Interview with Bruno Browning

Troy Reeves 0:01 Okay, today is February 25th, 2020. I am here with Bruno Browning. My name is Troy Reeves. We're here at University-- Union South on the University of Wisconsin's campus. We're doing this interview, as we have been all day, with academic staff award winners. So Bruno, if you could by-- start by saying your name and spelling your last name.

Bruno Browning 0:27 My name is Bruno Browning. The last name is spelled B-R-O-W-N-I-N-G.

Troy Reeves 0:34 Great. Bruno, I'm just gonna slide this little closer to you, you can use that same voice, I just want to make sure we get you. So, Bruno, as I said, and as you saw, I sent you the questions in advance, we're gonna start with this big broad question about what brought you to UW-Madison.

Bruno Browning 0:51 I came to UW-Madison originally to pursue a PhD in the Department of Slavic Languages. I was a Russian major as an undergrad and was attracted to the graduate program here. So I was... I earned that PhD here and, after having done so instead of going out and seeking an academic job, I decided to stay here working as a staff member in a field only tangentially related to Slavic languages. I was nevertheless very happy to have earned the PhD because I think that gave me some credibility on campus that I probably would not have had otherwise. Also, I think a better understanding of the work life of faculty, and especially instructional academic staff, also research academic staff. Just gave me a better understanding of the academy than I might have had otherwise. During the course of-- my, my academic specialty was Slavic linguistics, I was especially interested in the whole long transition from Proto-Indo-European to common Slavic. So my dissertation, I needed to gloss words in a zillion different languages. This was right about at the same time that the word processor was invented. So I had two countervailing things. One, I was a lousy typist, and watching my grad school colleagues, who were a little bit ahead of me, type 600 page definitions over and over and over again, for different drafts filled me with trepidation and fear. On the other hand, word processors at the time, barely could handle English characters. And I needed to gloss words in Greek and Russian and Sanskrit and all of these other alphabets that didn't 00:03:00exist at the time, so. So, I created them and at that point, I had developed a set of IT skills that eventually turned into my career in IT here.

Troy Reeves 3:17 So basically, you were, well, maybe it's not, to me, it sounds like then you were creating sort of word processing templates that could handle multiple languages.

Bruno Browning 3:26 Well, fonts, really.

Troy Reeves 3:27 Fonts.

Bruno Browning 3:28 I didn't need to do anything fancier than that. The main text was in English.

And fortunately, I didn't need to gloss anything from right to left languages.

Basically, I just needed the extra characters. A little bit more complicated for that then, with the Sanskrit stuff, but in general, that could be transliterated. It wasn't acceptable at the time to transliterate the Cyrillic and the Greek. So those had to be there.

Troy Reeves 3:59 Okay. And so were you-- to do that, were you working with people in... I don't even know if it was called DoIT at that point. But were you working with people who were--

Bruno Browning 4:10 It was not called DoIT at that point, but no, at that point DoIT was called...

well, one of the predecessor organizations that were combined to create DoIT was called the Madison Academic Computing Center, MACC, and it was very much at the time a research-oriented thing. And because of that, it was structured as a chargeback operation. DoIT still, or was when I left work, still largely structured as a chargeback organization. But one of the downsides of that was, being a humanist, I did not have any dollars to pay them. So I was kind of on my own. I did most of this work just on myself...

Troy Reeves 5:01 Okay Bruno Browning 5:02 By myself.

Troy Reeves 5:03 So you said by the end of the PhD, or maybe at some point in the PhD, you you realize that sort of an academic career if you would, like a professorship, was not going to be what you wanted.

Bruno Browning 5:17 Yeah, kind of probably late in the in the dissertation. At that point, I had started doing-- working in IT support on a project assistantship at Learning Support Services. And at the same time, I was watching a lot of my peers in graduate school, my friends who had graduated a little bit early and gone out and find faculty-- found faculty jobs here and there. And they were all still going through the tenure process and pretty much every one of them was pretty unhappy with their situation. I imagine that they mostly reached states later where they were tenured 00:06:00and they were happier but at that point, they weren't so I kind of was enjoying what I was doing and watching them not enjoying what they were doing so I decided to become an early what what we later came to call "alt ack," in terms of my career.

Troy Reeves 6:19 So, while you were getting your PhD you're working at LSS and that's... can we, can we un-acronym-ize that, that's Learning Support Services Bruno Browning 6:30 Learning Support Services Troy Reeves 6:31 And that's what's in the letter - College of Letters and Science?

Bruno Browning 6:31 Department in the College of Letters Science.

Department. So what was your first job with them?

