Interview with Aaron Brower

LEH: Okay. So could you say your first name and then your last name and then spell out your last name?

AB: Okay. Aaron Brower. B-r-o-w-e-r.

LEH: Okay. I'm just going to bring this up slightly. All right. Why don't we start with a kind of general question. So what brought you to the UW System?

AB: So, I came in 1985 as a professor in the School of Social Work here. And spent the first twenty-five years as a professor and administrator on the Madison campus. Where, what are some of the things that you'd like to know in terms of that question and where we're headed?

LEH: I guess you could expand on that, just sort of like timeline of your experiences with the System.

AB: Okay. So those first twenty-five years were here. And the last job I had at Madison was as the vice provost of teaching and learning, where I was basically overseeing undergraduate education here. From that I was hired as provost of UW Extension. And that started in 2012, August of 2012. And then did that for several years. Was actually interim chancellor of UW Colleges and Extension in 2014. And then 2017, the restructuring hit. I moved back as provost. And then through the restructuring, my job was to help find homes for the major divisions of Extension and help with some other parts of the transition. And then help establish a new unit which I now run, which is called UW Extended Campus.

LEH: All right. Can you expand on that, the part about your role during restructuring?

AB: So as you know, the restructuring dissolved Colleges and 00:03:00Extension as well. My specific job was to, well, the four main divisions of Extension, Cooperative Extension, Public Broadcasting, CEOEL, which is Continuing Education, Outreach and E-Learning, and then the Small Business Development Centers. Each then had to find new administrative homes. Coop Extension and Public Broadcasting came here to Madison, to the Madison campus. And then the other two were going to go to System. But what that meant was to get worked out.

So I helped, first of all, settle how Coop Extension and Public Broadcasting would make its transition into Madison. I wrote the memos of understanding with the campus to work out all the details of the transition itself. Helped the central administration here figure out how to position those units within Madison. And a couple of other things, too.

And then for CEOEL, that became its own spinoff organization, which then turned into UW Extended Campus. And then Small Business Development Center organization became the Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship. And that is joined in System administration. So it was kind of helping direct and conceptualize how all four of those units would flow.

LEH: Yeah. That's a lot of stuff.

AB: Yeah. Yeah, it was.

LEH: Yeah. What would you say, what parts of that process were sort of more difficult? Which were easier?

AB: All of it was hard.

LEH: Yeah. (laughs)

AB: All of it was hard. So in, the reason for the restructuring was really to deal with the declining enrollments in the UW Colleges campuses. Extension was functioning really well, actually, and it is a program revenue operation. So it was generating revenue for the entire system. The challenge, then, was how to, how to help with the transition in ways that wouldn't wreck what was 00:06:00there, to be honest. Because, again, it was functioning really well. And Extension as its own institution--how much do you know? You've done other interviews. So do you have a sense of the structure of what Colleges and Extension was before the transition?

LEH: Yeah. My kind of understanding of it was that there were, there's sort of the flexible option and stuff like that was sort of joined with the Colleges, the former Colleges?

AB: No.

LEH: That's wrong? (laughs)

AB: Yeah.

LEH: Okay. Any clarification is definitely useful. Because there's information out there, but it's not exactly clear from like the org charts and stuff like where--

AB: How things are organized. Good. That's great. So I can go through all that and give you at least a lay of the land. So, Colleges and Extension were two separate institutions. Separately functioning institutions. They had one chancellor but two separate provosts and then two separate budgets, two separate faculty, two separate missions, two separate HR organizations. You name it. They were two separate things. They had one chancellor. And there's a history to that, but it's probably not that important.

Colleges' enrollments were quite a bit of a problem. They were declining by about 30 % over the last probably ten years. And so they needed to fix that. The decision was made that they didn't believe that Extension kind of politically would be able to be seen as being able to stand on its own. So they said okay, we're going to get rid of Colleges. And each of the campuses were going to different four-year institutions to kind of regionalize. Gee, Extension's going well. What do we do with that? I don't know. Let's think this through. So part of my job was let's think this through.

