions. And then after that, in roughly 2008, I believe, I became the program manager for the UW Colleges distance education program. It was called the NODE program at the time. Non-Online Distance Education. And I did that for several years.

And then when the first major restructuring happened when the colleges became regionalized. I became the director of the Office of Distance Learning, which involved being the supervisor for all of the repurposed distance education positions at each of the thirteen UW Colleges campuses. And I continued in that role all the way up through the very end of our restructuring, and then the merger which happened after that. And I was, my last day in that position was June thirtieth of last year. In the interim position. And I'm now an employee of UW Shared Services.

LEH: Could you say a little bit about the NODE program and what that entailed?

SB: Sure. So the NODE, or the Non-Online Distance Education program started out in the UW Colleges not, it actually existed, I believe, as an official program. It started in the late 1990s. And there were, basically it was an initiative to allow the Colleges campuses to share curriculum. And specifically to share curriculum that wasn't available at each of the two-year campuses. Some of them are, or were, quite small. And not every campus had faculty in every discipline that was able to teach the full necessary curriculum. So the decision was made to try and share curriculum between the campuses in order to meet enrollment minimums or share resources that weren't locally available, but not in an online course fashion.

You know, asynchronous. So the NODE program shared the curriculum across multiple campuses. But the courses were delivered in a live, synchronous fashion. And so over the years there were videoconference facilities and web conference facilities built at each of the thirteen campuses in order to deliver the courses. So an example would be you might have a course that was taught from the Richland Center campus in physics. And you might have five or six other campuses that were all connected real time. And collectively those five or six campuses would have a course cap that would be the equivalent of like one single face-to-face class. So it allowed us to deliver a lot of the things that we needed for the associate's degree and then a lot of the things that we needed to help supplement the collaborative degrees. Mainly in areas, things like engineering, world languages, higher level computer science, higher level math. Things like that where they wouldn't be able to offer a face-to-face equivalent.

So each year, a curriculum was built and a staffing model was built and the technology was secured and the courses were then delivered. And we had local technology and academic support for the students at the sites where the instructor was not. And that continued up through, right up until the end of the restructuring. We were still delivering courses as late as, it would have been spring of 2019, I believe.

LEH: So between that and then regionalization, you said that your role changed.

SB: Correct.

LEH: Could you expand on that? Did regionalization impact you, how you did work in any way?

SB: It did, pretty significantly. The restructuring and the regionalization was, you know, it was an exercise in efficiencies. And it was an exercise in reducing budget lines. Even though that, maybe it wasn't the publicly stated objective that it was a necessary, there were certain amounts of funds that 00:09:00needed to be cut from each individual budget. So the budget that we had was reduced. And so we needed to completely redo the staffing model that we had. There was initial talk of potentially regionalizing some of the positions that did the support for distance education. But after further review, it was found that that just was not possible because of the need for people at each location. So we ended up actually reducing the appointments across the board from a fulltime equivalent at each campus to a .75 FTE equivalent. And those individuals were the only individual providing those services. It just basically reduced the amount of services we had to offer.

So I became the supervisor of all those individuals. And it made the job of allocating our resources even much more important to only be able to do three-quarter time work on each campus. So we needed to reduce the hours, you know, the times that the courses were offered, for example. Sometimes the number of courses that were offered because of the need for support in the facilities. And it also reduced the availability of academic support for students and things like exam proctoring and technology training and things of that nature. So that was probably the biggest change is that we really had to redo our entire budget, or do our entire staffing model, still attempting to deliver the same level of coursework.

LEH: What were people's reactions to that?

SB: Well, (laughs) so there were thirteen individuals that were in the position of providing that support prior to the merger. And they were given the option to retain a .75 position. And actually, surprisingly, the majority of them did stay, even with having to take a pay cut and an appointment cut. I think there were, I believe that there were eight, no, nine of the thirteen chose to stay. Or someone else from the campus chose to stay in that position without us having to actually do a full search. So we were one of the few groups. Because there were other groups that had to go through similar exercises. And many of them had a much higher rate of attrition. But I think the fact that we had been a group that had worked together for so many years, that the dedication was 00:12:00there and I think it was just a really good core group of people. So from that standpoint, that was sort of a negative.