Well, I started as a, as I said, as a graduate project assistant. And then I became a an information processing consultant. Basically doing microcomputer support college-wide. At that time, you know, that was very early in the computer days. So it was a time when one still tried to repair things rather than throwing away and buying new ones. It was a time when installing software actually took some time and attention to detail and things like that. It wasn't just click download from the internet, wait 10 seconds. So there was a lot of that kind of work to do, and so that's what I started doing. About a year after I started doing that, the college allowed us to hire a couple more people and about a year after that, both of them left for different reasons. And so I ended up heading up the microcomputer support group pretty early in my career actually. And then, a few years later, our director, Reed Gilligan restructured the department a little bit and I became, in effect, the Associate Director when I was really called the assistant to the Director for a few years, while we wangled the personnel system, and then at that point I became the, the Associate Director of the Department. And I stayed there in that position for quite a long time. Went through a lot of changes there. LSS was, it was originally founded way back in the 50s as the UW-Madison Language Labs. And early in the 1980s, when microcomputers started to become a thing, 00:09:00one of the Associate Deans in L&S, Dave Dean, was interested in seeing the new technology used around the college and so he started buying computers and gave them all to the administrative offices everywhere. And the, the actual Dean, Dave Cronin, wanted to see something similar happen to faculty. So he created a faculty familiarity program, a faculty computer familiarity program. And we bought a bunch of computers that we lent to faculty so they could start figuring out how to use these things. And so LSS was always oriented, had always been oriented, towards instructional uses of technology. And as time progressed, especially in the 90s, microcomputers exploded, everybody started wanting to have-- they became not rarities, but fixtures on everybody's desk. And at that point, it kind of didn't make sense to do microcomputer support for the entire college from a single thinly-staffed office, especially when departments started hiring their own people. So later in the 80s, Dean Phil Certain had us kind of reorient ourselves to, more exclusively towards the instructional uses of technology and some of the early responsibilities we had for other support around the college fell away and got taken care of, in other fashion.

Troy Reeves 10:41 So Bruno, where was, and it might still be the same place, but when you when you first started working those early jobs, where was your office? Or or where were you located?

Bruno Browning 10:54 Pretty much my entire career was second floor of Van Hise Hall. It's interesting, some of the professional organizations I belong to, I've learned that it's generally a truism in higher ed, that technical support operations are housed in physically unattractive spaces.

Troy Reeves 11:29 So you're now retired, but when, when asked or when you were asked, or if you were asked, how did you describe what you did, or what you do?

Bruno Browning 11:39 I usually told people I was the head geek. I've always found it useful to be self-deprecating. And so I've never made a big deal of directorial titles or anything like that. So head geek was 00:12:00my usual response. And then I would go on to explain that we helped people use computers, digital technologies, for things they needed to get done. Most of the work we did, especially later was in the instructional space, but it was never exclusively that. So we would help people figure out how to use computers towards research. And even administrative uses, there was a number of years there early on where the college did its annual merit, merit exercise using software I wrote. Not very instructionally oriented, but still useful and important.

Troy Reeves 12:50 You've talked about this a little bit, as we've, as you've talked about. I'd like to ask directly, and of course, understanding that there's no such thing as a typical day. But what are some of the things that might might have comprise a typical day, particularly that last, you know, job you had, since you had it the longest, I think.

Bruno Browning 13:07 Well, I really, it really changed over time. You know, when I started doing that job. I was part of the forward facing, the user-facing support staff. And so I answered telephones, and I ran out to people's offices, and I installed software on their computers or fixed problems on their computers or fixed problems with their email, sit down and brainstorm with them. If they had a particular little pedagogical problem that they were interested in using technology to solve, how can we solve that, that was some of the more rewarding things that you know, "I, every year, I tried to do X, Y, and Z and the students have a real problem with this particular concept. And I'm thinking if I could do X, that would help them"

that's all-- I did a lot of that that was very rewarding. Later in my career, of course, as I became the Department Director, I spent a lot more time-- less time dealing with faculty and interesting faculty problems and more with administrative issues and money and meetings and stuff like that, which is less immediately rewarding. But of course, it needs to be done. And if it's not done right, the other stuff can't happen at all, so.

Troy Reeves 14:38 So, as you moved into sort of higher-level administration, how did you continue, I think you may have just said it but I'm going to ask it directly: How did you find your, your happiness, if you will? If you're doing less and less of what interest-- immediately interests you in more and more of these administrative tasks.

Bruno Browning 14:59 Well, I 00:15:00did a couple things. One, there were some things that... that I held on to. I wrote some software, for instance, that helped schedule student workers into positions around their classes. And that, I reached a point where I wasn't running that every semester anymore to schedule the students. But every semester, the person who was running it would knock on my door and say, "you know, it'd be really cool if it would do X." So I would get my... give me that would give me an opportunity to get my geek on and add a feature there. So there were a few things like that. And some oddly configured servers that didn't need much maintenance, it didn't make much sense to shove those off onto other people, another thing I did was volunteer work. And so for a long time I, outside of actual-- outside of work hours, outside of work responsibilities, I got involved with mozilla.org, the people that make [word unclear] the Firefox browser, and I helped code up neat things in their, in their space, and just open source software. That was very satisfying. And this had allowed me to keep my geek on, even though I wasn't doing it. And then of course, you know, part of what you have to do when you move into a position like that is find ways to make it the intellectual challenge. You know, how do you? How can I convince this guy that to do X, when he's really inclined to do Y? And financially incentivized to do Y.

Troy Reeves 16:48 So, I've asked this question of every academic staff award winner, it seems. You know, in your case, I'm not sure how you're gonna answer this. But I'm gonna answer-- ask it anyway. And that's the sort of the technology question, you know, how has technology changed your work?