There were lots of different options that were on the table. The Coop Extension a hundred years ago used to be part of Madison. So gee, why don't we make it part of Madison again? It made good sense.

And then the other three units were going to go into System. System is a policy 00:09:00strategy coordinating body. It doesn't know how to do programs. So as we looked into it, then we were thinking well, of the three that are left, do they really fit in System or not? Again, because we want to try and not wreck what's going on that's working well. It was about a 240 million dollar operation and it was receiving about forty million in state funds. So that's a six-to-one ratio of generating funds for the state funds that were coming in. So it was important not to wreck it.

So the three that were left, CEOEL, Public Broadcasting and Business and Entrepreneurship, Public Broadcasting was already in Vilas Hall. So why don't we put that in Madison. Do you know Vilas Hall? So Vilas Hall is--

LEH: I know it. I know what they look like. (laughs)

AB: Okay. That's fine. They were already using those facilities. So we kind of went through the process of thinking if it were literally part of Madison administratively and operationally, what are the pros and cons to that? And it was decided it makes good sense to put it in Madison. It has the operational strength to take it over.

Business and Entrepreneurship, the director wanted to actually be independent of any one campus. Because for their work, they really need to kind of sit outside of any one institution's branding. Because they're trying to develop business, small businesses and entrepreneurial ventures on behalf of the state as much as on behalf of the university system. So they said, oh, we want to be part of System. We'll have some separation, but we want to be part of System and brand ourselves separately.

And CEOEL, it was somewhat the same. Their work, and that's where the UW Flex option was, and still is. And actually I was brought over to start Flex in 2012. So that's why I came over there. The thought was, it really needs to stand on its own and be branded separately in order to continue to have the 00:12:00partnership relationships that it has with each of the campuses. If it was part of any one campus, let's say Madison, or Parkside, those were kind of the two campuses that we were considering partnering that unit with.

LEH: Why Parkside?

AB: Parkside because Parkside already had ten partnership programs with CEOEL. And it is still a very forward-looking program. Most of its, well, 40 percent, 40 percent of its population is adult population. Thirty percent is students of color. It's in the kind of southeast part of the state where there's almost a corridor between Chicago and Milwaukee of kind of business and industry. Foxconn's there. There's a lot of manufacturing going on there. So that was one place that made some sense.

Madison made sense because just of the size and the kind of stature. But the thought was if it was either one, how would that unit partner with other campuses without those other campuses being suspicious about whether that unit would be working on behalf of its home campus?

So then the thought was can we spin it off entirely? And that's what we've done. And its' rebranded now, UW Extended Campus. And it's sort of incorporated in a way that's separate from System. It's sort of again a separate organization from System and from any of the other campuses.

So anyway, it was working through all the big conceptual things like what we just were talking about, and all the tiny micro details like what email addresses are going to be used for these different units. And all the budgets are coded in certain ways so that they can be kept straight in the state budgeting system. How do you create all the budget codes to make all that work? So it was working out all those details, big and small.

After the initial work with Madison to bring in Coop and Public Broadcasting, then I began moving away from that work and was focusing more on the other two units. And then once Business and Entrepreneurship got established, that was probably early 2018, then I started focusing almost entirely on CEOEL 00:15:00becoming Extended Campus. And since then, I've been focusing mostly on that.

LEH: So you said that there's sort of a suspicion if C--Continuing Education is--

AB: So, call it Extended Campus. That's the easiest thing right now.

LEH: (laughs) Yeah. The acronym always, I'm like CO--

AB: Yeah, CEO, yeah. So now it's UWEX. So we retained the old Extension acronym. That was a battle. But anyway, so you can use that now.

LEH: Why was that a battle?

AB: Just because some people felt like we should kill it and bury it and others--

LEH: (laughs) No affinity towards--

AB: Other felt, this was part of me, it's got a brand and recognition. Isn't there a way we can evolve it? And, by the way, the email addresses could remain uwex.edu. So everyone else vacated that email address. We were able to hold onto it. So those were, yeah, those were just some of the hundreds of little details that got worked through.

LEH: What are like the little details that kind of stand out the most? Like there's the most tension.