And then from the faculty and the student standpoints, the reduced flexibility for having, being able to do classes at night, for example, we weren't able to do as many night classes without as much support. And some of our collaborative degree programs did a lot of their courses at night. So you know, it was not good for anyone in those programs because we just simply didn't have enough, we didn't have the resources to offer as many courses as they wanted to offer.

LEH: Yeah. And you mentioned that it was still important to have people physically at campuses.

SB: Correct.

LEH: Could you expand on that?

SB: Right. So the nature of these courses is that they are synchronous. Meaning that all of the people that are participating in the course are sitting in a facility of some kind and there's some type of a connection between all the facilities via video and audio so everyone can hear what's happening all at once. And that type of synchronous delivery, from a technology standpoint, just has a higher level of support requirements than an online class would, for example, where it's asynchronous and you're not logged in real time. So there's that component for just the technology side of things.

And then also these types of courses many times utilize things like proctored exams or quizzes or local support for the academic side of the course as well. And proctoring is like an example of something that, it's difficult, very difficult, if not impossible, to do at a distance. So there were many components of synchronous course delivery that just did not work well without local individual bodies there to help out.

LEH: And with things like the collaborative degrees, could you maybe expand on that? And how the degree structure was sort of related to the colleges themselves?

SB: Sure. There were a lot of them and there were many different models. But I think the general, overarching similarity is that most of them were considered as a program where they would start their education at one of the two-year campuses and then continue the, so the first two years would be based 00:15:00on a college campus. And then the second two years would be via some type of distance education. But allowing the students to stay in the community that the branch campus or the two-year campus was located. So just thinking like at the UW Marathon campus where I worked, UW Platteville had a collaborative engineering program. Oshkosh had a collaborative nursing program. Oshkosh also had a, it was a social work and a, I can't remember the other component of that program. But Eau Claire had a nursing program for a while. Madison has their physician's assistant program.

So in just about every case, the plan was that it was kind of like a two and two. So it's like yeah, I'm from the Wausau area or central Wisconsin and I want to get a degree in engineering. So they would take their regular freshmen and sophomore curriculum at a campus locally. And then as they progressed into their sophomore, or, I'm sorry, junior and senior year, some of the curriculum could still be delivered locally at the branch campus or the two-year campus. Or it would be delivered via some type of distance ed. But it was a beginning to end program. They would sign up, get your buck, start here, was one of the terms that was used over the years, I remember. So many of them were structured in that same way. So it was to keep the people, give them the ability to get the degree locally, and also to help reduce the cost of the degree since the first two years tuition were sometimes significantly less than what they would be paying for those two years at Madison or a comprehensive.

LEH: So what sort of went into like helping develop curriculum for those sorts of programs?

SB: Well, for our program, the NODE program, we looked at our first priority was always the associate's degree of the UW Colleges. So the collaborative degrees were always a supplemental part of our program. But our main focus of the NODE program was to aid students in acquiring the associate's degree that the colleges offered. And so, and especially at some of the smaller campuses, it was not always possible to get those courses offered locally.

So our curriculum development process actually started even earlier than the on-campus curriculum development process. Because they built theirs around ours. And we worked generally with all of the academic departments. They were the ones that are the subject matter experts in curriculum and what's needed for their portion of the degree. So we would generally begin there. And then we would then look at what are the collaborations we're involved with and what are their needs? And in every instance I can remember, there were always a lot more needs than we had the resources to deliver. So we had to use a ranking process to sort of look at our priorities every time we'd get a course request. And even within our associate's degree program, there were usually more requests to teach courses than we had spots available. So it was a pretty competitive process.

LEH: Could you maybe expand on that? Like what were the needs that couldn't be met? And why?

SB: Well, for the synchronous courses, one of the biggest limiting factors was that they're reliant on facilities. So we only had so many classrooms, and they were not a traditional classroom that you, you couldn't just use any classroom. Some specialized equipment needed to be installed in those classrooms to allow for that live sharing. And over the years, the cost of building those classrooms did go down quite significantly, because technology's always improving. But you still only had a limited number of them at each particular campus. So there's only so many hours in the day. And eventually the classrooms would just fill up and you didn't have any more space to offer any of the courses.