Bruno Browning 17:04 Oh, it's enormously, since technology has been my work. And since technology has been in a state of constant change for those 30 years, there's just no... So, the work that the LSS frontline staff do today, has essentially nothing to do with what I was doing in 1989 or 1990. Right? Computers are now arguably fungible, they're certainly inexpensive, they're no longer capital expense items. You... one doesn't repair them now, one replaces them. Installing software is not, not a thing anymore. World Wide Web exists. So data is no longer stored on your computer, if 00:18:00your data is stored in the cloud, for the most part. Computing is mostly done in the cloud, and your computer nowadays really serves to simply display the results of computation to you. The fact that the network is there changes the entire game. I could go on and on. But yeah, it's, it's been a source of enormous change, at least for those front-end things. You know, some of the more administrative things that I did in a Director role, I think, probably have not. Those problems have not fundamentally changed, some of the ways that we approach them, certainly the systems we use to manage budgets, for instance, have completely changed and need to completely change again, I'm glad that Laurent Heller has got that underway. So, yeah. You know, when I, when I came to UW to start graduate school, that first fall, I got a multi-part form that I picked up at the stock pavilion, and I trotted that around campus to get signatures to enroll in my classes, and then I hoofed that over to the Red Gym. And now that, all of that, is entirely online. Probably a lot of students don't know where the stock pavilion is. So, so yeah. Enormous change in terms of technology.

Troy Reeves 19:42 Are there changes in technology that have happened that make you long for the previous iteration of the technology, even if that means analog as opposed to digital?

Bruno Browning 19:56 I can't think of the word you know, obviously, I'm a technophile, so I'm not likely to view things that way. Certainly not all technologies are equally useful. And we've had some... we've deployed some technologies over the years that I have not been fond of and that I was happy to see go, or am happy to see going. I already mentioned, Laurent Heller's administrative redesign project or whatever he's calling it. I recall one of the battles that I fought for years and years and years had to do with languages and the campus course management systems. For whatever reason, UW is probably, or at least arguably, the University in North America that teaches the most languages. 00:21:00My colleagues in Indiana would fight me on that, but I think I would win. Certainly much more than most other universities. And until well into the twenty-teens, campus or actually UW System, to my mind, perversely kept picking course management systems that could not handle those funny alphabets that trampled me in writing my, my dissertation. And so if you wanted to use the course management system to teach Japanese or Chinese or, or even Russian, you couldn't do that quite as directly as you could, if you were teaching, say, an English class. And so I spent a lot of time politicking for "let's, let's choose a course management system with these, these faculty can actually use." Nowadays, Unicode has finally won the day and all of those glyphs are baked into your cell phone and every other piece of technology that you have. That's no longer an issue. But it was a huge headache for me for most of my career, making sure that these instruct-- that instruction faculty and instructional staff had the wherewithal they needed to handle the languages that they were involved in.

Troy Reeves 22:29 So I want to start with the academic staff questions by this sort of broad, again, another broad question about, you know, during your time here, how much thought did you put into the relationship between faculty and staff? And then, sort of what were your thoughts about that relationship?

Bruno Browning 22:52 Well, that's always been, you know, that relationship is obviously fundamental to anybody who works at the University. I was struck when I read the question that it's broadly speaking, faculty, vis-a-vis staff. And in fact, we we do have, we make important, important distinction within the staff, as well. And sometimes the distinction between the academic and University staff can be actually more important to the individuals involved than the distinction between faculty and staff. So that's one thing I would, I would point out. And, of course, especially after I got involved in governance, I served for nine years on the Personnel Policies and Procedures Committee. And so all of these questions were front and center at almost every, every meeting. One thing that I always think of when I 00:24:00somebody askes me a question like that, is I think we all recognize that... I don't want to call it a caste system, though it often is, but there's definitely kind of an informal ranking of those three groups where the faculty are higher-status on campus than academic staff, who in turn are generally considered higher-status than the classified staff. But we always lose-- nobody ever seems to mention the fact that you know, for most of my career, pre-Act 10, the raises that everybody, faculty, and both kinds of staff got annually and pay plans were always negotiated by the unions. There was no formal tie between faculty remuneration and, and civil service. But in point of fact, what happened biennium after biennium is that pretty much the same amount was allocated. So, you know, the non civil service folks really have benefited in a lot of ways, from structures and practices in place for the classified/civil service/university staff. And so I just never thought that was appreciated as well as it could be. And I think that's largely true now. I mean, since Act 10, the unions are,are not there negotiating and raises for state employees are driven by somewhat different things. But there still does seem to be fairly strong coupling in pay plans between the civil service folks and everybody else. Now, everybody else does have other flexibilities, and there are ways to tap other funds to get them raises. And so, you know, there's, there's more complication, it's not quite as simple as I think I've just depicted it.