AB: So my background's in social work and it's in human behavior and development. I raise that to say there's theory in human behavior areas and in organizational theory that talks about ecosystems. So ecosystems like a biosystem is stable. And if you kill the mosquitoes, then it has ripple effects everywhere, right? So you know, the birds that eat the mosquitoes die because there's no mosquitoes to eat. And then the animals that eat the birds--you get the idea, right?

LEH: Yeah.

AB: Human systems are the same. The system, UW System, was stable. Functioning well or functioning poorly, it was stable, right? So now what happened in this restructure is shaking it up quite a bit. Lots of shake up on the Colleges side. Green Bay having to take on two new campuses, for example, and how did that work?

But in my world, on the Extension side, I'm advocating for creating a 00:18:00new entity into this stable system. So some of the tensions were why do we need that? What's the advantage? Isn't it going to cost more? Kind of conceptual issues like that. Second-level things were what kind of authorities will that new organization have? So all of our work is on adult professional education, online education, and we do it in partnership with all the campuses. Who's going to have the authority to negotiate partnerships with Parkside, with Madison, with Green Bay? If I'm part of System, does System have to approve it all? Or does this new entity continue to function to approve these things? Like I did when I was Extension, right? So those were battles that had to be won.

And that took about a year to kind of work through. (coughs) Excuse me. Resulting in a document that was a delegated authorities document that said Extended Campus will have this kind of legal definition. And here's all the authorities that are delegated to it. The ability to, so I can hire my own people. I can pay them in ways that make sense for the organization. I can negotiate programs with the campuses. And that's different from any other unit within System. So it took times to work through those authorities.

It wasn't as if people were, it was a lot of well-intended cooks in the kitchen rather than ill intent, if you know what I mean. System, like I said, it's never done programming before. So it didn't know how to support that kind of a unit. So there would be lots of discussions about how it should happen. And well, this other part of System doesn't do this. How come you need this authority? So there was a lot of discussions that way. So, yeah, it wasn't so much evil intent or I don't know, whatever. It really was lots of well-intentioned people with, again, lots of cooks in the kitchen.

LEH: Yeah. I mean I think, especially with the colleges, it does seem 00:21:00like the counties and a lot of the people that are involved in the System are very, or the former System, were very hooked on the idea and the Colleges' mission and what it was about. So I'm just wondering could you expand on sort of dealing with the programming side of things? I'm kind of thinking specifically about like the Higher Learning Commission and stuff like that. But anything that sort of like impacted the former Colleges and that transition as well.

AB: Right. So remember, Colleges and Extension, two separate, entirely separate.

LEH: Right. Yeah. (laughs)

AB: You could as easily be talking about Madison and UW Green Bay, if they happened to have one chancellor.

LEH: Mm hmm. Right.

AB: So on the Colleges side, this concept of ecosystems really works quite well. Everyone, for good or bad, knew how the things worked, right? Everything from how do you borrow a book in the library if you're at UW Barron County to how do you get paid to, if I'm a student at Barron County and I'm taking courses there but also taking some online courses from UW Rock County, whether it worked well or not, I knew how it worked. So now I'm invested in the status quo. And that's true for the counties. That's true for the faculty at each of those campuses. It's true for the deans of each of those two-year campuses. True for the chancellors at the four-year campuses that didn't really have to deal with these other two-year campuses in their region. There was a lot of commitment to the status quo. So now, okay, we're going to reorganize. How do you maintain, what is the value of the two-year campuses? And then how do you maintain that under a new kind of structure?

So I wasn't in the center of those conversations. But that was a lot of the conversation. And actually, if you haven't yet talked to a woman named Karen Schmitt, she was interim vice president. Was the provost of UW Colleges, then was interim vice president in System, vice president for student and academic affairs. And she was, and still is, actively in the center of all of the Colleges reorganization things. So again, if you haven't talked to her, I recommend you do.

So anyway, those were, so HLC governs degree-granting organizations. 00:24:00Again, Extension is not degree-granting. So we did not have direct involvement with HLC. The Colleges did. And they had to go through and you probably know the kind of review by HLC and a new document that described how the new structure would work and make sure students are protected. So that was a lot of work for other people.