So one of the things we did to try to accommodate that over the years was to start teaching hybrid course format. So we would do part of the class synchronously and then part of the class asynchronously. So an example would be if you have a Tuesday/Thursday nine o'clock till 10:50 time slot, if you're doing the entire class synchronously, you're only able to offer one class in that time slot. Where if you do it in hybrid format, you can have one class that meets synchronously on Tuesday and then another one that meets synchronously on Thursday and then in between they're doing some type of learning management system-based activity or other online activity. But then you're able 00:21:00to still get, you're basically doubling up on that time slot in the course timetable.

LEH: So I guess, you said that you would talk with like subject matter experts and that really like the main focus of NODE was the associate's degree.

SB: Correct.

LEH: How does that work with like what the structures of the UW Colleges were? Because from my understanding, it would be there would be one history department but it would be across campuses.

SB: That's correct.

LEH: So how do you work with like faculty and other people who would be delivering those courses in that model?

SB: Right. And the way you explained it is exactly right. So in the original UW Colleges and the restructured UW Colleges, academic departments were a collective of all thirteen campuses combined together. So what we would do when we built our curriculum is we would basically work with the department chairs. And the department chairs were responsible for being, I guess when I said subject matter experts, they were the ones that were aware of where all their faculty are. You know, which campuses they were at and which ones are the best equipped to teach all of the different courses that need to be offered. So we would generally every year start with them and say okay, what are the courses that you want to continue to offer? And are there new courses that need to be offered? And then work with them to determine who would be the best person to teach it and where are they?

And in general, we didn't have a lot of capacity to add new courses. So our new course proposal guidelines were generally that if you're going to add a class for your department, you're probably going to have to take something out. So when we would ask for proposals that we would also ask them what are your priorities? So if your department has four sections this semester, which ones are the most important? And if you're asking to add something, is there anything we can take out?

And so it was a pretty long process. We would work with the department chairs and we would generally have a lot more requests coming than we had capacity. So after the chairs had reviewed everything, then it would go to, we actually had an advisory committee. Which was the director, myself, and there were some student services administrative staff and faculty on that committee. 00:24:00And then we would generally go through and end up, sometimes we'd have to rank them. And just look at what needs is this class meeting, the new, requested courses, and are those core curriculum? Are they collaborative? Are they both? What's the projected enrollment? All of those things are taken into consideration anytime we add a new course. But the departments were the main subject matter experts in that area.

LEH: And so going from regionalization into restructuring, could you expand on what sort of the major concerns were there?

SB: When we went to the regional model?

LEH: Yeah, sure.

SB: Okay. So when we went to the regional model, one of kind of interesting thing that happened is that several of the regions actually decided to try and kind of build their own regional distance ed networks using similar technologies to what we were using for the NODE program. But funding it themselves. And another thing that became very popular was what they called point to point courses. So all of our NODE classes were multiple locations. Usually with anywhere from five to ten campuses all participating in the same course. But what started becoming popular was what they would call a point to point class, where they would, just two campuses would decide hey, I've only got six people in Chem 363 this fall. And they all need it to transfer to wherever. And the other campus would only have five. So both of them collectively probably couldn't afford to teach a section of five or six students. So they'd say hey, let's just pair up and use some of that, allocate some of that distance ed equipment to do just this point to point class between us two. So that was one of the things that popped up.

And it made it even sometimes more confusing, because then we were sometimes competing against those little regional models. But I think a lot of it was, I don't know if they saw the writing on the wall because our enrollment kept going down and down and down and they knew something even bigger was going to happen, and they were trying to kind of protect their local head count, so to 00:27:00speak, versus, because the NODE program was a centrally funded initiative. So the FTE didn't always necessarily stay with the campus. Where if they did their own little regional distance ed or point to point classes, the FTE stayed within their head count. So I think there was a lot, there were many factors that changed how--we still carried on our curriculum development process as we always did, right up to the very end.

But the regionalization, I think that was probably the biggest effect that it had, is that it kind of spawned these little grassroots distance ed networks in the campuses that were in a big region. Now if you look at Barron County, for example, they just were kind of way out on their own. And they ended up in the big restructuring being paired up with Eau Claire. But geographically, you know, Fox and Fond du Lac were doing things a lot as a small group. Marinette, Manitowoc and Sheboygan ended up doing some things kind of as a little group. Waukesha and Washington County. So geographically, they kind of started doing a little bit more of that. That was for the last two or three years during the restructuring that you saw a lot more of that.