But I think it's still, broadly speaking true that in terms of pay and benefits, the, the non-civil service folks really owe a lot to the civil service folks by way of thanks. What do I want to say beyond that... they're, the incentives that faculty have, the imperatives that their work lives put on them, 00:27:00very often put them under a great deal of pressure to excel at research. And so that's where they really need to put their time. And since every faculty member on campus has essentially the same job description, that doesn't vary a whole lot across campus. For academic staff, that's not quite so true. So academic staff can have more flexibility to spend their time on things that are more tangentially related to their core goals. And so that's one reason why I think that faculty don't, by and large, there are certainly exceptions, don't have a lot of training in how to supervise people, how to be a boss, how to run a lab or, or whatever, even instructional program that has staff. Whereas-- and they don't really have incentive to spend time on picking up those kinds of skills. And so I think that does put the, a lot of times the non faculty staff that work in that kind of environment at a disadvantage. Certainly some of the more, the better-run, places I've seen are ones that have actually made an effort to either provide extra training for academic and university staff or in supervisory positions, or to make positions that are explicitly supervisory and administrative and don't have... that have less or none of the research or instruction-oriented things so that they can learn how to be better at administering and, you know, making, keeping the wheels turning. And I think that's been, we saw a lot of challenges with, certainly with the TTC project in the early days when I was involved with that. I'm not sure what's going on with that, since in the year or so since I have left, but... but I imagine that there's still issues like that. The other thing that always struck me that we could do better at is that, because faculty have this more exalted status on campus, faculty programs tend to be much better resourced. 00:30:00So for instance, I'll give you two examples that, that frustrated me that I always thought could be better dealt with. One is WISLI [?], which is a fantastic program with some fantastic staff and they do absolutely wonderful things for, in the faculty hiring space and, and annual surveys of, of faculty for things like work-life balance, department climate, bah bah bah. They are very helpful eliminating bias in faculty hiring and just a wonderful program, I can't laud them enough.

There's nothing like that for academic staff, or for, or for university staff.

And, you know, sometimes we could garner little bits of that by sending people from search and screen committees for non faculty positions to some of the training sessions WISLI [?] did. But WISLI [?] itself cannot expend any of their resources in helping non-faculty programs and, and I'm just using WISLI [?] as an example. There are many other structures like that. Another example would be the fact that, certainly when I was a Director, I was always frustrated. When faculty advance through their careers there are defined points such as, you know, promotions between the three faculty ranks, and so forth, where there are raises attached, which is wonderful and appropriate, and we need to be doing that. And those raises are defined amount, well defined-- not defined amounts, but defined minima. And there's a significant amount of Central Campus funding that goes into those that is supplemented by the school or college, to varying degrees. But there's Central Campus muscle behind it. Now, when I was, when I was in the Director position at LSS, we had no faculty, we were mostly academic staff. Through most of my career, we had only one University staff person, but for my academic staff, as they advanced through the ranks, again, there are raises that come with that. But when I want to do that I either needed to find that within my own budget, or go talk to, you know, the, the Dean or the Associate Dean, whoever in L&S I was reporting to at the time, and talk them out of 00:33:00the few thousand dollars that were involved. And I just, I always thought that central campus ought to be helping with those as well. Those are just two examples. Campus, especially Central Campus, exalt faculty over over other employment categories.

Troy Reeves 33:23 Bruno, I'm going to jump over the governance and group stuff because I want to ,I want to sort of focus the next session on that.

Bruno Browning 33:30 Okay.

Troy Reeves 33:31 So I want to talk about the, the academic staff award itself.

Bruno Browning 33:35 Sure.

Troy Reeves 33:36 So start by this sort of yes or no question. You know, did you know that you were, that you were nominated?

Bruno Browning 33:42 Yeah, it's hard to hide that. Given that one of the requirements is a CV. So my, my nominators had to hit me up for a CV. So that kind of let that cat out of the bag right there. I've always been a big believer in awards through my career, that I've nominated a lot of people for them and actually one of the things I did at LSS was for staff I-- we record an updated CV annually at review time and so there were times when I was able to surprise people with awards because I would have a recent CV in my pocket. But...

Troy Reeves 34:30 So how did you... how'd you find out or what's your memory about you know, finding out that you, you did earn this award?

Bruno Browning 34:42 How did I find out that I earned the award? A... that happened a month or two after I stopped working and I was actually out of town, down in Bear County in Texas, near San Antonio, visiting my parents. And one of my nominators called me up on my cell phone. I was having dinner with my parents at the retirement community that they're living in. And my phone rang. So I picked it up. And my one of my nominators was was on the line. I said, "can I call you back, I'm right in the middle of dinner," and she said, "I really need to talk to you," so I said, "Okay," and I ducked out in the hallway. And she told me that, that I had won the award. That was very gratifying. And she told me that I could go back to dinner and promised me that she would be sending a copy of the nomination materials for my mom to put on her refrigerator.

Troy Reeves 36:00 00:36:00So did you attend the reception?

Bruno Browning 36:04 I did. Yeah.

Troy Reeves 36:05 What are your thoughts or memories about that?

Bruno Browning 36:07 Oh, I always enjoy those. As does the Chancellor, she keeps telling me. And I've been to a lot of them over the years, both whether I had nominated people or written letters in support of things or, or whatever. And when I was serving on ASAC [?] I kind of figured that was part of the role was to be there to support things. So I always enjoy those ceremonies. The speech vacation is kept mercifully short, the reception beforehand is always a wonderful chance to bump into people from all over campus that you haven't seen for a while. It's a happy occasion. People are there for a happy reason. So I, I really enjoy that.