LEH: Hmm. Maybe we could talk about the Extended Campus, sort of like branching off. The mission and its sort of relation to the UW System as a whole and the different institutions. Could you expand on that?

AB: So, I'm trying to think about how to tell this story. So CEOEL had about a decade's worth of these collaborative programs with the other campuses. So there was some history and momentum in the work that they did. When, and there was a choice point, really. Again, what do we do with these four divisions? Some people felt like the best thing to do was take the resources of CEOEL and simply divide them up by the other campuses. So make every campus, so CEOEL had, has, but now as Extended Campus has about, it's about a sixty million dollar operation, about a hundred and forty, hundred and fifty people. And we do everything from market research, what are the programs that should be developed, marketing and recruitment of adult students, instructional design, curriculum design, all in partnership with the other campuses.

But we support students with kind of guide, success coaches, they're called, sort of guides on the side for students who help adult--I don't know if you know much about adult education. But they're working, they've got families. They're looking for lots of support to fit education into their lives, rather 00:27:00than the other way around. So these guides are kind of like, they follow them with them, they bug them weekly. "How's that working? How's your assignment going? Oh, you're having trouble with financial aid? Let me connect you with a financial aid advisor."

So, rather than keep that all together, what if we just split it all out to all the other campuses? I argued that you lose any kind of synergy in any one of those units if you split it out. In other words, we have seventeen instructional designers. As a team, they're really very powerful. If you gave one instructional designer to every campus, that person would not have any impact. That position won out, ultimately. They went forward with keeping it together and then spinning it off.

Then the question, again, as I said before, became how do you set this thing up so that it actually functions well, and functions well in relationship to all the other campuses? There wasn't, I mean, each chancellor initially said oh, there's money over here, sixty million dollars. We'll take a twelfth of it. You know, heck yeah. But they quickly realized that that wasn't the answer. And then, like I said, there wasn't ill intent. It was more everyone having what they thought was a good idea of how to make it work and so how to navigate through that to come up with this delegated authorities document that listed how Extended Campus would be charted. I'm not sure if that's the answer you were looking for.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. Any answer is a good answer. So, yeah. Could you expand on some of the points you just listed? So maybe like marketing or market research as it pertains to this shift.

AB: So it has more to do with how adult education works than it has to do necessarily with Extended Campus. So adult students, I mentioned the support model. They really need much more of this guide on the side support. It's called intrusive advising is the actual technical term for it. So, we assign a coach to each student who gets enrolled in any of our programs. And I don't 00:30:00know if I mentioned this. We have about twenty-four programs, mostly master's and bachelor's degrees. And again, these are collaborative across all of UWs. So that's one example of how there's a resource within Extended Campus that is devoted specifically to this one piece. In this case, student support to make these programs successful on behalf of all of our campuses.

Marketing is the same. Adult students need to be marketed to differently than traditional age students. We're all inundated with marketing constantly. Adult students are, so we do lots of Facebook ads. And we do the click ads. So if you were interested in, so the next program we're going to do is a master's in cyber security. So if you were to Google "master's in cybersecurity," you probably know this, right? So now you're tagged with that tag. And then when you go on the, you know, Kohl's dot come site, there will be an ad on the side about University of Phoenix or, in our case, our program will be following you. So it's those kind of ads that are very effective for adults.

Recruitment is a different story. Adult students typically are interested, again, these are professionals who are looking to advance in their career. So they're less actually interested in where their degree comes from and more interested in making sure they get the degree and it has the skills in it that they're looking for. So, they're savvy shoppers. So if you're interested in the cybersecurity program and you start Googling and you click on our website, and you're interested in more information and you click on the button, we try and call you back within 24 hours. And that's slow as an industry standard. If you click on Capella button, they'll call you back within three minutes. Because adults are like, I've got half an hour right now where I'm doing Googling on this program and then I've got to take my kids to soccer. Or I've got to go into my work meeting, or whatever it is. So my attention is right here, right now. So the recruitment of these students is a different thing. So from soup to nuts, there's a whole bunch of stuff that is different about adult students that you have to live within. And you want to. I mean, this is how it works in 00:33:00this part of higher ed.