LEH: Could you expand on that? Like other than geography and then I guess also the financial benefits, could you expand on what the benefits of doing that sort of model were?

SB: Well, it gave the campuses a little bit more local control over it, versus it being a centrally managed program. And it just also allowed for, you know, one of the other things that happened for years, forever, really, is there were adjunct faculty that would go back and forth between campuses and teach classes. So I think they kind of figured out like hey, rather than having this person drive back and forth, maybe we'll just beam the class over and then just have the people combined into one section.

Dropping enrollments were a big thing, too, you know, because more and more they were finding that they were not able to offer classes locally. So that was a big driver for it, too.

Or just things that, like computer science, for example. I think there were only three tenured computer science faculty left towards the end of the restructuring. So if you have thirteen campuses and only three 00:30:00computer science faculty, it's pretty difficult to offer computer science at the other ten campuses. So a lot of these courses sprung out of just necessity.

LEH: Yeah. So, and you mentioned that, could you sort of expand on continuing this sort of until the end restructuring, sort of like how your responsibilities changed or didn't change after restructuring?

SB: I think the biggest change was the, a little bit of the competition factor. So like for local facilities, for example, these point to point classes that people were doing used the same facilities that we used for our courses. So if a campus decided they were going to do some of those that reduced the availability of the classrooms for our program. And technically our program was supposed to be the priority because we funded the facilities. But if a campus was in a particularly situation where they really needed a class, they were looking out for the best interest of the students to get them the class that they needed. So that was probably the biggest thing was just the competition against those types of courses. And then the big change to the reduced positions that happened during the main restructuring was a challenge, too. So my job got harder just because the people that worked for me didn't have as much time to do their job. So it required me to pick up some of that slack at the administrative level.

But I think our goal never changed the whole time. Our goal was to supplement the associate's degree to the best of our ability and offer curriculum that couldn't otherwise be offered. And that never changed. I mean, the whole twenty years that I've been here either as a campus employee or a central employee. That was always our goal.

LEH: Yeah. Could you expand on that? Sort of how do you see the mission of the former colleges in relation to your job?

SB: So, yeah, the mission of the former colleges was always in my eyes, at least, that we were the institution of access and affordability, I guess, relative to comprehensives. And that was the whole concept behind our program was to allow those campuses to, or supplement those campuses in their 00:33:00ability to do that. To keep the tuition low, to keep the class sizes decent, to help them develop the technologies that they needed to make the courses successful, to train the faculty, to basically allow them to remain an institution of access.

And so I'm not sure, there's still some of those things, some of those tenets are in place. But as the campuses now become branch campuses, I think in some cases that's not always the case anymore.

LEH: Can you expand on that?

SB: Well I think now some of the branch campuses are really becoming just truly that, an extension of their main campus. So I know that there are still, I believe, I don't know that it's legislative, but there's system policy in place that the tuition levels are still lower. And I think that that, there's a certain, I think there's a sunset on that. But I think that you're seeing many of the four-year institutions realizing that the situation of the really low enrollment still exists. Like the Marathon County campus, for example, I don't even know what the head count is here anymore, but it's a lot less than it used to be. And the merger didn't change it. The fact that you have some of the really small campuses, like Manitowoc and Marinette and Richland Center with only a few hundred students. The merger didn't change the fact that there's still only a few hundred students there. Which in turn means that there's not going to be as many faculty. So there's still a need for curriculum to get out to that campus via some method other than a person standing in a classroom teaching the class.

So I think, I mean, I've already seen in many of these new institutions similar kind of regional distance ed networks popping up. Like for example, here in Wausau they still do a tremendous amount of those point to point classes between the Marshfield campus and the Wausau campus because they don't have the capacity to teach them locally. There are just not enough students.

But I think that we lost, there is no more institutional distance ed program, so to speak, like we used to have with the NODE program. So there's nobody out there saying hey, there's a need for Computer Science 250 or whatever, I'm just grabbing a number off the top of my head. There's no one collectively saying hey, we've got five people over in Wausau and six people up in Rice Lake and two people down in Janesville and one person over in Appleton that all need this class, and unless we do a collective course, it's just not going to be taught.