Troy Reeves 36:57 What was the the gist of your comments?

Bruno Browning 37:01 Oh, the gist of my comments? Mostly thanks to the nominators, of course. You have to thank the Chancellor. So I did, I thanked Anne Wallace, because I won the... got the Anne Wallace award, which was funded by Anne, who I had the good, great good fortune to overlap with on TPPC right before she retired, so. We have kept tangentially in touch over the years, and so it was a wonderful chance to see her. That was one of the highlights for me of the reception and the ceremony is that she actually came.

Troy Reeves 37:53 Yeah, I was gonna ask you about Anne, because the award's named after her. So thank you for, for dropping that in there, too. So I think to end today, instead of asking about legacies, I want to ask that at the end of the next one, you are retired. So I want... I wonder if you would tell us about why you decided to retire when you did.

Bruno Browning 38:21 Oh, how do I want to say there... I was approaching 30 years of service, which is a point at which it does make sense to retire. My wife had retired two and a half years previously, she's a couple years older than I am and she was interested in doing a fair amount of traveling while she still felt like traveling. And so I was certain... under a certain amount of you know, I wanted to support her in that and it's hard to spend a lot of time 00:39:00traveling while you're working full time. So I had domestic reasons to do it. There were some things that were happening in the IT space around campus that had made my role as the Chief Information Officer at L&S a little bit more trying than it had been previously. I'm sure it was a, was a factor. I think those are, workwise those are the three main things. You know there's always when you're working 40 or 50 hours a week, there's always a lot of things that you're not getting done at home that you would like to do and so being able to go back to some of the things that I've always enjoyed doing. Learning new languages, doing some more of that open source software work that that I did with Mozilla previously, that kind of thing.

Troy Reeves 40:04 So, so it's been over a year.

Bruno Browning 40:09 Well, yeah, I, technically, it's been since August. So I saved as much vacation every year during my career as I could. And so I had a lengthy terminal leave at that full pay, but I stopped going into the office right at the end of 2018. So, so coming up on 14 months now, since I've had work duties.

Troy Reeves 40:37 Is there anything you miss?

Bruno Browning 40:39 Yeah, I miss the people. A lot of the one of the things I always loved about working at the University is being able to be around smart, idealistic, hard-working, knowledgeable people. That was always very gratifying. And, you know, some of, there are a few of them that were always been personal friends that that I've kept very closely in touch with. But other than that, I've kind of consciously tried to not sever ties, but not to try to hold on too closely.

My observation's over the years that sometimes when people try to hang on a little too hard, it doesn't work out too well. So, I thought maybe best to make a fairly clean break of things, and then possibly come back after a year or two, and get more involved in things but not look like I was... I didn't want to put myself in a position where anybody got the idea that I tried to retire and still run things, you know? Because there's always somebody new who wants to... who's actually in the role running things has those responsibilities and doesn't need your interference.

Troy Reeves 42:01 00:42:00So Bruno, I want to wrap up for the day. But, understanding that we're in talk about academic staff and governance and then probably talk legacy. Is there anything that is on your mind that you'd like to get on to this session? In case you know, in case we just don't get to it the next session?

Bruno Browning 42:18 I can't think of anything, most of the things that I really wanted to say here are related to those other two topics.

Troy Reeves 42:25 Okay. All right. Great. So we will hit those in the second session. So this ends the first session with Bruno Browning. Thank you, Bruno, for your time.

Bruno Browning 42:33 Thank you.

Troy Reeves 0:04 Excuse me. Okay, today is July 15th, 2020. This is the follow up interview with Bruno Browning. My name is Troy Reeves. Due to the COVID pandemic, we're conducting this interview remotely. Meaning I'm in my home in Madison, and Bruno, I assume is in his home, wherever that is. So Bruno, as we did with the first session, if you could start by saying your name and spelling your last name.

Bruno Browning 0:32 Sure, my name is Bruno Browning. Last name is spelled B-R-O-W-N-I-N-G.

Troy Reeves 0:38 Great. Thank you. So Bruno, as I said, I'm going to start with a really open ended question here about campus governance or academic staff governance, my open ended question is how and when, or at least as far as you remember, how and when did you find out that that even existed, and that was something you could be involved in?

Bruno Browning 1:00 I think I was aware of it, to some extent, from the beginning of my career at UW. I was not on the staff when academic staff governance was originally instituted, but I was on campus as a student. So I was aware at some distance of it, and I... but it wasn't until the late 1990s when I started getting involved.

At that point, I am been on the academic staff for most of 10 years, I think, before I started getting involved. I got involved started getting involved, because my immediate supervisor, Reid Gilligan, had gotten involved several years earlier. He was not among the initial group of people that instituted academic staff governance on campus, but he got involved shortly after, [word unlcear] was involved. And he was heavily involved in the day he retired, actually. And he had very good experience with it, both in terms of his own professional development, the impact he thought he was having on campus. And especially in terms of this feedback that he was getting from his leadership in South Hall. He was the 00:45:00longtime director of L&S Learning Support Services. So he started seeing academic staff governance as a way that staff could kind of pay things back to the University, have a positive impact on the institution, and develop themselves professionally. He started encouraging LSS staff to do so.