LEH: That's interesting. That's something I never thought about. Yeah.

AB: Yeah. Here's another example. So we have a very successful RN to BSN program. So that's a pretty common thing. So registered nurse--

LEH: Registered nurse to bachelor nurse?

AB: Yeah. Bachelors of science at nursing. Most nurses are at the RN level, and that's a two-year degree. And then more and more hospitals are requiring their nurses to go from the RN to the BSN. They get a different kind of certification as a hospital if a certain proportion of their nurses are master's, sorry, bachelor's degree or higher. So we have this RN to BSN program. Many working nurses take one course at a time and then they get serious about what they're going to do. That's not quite the word. Then they say okay, I'm ready to finish. So they click on the button, RN to BSN program. I mean, they're Googling. They find a program, let's say ours. We call them back within 24 hours. And they say, "I have a whole bunch of credits. How many of them are going to count towards this BSN program?" And we need to evaluate their transcript. Again, within a couple of days. Because University of Phoenix, Capella, Chamberlain, which is a for-profit nursing program in Illinois will review and give them an official stamp of yes, these seventeen credits will count toward your degree. And they'll do that within 48 hours.

The UW does not do that. UW won't even, as a rule, won't even look at transcripts until after not only have you applied, but you've been accepted. Well that adult student is like long gone. Because they want to know upfront, what am I heading into? So just another example.

So we do all the front end work and we've developed the resource to be able to serve these students well.

LEH: Yeah. That's like you're competing, too, with these for-profit schools. Which is not obviously the same as something that gets public funding.

AB: That's correct. Now we're off topic. But there was, in 2010, Tom Harkin, who was a senator from Iowa, he issued a report on for-profit education and found that 80 percent of the budgets, on average, in the for-profit higher 00:36:00ed space was devoted to marketing. Marketing and recruitment. Eighty percent. Which is scandalous, right?

LEH: I'm not surprised.

AB: So our task is, you know, we are the University of Wisconsin. Our standards have to remain at the standard of all of the UWs. And they should. That's the whole point of getting a degree from us versus Chamberlain or University of Phoenix. So we're marrying those quality standard with the ability to compete successfully in that online world.

And to come back to the restructuring, CEOEL was doing that very well. At a small scale, but doing it very well. How do we retain that and grow it on behalf of the whole system? And that really was a lot of the work then over the last, it's actually been since October 2017. So you know, last two years.

LEH: Yeah. Because it technically just ended last June? July?

AB: Yeah, but it didn't end. (LEH laughs) I mean, it only ended from a project manager's spreadsheet.

LEH: So what are you, sorry, can you expand on that?

AB: I mean, there's still, so we're still figuring out just in our case, we're still figuring out, for example, how our IT network is going to get supported. There's still lots of details. And it's going to be another two years or more before it all works itself through. That's okay. I mean, so there's the big benchmarks, the big benchmarks. But every single campus. I was talking to, well, anyway, I was talking to a colleague, a provost at one of the other campuses who is still trying to figure out how faculty that they brought in from Colleges are going to proceed through tenure and post-tenure review. They have a model set up. But until they get enough of them who go through the cycle, right, you don't kind of see where the problems are and how to fix them. So anyway, yeah, so that's the, yeah. So officially it's still going to be another year, easily. Two years, probably.

LEH: That's interesting because there's that official timeline--

AB: Right.

LEH: --that System has.

AB: Right.

LEH: Do you have any thoughts about that?

AB: So I've been through several kinds of organizational changes like this. And there's the official story and what they're keeping track of at a 00:39:00relatively high level, which is what the System project management office was keeping track of. And then there's the thousands of details that fall underneath it. And you know, if you're managing those projects, you want to just make sure that whatever that checkmark is representing, sometimes it's 100 percent complete. And sometimes you're 100 percent certain that it will get complete. You know what I mean? So I'm going to check this box because I know it's going to happen. Like our network will get served. We will get supported. We're still figuring it out. It's not like it's not going to happen. So I was fine to tell them yes, check it off, we'll deal with the details of how to make it work. And that happened all across System. If you talk to any of the--have you started talking yet with people at the campuses?