So that's one of my fears is that that ability to share resources across multiple institutions might be dwindling a little as a result of our program not existing. Well, and the colleges not existing anymore.

LEH: Yeah. So that's sort of like the influence of the way that the colleges were structured on sort of how people communicated with each other.

SB: Right. Yeah, I would say that the restructuring in general, not the merger, but the colleges' regionalization, you know, it was done as a response to a big budget cut. And we had a big challenge ahead of us. But it was actually, once it was in place it was actually working quite well. And so it was a pretty successful transformation. And it did indeed, you know, it reduced a lot of costs. But it still allowed us to deliver pretty close to the same level of curriculum we had been. So it was fairly successful, I think. But then of course it went away. Completely.

LEH: Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about like the timeline of that from regionalization into restructuring?

SB: You mean as far as--

LEH: Just sort of like--

SB: How long did it actually take?

LEH: Yeah. Just sort of like the succession of things.

SB: Gosh, I'd have to probably dig through some emails to find exact dates. But you know, the restructuring, the regionalization of the UW Colleges took at least, I believe at least a year to design and implement it. And then you know, the merger, it's still, I don't think, done. So there was, that was 00:39:00at least a two-year process. And probably longer, because it's not finished. On paper, the Colleges and Extension don't exist anywhere. But there's still some pockets of legacy stuff that's being taken care of. So the beginning of the restructuring was the big budget cut. I think it was, that was the 2013-14 fiscal year. It was the 250 million dollar cut to the UW budget. And I don't remember what year that was, but that was really what triggered it.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty massive amount of money.

SB: It is. That wasn't just, that was to the entire UW system. So obviously, you know, I don't know what our portion of that was. But that's how our cuts were calculated, what's our share of that cut. And then that was our goal.

LEH: Okay. Let's see. Could you expand on, were you involved in either the steering committee or specific working groups related to distance learning during restructuring?

SB: Yes. So many that I can't even remember all of them. (laughter) There were, there was a restructuring committee. And there were several subcommittees. So I was on several of them. There was an IT restructuring team. And I don't know what the name of it was off the top of my head. But there were several working groups within the IT area. And I was on the main IT committee. I was also on the one for distance education and academic technology. I think those were the two main ones. That was for the first, the restructuring.

And then when the merger started, I was on just dozens of them. Each new cohort of the merger had their own restructuring plan or merger plan. So Platteville had one that involved Richland Center and Baraboo. Stevens Point had one that involved Marshfield and Marathon County. And so on and so forth. And so each one of those, there was the merger itself. There was a big, system-wide 00:42:00oversight committee. I was not involved in that. But I was involved in everything from online program curriculum to distance ed to classroom technology. And almost every single one of the regional reorganizations. Mainly because my staff eventually became the staff of the branch campus. So they needed to know how we went about things in order to accommodate all of the things that were going on at our campuses into their programs and their organizations.

LEH: Do you recall at all sort of like the communication with those universities or like the directives you were receiving?

SB: Sure. Most of the committees that I was on, they met virtually because there were people from many different locations. The directive was really how are they going to continue to offer the same services from the technology side of things that were, with the resources that they had there? And in most cases, that resource was just that one .75 position. So I was involved in some curriculum talk. But because our program was basically just dissolved, there was no plan to transition the academics. It was all the technology and the facilities and the human resources. So all the work that I did on all of these transitional merger committees were focused around budget, human resources and technology. The curriculum piece was basically just this program's going away so it wasn't something we had to merge.

Having said that, several of the comprehensives that were becoming the overseers of branch campuses were interested in it because they knew that there was still going to be a need for that curriculum. And I was on a couple of different committees that talked about those issues, too. But there was no mandate for us to merge any of the academic piece. Does that make sense?

LEH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm kind of, I don't know. I'm sure 00:45:00like those, the universities have their own priorities and structure that those branch campuses--

SB: Yes, they do.

LEH: Yeah. (laughs)

SB: And some are very, they really ran the gamut. There were institutions that were very much interested in learning how our office operated so that they could continue to do some of those things. And there were others that just, like we don't really have a need for this, so we're just not even going to talk about it. So there was a very wide range.