And that was a tradition I benefited from, I thought, and I carried that on. I later became director myself. I rather imagine that the current LSS leadership is continuing to do that. I know that the current Interim Director is somebody that I had encouraged to-- Reid and I both had encouraged to get involved in, in governance, and she's served on a number of campus level committees and so forth. So.

Troy Reeves 3:20 Great. Sorry, go ahead.

Bruno Browning 3:24 No, no, that's fine. I was just winding down.

Troy Reeves 3:26 Okay. That's the bad thing about not doing it face to face, as you can't really see... I can't see. I wonder if you, if we can maybe take a step back and just have you know, from your perspective, obviously as as an academic staff person and a long time being involved in governance, talk a little bit, from your perspective, about the idea of shared governance.

Bruno Browning 3:52 Well, you... shared governance as it exists on the Madison campus is I think, kind of unique to UW-Madison. I know it's surprised a lot of people who have come here from elsewhere. But shared governance itself is ubiquitous in higher education, notions generally being in many places it's restricted only to faculty with the notion that the faculty need to have some input on the way that the institution is run and it's not... Universities are not run with the "Chancellor as Emperor" model. There is active participation of the faculty in decision-making at the institutional level, goal setting at the institutional level. It's really just a different approach towards governance. You know, we have a lot of pieces of our society that, such as the law or labor unions, where decision-making is done through an adversarial process. Shared governance is another model that attempts to do so in a collaborative way. Shared governance 00:48:00has been a big thing at the UW, since, really since very early in the existence of the institution. But it was not until really the 1980s, with the notion that governance rights should be extended beyond the tenure track faculty and into, initially academic staff. And then, more recently, since Act 10, where the labor unions no longer play such a big role in life of what we call university staff members, that the notion of including them in shared governance came from sort of a... again to have input into the into decision making priorities creation and policy creation at the institution. I don't know, did that answer your question?

Troy Reeves 6:25 Yeah, thank you. It just, it's always interesting to hear what people who've been in governance, how they answer that question, so thank you. So how did you first become involved, then, in academic staff governance? What was your first committee or first task?

Bruno Browning 6:47 Well, I think the very first thing I did was lose what has to be one of the more congenial election campaigns in history against Chris Brune for a seat in the Academic Staff Assembly. Chris won by one vote, and immediately appointed me his alternate. I served in that capacity for a couple of years. And then Chris decided not to run again and I got elected to that seat. That was probably in the late 1990s, if I recall correctly. So I served on the assembly for several years. And so it seemed like I was a willing horse. At that point, I started getting appointed to other government functions. So I got appointed to the Diversity Oversight Committee in its early days when Bernice Durand was running it. I was appointed to a Search and Screen Committee for the Vice Chancellor for Faculty and Staff. And I think 2003 or 2004 the early aughties, L&S formed a committee on academic staff issues at the urging of campus-level academic staff governance, and I was asked to join that in its second year of existence. I served for three years on that, 00:51:00and so forth for the whole time I was on... and from that time on until I retired, and then periodically get tapped for various committees, councils and task forces. Mostly ad-hoc things, but some of them ongoing.

Troy Reeves 8:49 Okay. So, could you talk a little bit or describe what the academic staff assembly, academic staff assembly is or was when you were serving on it?

Bruno Browning 9:06 Well, it's the campus level organization, or group that actually instantiates the, the legal requirements that academic staff governance exists. Nothing really happens without the assembly. There's a... it has an executive committee that kind of gets all of the attention, but nothing really happens from legal standpoint, unless the academic-- unless the assembly approves. The academic--

the executive committee can point the way and propose things but the actual votes and decisions are done by the academic staff assembly. Most of what they do are things that are specific to the academic staff, the statutory language around academic staff governance gives academic staff certain legal rights in terms of personnel policy and things like that around academic staff. So that's a large part of what the assembly and the various committees do. But they will often take a stand on, on other issues that are, that are [word unclear] on campus. And they also can kind of give the the Chancellor, the Provost and other leaders that feedback on some of those issues. For instance, in recent years, the whole hostile and intimidating behavior issue came forward. That was something that the Provost would take the temperature of the assembly, honestly, how academic staff were feeling about the importance of the issue and the approach the campus was taking to address it. That's just one example.

Troy Reeves 11:22 So you had mentioned academic 00:54:00staff Executive Committee, or ASEC, you were on that as well to0, correct?

Bruno Browning 11:31 Yes, I was on that for I think, four-and-a-half years. And I was the Vice Chair of it for two of those years. Immediately before I retired, I was on the committee at the time of my retirement.

Troy Reeves 11:45 So I know you said that nothing happens without, you know, the assembly, convening and voting on it. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how an ASEC meeting, you know, a typical, if there ever was one, a typical meeting might some of the component parts, if you will, of a typical ASEC meeting?