LEH: Some. Some people, yeah.

AB: Okay. So that' snot an uncommon story. I'm sure you'll hear that from others. And it's not a problem, necessarily. It's just the way it is, right? So.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. So sort of going off of like the collaborative degrees, how do you decide where there's need for a specific thing?

AB: Yeah. If you don't mind, let me show you. So here's all the current programs that we've got. Okay. So these are, we've got about twenty-four programs. So a BS in applied computing. This one has Milwaukee, Oshkosh, Platteville, River Falls, Stevens Point as the partners. Right? So you can see the partners here, and then each campus is involved in X number of partnerships down below. These are, all of this is online. These are programs that are pretty standard online in terms of format. In other words, the run courses semester by semester. It runs twelve months of the year, so you're running fall, spring and summer.

These are the UW Flex programs, which run in a different format. They're self-paced. They're project-based. Students complete these programs 00:42:00by completing a project. So nursing, we've got the, so this is the RN to BSN program. Instead of taking a course in leadership and another course in community health, you would complete a project where you develop and implement a community health program in the nursing setting that you're in. And then you get lots of support and help along the way to do that. And then you're scored, you're graded, on a variety of scales. So how much, how good was your research behind the program? How much of the community assessment, quality of that? How good was the presentation and your communication skills as you got that done? So you can kind of see how that, and you get graded on every one of those. You pass forward if you reach a mastery level rather than you could get an A in one piece of it and a C in another so it averages out to a B. You have to literally master each one of those. So it's pretty cool. Anyway, but these are the Flex programs. And independent learning are involved courses that are gen ed courses that students take just online routinely because they need to pick up a pre-calculus or Spanish 1 and 2 or whatever.

Okay. If you were to look at this, you would see that there are basically three areas that almost all of our programs are in: healthcare, IT and business management. Because these are the high-demand areas. So we do a market analysis every year to say what are the next programs that are on the horizon? And would the UW be able to have a reasonable niche so that it would actually be a viable program? We, again, next one we're doing is cybersecurity.

And in January of every year, so one's coming up, we go out to all the campuses and we say, "Cybersecurity, we believe, is going to be a really important program. Who wants to join?"

This one in particular has eight partners. So almost everyone said, "We want to be partner in that!" So once in the springtime, once we get the partnerships, then we start collaboratively developing the curriculum and putting all the other pieces together. So it's very much driven by the market demand and the capacity of campuses to help teach in that program.

LEH: Has market demand shifted at all now that these colleges are affiliated 00:45:00with the four-years

AB: No. It's not the market of those students. It's the market of like what's the demand in the field. So there's a demand for cybersecurity because industry needs people who are in this case master's level trained in cybersecurity.

What did change is we did have a Flex option program with the Colleges, which was the associate's degree. And it served as kind of a feeder to a lot of other programs. So that program then shifted to Milwaukee. And Milwaukee became kind of the home for that program. So that is one change because of the restructuring.

Actually another change happened, too, which was the bachelor's in business administration--

LEH: Yeah, I see.

AB: Yeah. So Milwaukee has almost all of the Flex programs, except this program went to Parkside as a result of restructuring. And that's because they already had with us a noncredit project management certificate. So they were actually set up pretty well to take on this. So these two eventually are going to come together. But that was another result of restructuring.

LEH: So did like people in the counties, what were their reactions to some of the like shifts for like programs to like certain places? Was there like, because there's economic need, people want some of these programs? Or?

AB: Yeah. But the counties per se are not, they were the landlords for the colleges. Extension was separated from them, so completely different. Now Coop Extension, which went to Madison, and I'm pointing to the Ag School, which is in that direction, I think.

LEH: I know the dean's house is across the street. (laughs) So I think it's there. Yeah.

AB: So where's Babcock Hall?

LEH: Uh, is that--

AB: Across from Babcock is where the Ag School is.

LEH: Oh, okay, yeah. Then it's like that way.