And it's probably not too difficult to figure out that the ones that weren't too interested in offering distance ed were generally the larger institutions. Just because the bigger you are, the more resources you have locally. So if you have, if you don't really have a need for distance ed, or geographical location. Like I mean if you think about it, you have your Milwaukee. Waukesha and Washington County are within the same drivable distance. So for them, and in fact Milwaukee actually, the structure of their, I think they actually combined Waukesha and Washington County into a new college within UW Milwaukee. I think it's called the College of Liberal Studies or college of liberal something. So they literally took both physical campuses and made them into one entity within UW Milwaukee structure.

So they didn't become part, they didn't become like a direct branch where they'll offer all of the curriculum that, because that was a lot of the comprehensives wanted, they envisioned the branch campuses being a true branch. So it's like any degree you can get in Green Bay, we want you to be able to get it in Marinette and Manitowoc and Sheboygan. In fact, I think that was one of the chancellor's comments during the merger was that we want each one of these branch campuses to be a true extension of our home campus where you can if not get every degree, but most of them. Where Waukesha and Washington, they basically decided we're going to create a whole new College of Liberal Studies that's focused on, kind of like what the Colleges used to do. Being a freshman, sophomore, almost like a community college type college. And you just, they figured that out on their own. Those two collectively have a dean, have a curriculum coordinator. So we're very, very diverse in how the academic piece played out.

LEH: Yeah, that's interesting that the geography, too.

SB: Correct.

LEH: Yeah.

SB: Now you have like a Barron County, you know, they're all by themselves out in the middle of nowhere up in Rice Lake and they're paired up with UW Eau Claire. So it's like an hour and a half down the highway to get there. So the way that they're doing things is much differently than the way the ones that are geographically pretty close to each other are doing things.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. I guess that will be something that we'll all just see, see how it changes over time.

SB: Right. Yeah, you know, the demographics don't change at all. There are certain realities that all of them still face in that enrollments are declining and in some cases these branch campuses are getting down to really, really, really small numbers. So they have to do something in order to get the curriculum here. And paying additional people to be here to teach those courses, it's not an option anymore.

LEH: Yeah.

SB: But some of the four-years have their share of financial problems, too, that they've got to deal with. So if they inherited a branch campus that's got financial issues, you know, two wrongs don't make a right.

LEH: Yeah.

SB: I guess two budget deficits don't make a surplus.

LEH: Yeah. (laughs) Unfortunately.

SB: And that was the other thing about the colleges was that for many years they operated on, I don't know if it's really technically called a shared revenue model, but there was the ability to shift funds from place to place. And if someone had an up year and someone had a down year, there was the ability to move those pieces around a little bit since it was one institution. But now, that's not really the case anymore. The financial burden rests solely on that comprehensive institution now.

LEH: Hmm. Could you expand on that?

SB: Well, just that you know, when the Colleges was an institution, each campus was, there was an institutional budget and there were campus budgets. But there was an institutional process to set those budgets. So a lot of the ways like within a comprehensive, they have an institutional budget and then that budget's broken down by department versus campus. But now, and being a large 00:51:00enough institution that there could be some buffering of funds between campuses, that sort of goes away now. Because generally the two-year campuses are much smaller. And so if you're a comprehensive and you have two branch campuses that have low enrollments, even if their enrollments go up as a percentage of your overall budget it's really not that big of a change. If you have ten thousand students at your main campus and you only have three hundred at the branch campus, it's not really going to help you if the branch campus increases their enrollment by ten percent, because that's only thirty people. And there's no tie across the campuses anymore, so it's basically not like, you know, I'm here in Wausau. Stevens Point is responsible for everything that happens budget-wise in Marshfield and Wausau. And there's no, you know, UW System-level vehicle to help buffer deficits. At least, across the institution. As far as I know.

LEH: Yeah.

SB: Because we collectively at the Colleges were one program, one degree, one course catalog.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. The System was just, it's very different, yeah.

SB: So like one of the things that happened during the restructuring as well is they physically moved some people around. They had people that were teaching at campuses where the enrollment was going down. So instead of taking drastic measures and laying people off, they would offer a person that was teaching at one of the smaller campuses the option to move to a bigger campus if there was a need. And that was all handled within one budget and one institution.