Bruno Browning 12:07 Well, a typical ASEC meeting would.... you know, there's always an agenda, and it's usually a mixed group of things, some of it, sometimes there are issues that ASEC wants to discuss among itself. And so we'll block out time to, to do planning and discussion. An example that comes immediately in mind with what's in the news, mostly worrying us at the time of my retirement was this whole titling and compensation process that the campus is still going through. ASEC would monitor that very closely. And gave a lot of feedback to Mark Walters and other people that were involved in the project, which was kind of a changing cast of characters. We watched closely what they were doing and tried to make sure that things were not going off the rails or proceeding in a direction that would be disadvantageous to the academic staff. And that was... that took a lot of bird-dogging, because of course there are a lot of different competing interests involved in the whole thing. Typically, also, an ASEC meeting would involve visitors. We would have anywhere from one to five outside parties come to the committee at any given meeting, for updates and discussions. So the Provost came usually twice a month. In recent years, Laurent Heller has typically come once a month to update ASEC on things that were happening around campus and to get feedback from ASEC on issues that they were... worrying them.

We tried to bring in each of the Deans at least once every few years. And 00:57:00typically when there was a new Dean, we would wait a semester or two to let them get their feet underneath them and then bring them in. Get their take on how things were going for academic staff in their unit, provide feedback. We would do planning your students talk to academic staff groups and other initiatives.

So for instance, we a number of times had the group that was working on the new professorial tiding-- titling issue, they came in a number of times to do some planning and updates. And so for the leadership of the [word unlcear] visited us regularly. So that was typically kind of what happened. Various, but it was mostly keeping things... making sure that ASEC knew what was going on so that we could communicate that back to the assembly and we were there when... You know, since the assembly meets only once a month, it's not really a great vehicle for dealing with things that required quick turnaround, or... and since your typical assembly member has only made a fairly low level commitment, and probably devoting maybe a few hours a month to governance, they didn't-- they don't have the opportunity to study issues in depth. And so those are the two things that I think ASEC primarily provides the governance process is both a small group of people that can be aware of a wide range of issues at some depth, and can respond more quickly than, you know, a nine times a year assembly Troy Reeves 16:27 Thank you. As I mentioned in the, in the email, and I think when we talked on Friday, I was going to... might ask about the pandemic and the anti-racism protests, I still may do that. But it, it leads me to think about, you know, you talked about the hostile and intimidating behavior issue. And I'm wondering if there were issues that came up during your time in governance that, that directly involved ideas of race or disability or, or gender or sexuality?

Bruno Browning 17:01 Well, I served, I think I mentioned that I served on the Diversity Oversight Committee for a number of years. And that was a... that was a real eye-opener for me. I, I was, frankly, kind of shocked at some of the things that I ran into there. I think I tend to live in a little 01:00:00campus bubble. Most of the people I would interact with on campus were other professionals with backgrounds much like mine, and I just didn't live in a place where I ever heard anybody speak negatively about any ethnicity or race or religion, anything like that. And the DOC, especially in those early days was a place where people would then bring grievances, and I would hear about things that were happening on my campus that I had absolutely no conception existed. And there were just horrible... people were being treated and horrible things were happening to people on campus along racial lines, and so forth. That was a real eye-opener for me. I know that a lot of us had put in a lot of effort on that for a lot of years. I don't know honestly how much we've improved things. I hope some. But certainly now I think we are much more aware of it, that those things do still exist on our campus.

Certainly more than I was aware when I went to that first DOC meeting all those years ago.

Troy Reeves 18:50 Alright.

Bruno Browning 18:53 Other than that, I know that one of the things ASEC does that I didn't mention is committee appointments, because it's not typically something that the assembly has the bandwidth to do. And, and diversity along many axes was something that we were very conscious of. Anytime we put somebody on committees, we were... we would look at gender diversity, racial and ethnic diversity, diversity among employee units, diversity among appointment types. One of the issues we struggle with is it's really easy to find people from jobs like mine to serve on committees. Finding people whose duties were primarily instructional was much more difficult for a number of reasons, and especially in late years is finding people who were members of the research academic staff to serve on committees. It was really difficult because very often they were paid for by grants, and there were strict limitations on how their time could be used. And, and federal interpretations of the employment law that made things even more difficult. That was something that we always struggle 01:03:00with, to make sure that we had as much diversity of eyeballs on any given committee, any given issues we could.

Troy Reeves 20:34 Okay. A couple more things about academic staff governance, or maybe at least one thing for sure. And that's, I can't remember the-- how to spell out the acronym but I noticed you were on a group that has the acronym A-P-I-R. Does that ring a bell?

Bruno Browning 20:53 A-P-I-R...? I was on the Academic Planning Councils for a couple of--

Troy Reeves 21:01 Yeah, so I think Academic Planning and Institutional Research.

Bruno Browning 21:07 Okay, that's that...I don't know if that still exists, I was on a committee, it was a group within the Vice Provost for Finance office. We did a lot-- ASEC did a lot of work with them, they have some really brilliant statistical people. And so when we would want to find out various things about how the campus functions, and especially how our academic staff were functioning you know, they were the people that we would go to.

Troy Reeves 21:49 Okay. And that was just something... do you recall being involved in it because you were in academic staff governance or because of your, your, your day job so to speak?