AB: Okay. So that way. Okay. So, I should have pointed down. So, when Coop moved from the institution of Extension to Madison, the counties were very concerned. They felt like Madison hasn't necessarily been a great partner outside of the Milwaukee and Madison counties. Extension has been a great partner, 00:48:00right? So Extension literally funds the mental health services in Buffalo County. Buffalo County's in the mid and west part of the state. Their fear was, if Madison's taking this over, is Madison just going to sweep up all the resources and forget about us as a county and our needs? So they were pretty worried. And so Madison did a lot of work to travel around all the counties, spend a lot of time reassuring people it's a new administrative home but the services are going to remain. You know, all that kind of stuff.

If you haven't yet talked to Casey Nagy, he would be another person to talk with. He was my partner and then he was the lead in the transition from the Madison side. And he's now a vice provost overseeing Coop, Extension and Public Broadcasting. Okay, so he can tell you a lot more. But he worked, he spent a lot of time talking to county folks to help them feel comfortable with the transition. Moving from Extension to Madison, Coop Extension to Madison.

And you know, this is something that always confuses people. So again, kind of stepping back a little bit. UW Extension was the institution. Coop Extension was, Cooperative Extension was one division within Extension.

LEH: Yeah. (laughs)

AB: And it was a poorly chosen word, I think, to call Extension a hundred years ago Extension. Because it was the same name that around the country people used to talk about Cooperative Extension, which is ag.

LEH: Agriculture, 4-H.

AB: 4-H, yeah. All that, exactly. That, by the way, gets fixed, right? Extension goes away. The word "Extension" now will refer to Coop Extension, just like it does for most of the country. So that actually gets a little cleaner.

LEH: Versus Extended Campus.

AB: Versus Extended Campus, which is its own thing. So that's exactly right. It cleans up some of the language and some of the confusion.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting how some of those kind of historical legacies appear to still be there. (laughs)

AB: Yeah, yeah. It really is.

LEH: All right. Let's see. Problems and challenges, we kind of talked 00:51:00about that. Let's see. We talked about Continuing Education.

AB: There is a part of this that I haven't really talked about. So there's sort of two primary functions at Extended Campus has now that Extension had. The collaborative degrees, which are these. And there is, has anyone mentioned 104 money? Does that--okay. So, state funds come into the system just as a block of money. And then it's subdivided based on where those monies go. So, Madison and Milwaukee, because they're research institutions, their funding comes to their campus from System in what's called 101 funds. And those are GPR, General Program Revenue funds.

The comprehensive campuses are 102. Same money, but just different funding number because the mission of the 101 funds is to support a research institution versus the mission of the 102 funds is to support a comprehensive institution.

Extension had, and now still has, 104 funds, which are aimed at statewide outreach and public service. So, Extension's unique mission--not Colleges--but Extension's unique mission was overseeing, coordinating, you know, statewide public service. Colleges' mission was an access mission institution, and it had 103 funds, okay?

I'm bringing this up because the flow of how those funds came in, and then, in the case of Extension, went out to each campus to support what they do, also changed as kind of a behind the curtain review of how Extended Campus now functions in relationship to the other campuses. When we were our own institution, we wrote up what are called inter-institutional agreements, IIAs, with each of the campuses. We'll give you--and we had about, for this purpose we had about 16 million dollars in the CEOEL area that was, about half 00:54:00of which gets allocated out to each campus to support the continuing education operation on each campus. So, do you know Division of Continuing Studies, which is one of the colleges here at Madison?

LEH: Yeah.

AB: So, Division of Continuing Studies actually gets four million dollars from us to help support what they do. Separate from this. But just to support straight up what DCS does. Likewise, continuing ed at UW Green Bay gets an amount, Milwaukee gets, okay. That's the other function that we play. And part of what I had to figure out for System was, now that we're no longer an institution of Extension, but we're a separate entity, how do we still manage the oversight and accountability for those funds that are specifically state-mandated to be related to the statewide outreach in public service? And so we had to work out the details of how to make that work.