LEH: Right. Yeah.

SB: So I knew a couple of people personally that taught in the Wausau area for many years and they ended up going to Waukesha. Just because there was a need for the courses there and there wasn't as much of a need here. So just the size of the institution and the number of locations made it easier to be agile in making those changes. Where now, when you're a smaller entity, it's just not as easy. At least, I don't think it is.

LEH: Yeah. That's kind of like there's maybe less room to experiment 00:54:00with things.

SB: Although I mean I would say in general, it was a mandatory thing, the merger. But I think just about every institution that I worked with saw opportunities and approached it as a way to do positive work.

LEH: Right.

SB: Which is just throwing in the towel and saying, just throwing up their hands.

LEH: Could you expand on that? Are these other people at the Colleges?

SB: Well, you know, there was a certain amount of attrition at every step along the road where people don't like pay cuts, so the people are going to find other opportunities. And I think we did lose some really good people just because of that. But you know, in general I think that there was a good job was done to try to at least impress upon all of the comprehensives the value of what the Colleges was and what the Colleges did. And I think you see some of that in, like some of the parameters that were set by System and the president's office to like keep the tuition low, for example. They wrote that in that these are institutions of access. And one of the functions of an institution of access was having lower tuition. So it was written into the plan that the tuition would stay lower for, I don't know the horizon on that.

And also they do still, in the most part, allow the branch campuses as far as I know some control over the curriculum itself. So it's not just Stevens Point telling Wausau and Marshfield that you have to offer X, Y and Z number of classes. They still have a local curriculum committee and a curriculum group. And I'm sure they have many parameters they have to stay within. But they at least have input into what they're doing.

LEH: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And they have those local relationships, too.

SB: Right.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I guess, hmm, the rest of these questions have kind of been answered. Hmm. Do you have anything that you think is important or anything that you'd like to add?

SB: I really don't. I mean, I guess I've been around since, well, almost twenty years. So I saw, you know, the combination of Colleges and Extension into one institution. And then several budget cuts and then the regionalization. And then the eventual merger. And I know that there were back in way before I was around, there were some changes. Not as significant. But you know, I just hope that that mission of, that mission of access is something that, if anything can be preserved, the concept of being accessible to local students, especially in the northern part of the state where it's underserved to begin with. And I think the Colleges really always had a spirit of doing whatever it takes to get the students what they need. Now those, I'm hopeful that there are still a lot of people around that remember that and will continue to keep that going forward. But you know, hopefully fifteen, twenty years from now, people will still remember that. And hopefully the campuses will still be here. Because that's always been one of the rumors that's floated around is that they would eventually close some of the campuses if the enrollment got too small. So I hope that doesn't happen.

LEH: Yeah.

SB: Although, you know, there may just come a point in time where it's just not fiscally possible to keep all of them open anymore.

LEH: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's interesting. At this point it's unclear.

SB: You know, the other thing that is kind of unknown to a lot of people is the relationship between the branch campuses or the previous Colleges' campuses and the counties that they reside in. And even in some cases, the cities. Like here in Wausau, the county owns all of the buildings that are on this campus. So there's a different dynamic than a comprehensive like, so Stevens Point, just thirty miles down the road, you know, everything that's on the Stevens Point campuses is owned by the state. So they may not have as close of a relationship with the county government. And then like down at Marshfield, the 01:00:00city is actually a part owner of some of it, too. So I think those are really important connections between the community and the institution. Especially with the Extension side of things.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. Adds another layer of investment into what happens. Definitely.

SB: Right. I mean, because in a lot of cases, it's the only, especially in the northern part of the state, it's the only door to the university in town. And the counties know that. So they spend a lot of money supporting the facilities to make sure that there's still that open door for their students to get into the UW system.

LEH: Yeah. And I guess potential economic investment as well.

SB: Yeah. I mean, they build new buildings. And it costs a lot of money to maintain the existing facilities. All the infrastructure and you know. Keeping the lights on, keeping the building clean. All the systems that are in the building.

LEH: Yep.

SB: So I guess that would be my, my hope is that that concept of access and connection to the local community is the most important thing in my mind, anyway.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah.

End First Interview Session.