You can imagine, if you were Becky Blank, or you were any other chancellor, well, just give us that money directly and we'll tell you how we're using it for statewide public service. And the state said, that's not good enough, because you'll use it any way that you can--

LEH: Yeah.

AB: --whether or not, and then call it public service.

LEH: Anything's technically public service.

AB: Anything is public service.

LEH: Yeah.

AB: So we had to figure out that, how the money worked, so to speak, around the 104 funds. And that's another important function that Extended Campus plays.

This is an interesting sub-question, actually. On the mission of Colleges, you had asked before about what were some of the changes that took place when the Colleges campuses moved into each of the other institutions. What happens to the access mission of the system when each of those campuses, when UW Barron County becomes part of UW Eau Claire? Eau Claire now technically has an access mission. Every campus that got a two-year campus technically has now a part of that access mission. How will they implement that? Who's going to keep track of it? Do you trust that each campus will do it equally as well, and what if they don't? Is there someone who's sort of monitoring Eau Claire and Green 00:57:00Bay and Stevens Point's ability to have that access mission?

So I think, but you could explore this, I think that they retained the 103 designation. The money now that goes to Eau Claire, there's a sliver of it that's still 103. And then Eau Claire has to account for its activities that it's paying with those 103 funds and show how they're related to access. I think that's how it's working. But that would be an interesting question, right? So there should be an access mission to the UW System. How does it function, now that Colleges no longer is its own entity?

LEH: Yeah, that's an interesting question.

AB: Yeah. Yeah. Again, Karen Schmitt spent a lot of time trying to help System people think through all the details of how that works. So, again, if you get a chance to talk to her. But it's an interesting question. Because there should be access. But how do you really capture it?

LEH: Yeah. Well, I had never thought about that in terms of financial resources, either, really. So that's kind of like--(laughs) yeah.

AB: Yeah. Yeah, they had about, so, the GPR dollars that System got, sorry, that Colleges got, I want to say it was about forty million, something like that. So those forty million were split up to the seven receiving institutions. And then in theory, they have an obligation to maintain that access mission with their fraction of that forty million.

Now the interesting question, I mean, there's a lot of interesting questions. Seven campuses got two-year campuses. So they are tagged with access mission. Six campuses did not get a two-year campus. Do they not have an access mission? Right?

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. (laughs)

AB: The answer is no. The answer is, every campus now has an access mission. But for some of those campuses, it's an unfunded mandate and for others, it's not. Because they didn't get any money for that. They just got told they're going to--and it came with the fact that every campus now can offer an associate's degree. That was one of the things in the HLC application was that every campus can offer the associate's degree. And the intent of that is to provide a front door, an easy front door, even if you're UW River Falls, which didn't get a campus, you still have this obligation now, or at least opportunity, to provide access to students. But unfunded.

LEH: Yeah.

AB: Anyway, so, again. There's a lot of interesting little sub-pieces that go on with this transition project.

LEH: Yeah. All right. Do you have anything else you think is really important to add?

AB: If I were you, if I were your professor--

LEH: Okay. (laughs)

AB: I would want you to do a lot of triangulation. And it's got to be the case that this is like a primary part of what your training is. But I'm telling you what I truly believe is the right answer, or the view of how to understand how the transition worked. But I'm still only giving you my perspective on it.

LEH: Well, yeah, yeah. Well, because it's not just the Colleges. It's other functions as well. So that is most of why I reached out to you.

AB: Yeah. So not only am I giving you this perspective of Extension, right, I'm also telling you my view of Colleges.

LEH: Right.

AB: But do continue to really talk to lots of different people who are going to have lots of different perspectives. Because even the story about the 103, I bet if you ask six people, they'll give you six different answers to it. And then what you'll do is how do you understand this from a multi-faceted way, right?

LEH: Yeah.

AB: So it was a very big, complicated project. I think System went into it somewhat naively. But you've got really good people trying to make it work. And so, it worked. Not always smooth, but I've never been involved in a project that's been perfectly smooth. But I would, in trying to catalog the history, yeah, get every different perspective you can get. You'll get a very--well, I'd be curious to see how it gets written up.

LEH: Yeah, yeah.

End of First Interview Session.