Bruno Browning 21:59 Um, you know, I had intersected with them on any number-- for any number of reasons, some of them my day job, some of them academic staff government, sometimes in the kind of gray area in between. I at one point helped form a committee that was looking at various issues around the campus IT staff and, who are some of them academic staff some of them University staff. And also around the IT systems that support HR around campus. So I helped form a group to do that. And APIR was heavily involved in that, partly because they needed better campus-level systems themselves, because they were interested in what we're doing. So yeah, I worked with [name unclear] and some of her staff on a number of issues.

Troy Reeves 23:08 Okay. Um, I guess another question that I have just kind of popped in my head.

And that's, there's probably several of these situations where you ran across a situation or 01:06:00or a person on campus, could have even been a colleague that needed some type of help or advice. And because you were involved in, in academic staff governance, you were able to help those people. I don't even know if that question makes sense.

Bruno Browning 23:42 No, it does. And that happened with some regularity, both while I was on ASEC, and before I was on ASEC, I served for nine years on the Personnel Policies and Procedures Committee. And because of that work, I was intimately familiar with all of the academic staff, the academic staff policies and procedures document that sets forth all of the HR rules. And so if people knew I had that familiarity, and since I, you know, a lot of people knew me, and maybe I just seemed approachable. It was fairly regular people that had various kinds of concerns and lots of them people that had a grievance of some kind or thought they were about to get laid off, or have some other adverse management action against them would come and ask me for advice, and I could certainly advise them on what the policy was. In cases where I thought an employing unit was not coloring precisely between the lines that ASPT draws, I could point that out to campus-level HR, who generally were quite good and quite responsive about that, about helping with situations like that. That typically, what happened to there would come to you with some kind of concern.

Troy Reeves 25:27 Okay. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the search and screens you were involved in, because I know you were involved in what I'd consider to be a couple of high-level search and screens. I know you're on one for the CIO, you mentioned one about Vice Chancellor for Faculty and Staff. I'm particularly interested because I'm guessing those search and screens included not only staff, but faculty and maybe university staff and students. So, just sort of the complexity maybe in some of the surgeon screens you're involved in and how your role in academic staff governance may have helped you negotiate those?

Bruno Browning 26:09 Well, sure, yeah, you're right. Like ASEC, the Provost's office who puts these things together is very conscious of having a diversity of viewpoints on these campus-level. 01:09:00hires. And so there were usually a majority of faculty that are also academic staff, and university staff. And often students, usually students, they will serve on those committees. And that was another-- one aspect of our work in ASEC, as a matter of fact. The Provost's office was so interested in having that kind of diversity that often they would ask us to suggest four or six names, three seats, so that they would have some flexibility from among the academic staff available to them to achieve their diversity goals. So, you know, the diversity on those is very carefully planned. They vary a lot, the CIO search, I heard there was actually an external search firm, hired to help with that. There's a lot of the legwork, there's a lot of recruiting and so forth.

Some of that didn't happen, of course, in the case of the faculty and staff at ABC, because it was limited, you had to be a tenured faculty member on campus to be eligible. Pretty diverse set of parameters, and approaches. But those, those personally, I found to be very interesting and very useful, I met a lot of really wonderful people from around campus with angles and viewpoints on things that I never would have come up with on my own. And certainly I provided some viewpoints that were not otherwise represented on the committee. I always thought those were generally well done. The support from the staff and the Secretary of the Faculties office was always superb. Met some real characters, too. I'll never forget the CIO when we had a faculty member from the math department who was involved in so everybody on the committee got a short, but very intense course on the mathematical underpinnings of voting.

Troy Reeves 29:14 Bruno, thank you for that. Having not been involved in these high level search and screens, I'm always interested in how those, how those work and how academic staff are involved in those. 01:12:00So the one other thing I want to ask, and it's it's almost as much about your own work as it is about academic staff governance, you mentioned that, you know, Reid Gilligan was your advisor and had gotten you sort of involved, or at least talked to you about academic staff governance, and you said you, I think you'd said you'd paid that forward. But I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about mentoring, whether it's either you know, in your work, your day job, if you will, or in academic staff governance.

Bruno Browning 29:57 So sure, yes, Reid encouraged LSS staff to get involved in governance. And when I became director, I did the same. My associate director Lisa Jansen has served since on a couple of the standing committees. Another LSS staff member, is now, or was when I retired, on the Professional Development Recognition Committee. So we did very consciously call that up. You know, that was something that I made a point of mentioning, every time we did a performance review. Academic staff governance was a point item on the agenda, and I didn't start pushing people in that direction, the first year they were hired, or even the second, but once they've been around enough to get their feet underneath them and in some orientation on campus, I always did encourage them to do that. And I think most of them did some level of it, not all of them as much as I did or as Lisa did but. But I did encourage them to get involved outside the department. I also encouraged them to get involved in the IT community at the campus level, rather than just staying hunkered down within our own unit. It has upsides and downsides, obviously, times when I would hire somebody really wonderful, and they would go out, engage in campus level activities, and somebody else on campus would hire them away from that. It's good for them, and I always tried to take the attitude that a rising tide lifts all boats. But yes, I didn pay that forward. And I did, and I also encouraged people that weren't my direct supervisees to do so when I would meet other academic staff, especially younger academic staff. And governance would always prioritize and run in that direction, especially as I said, if they were instructional or research academic 01:15:00staff because we had a relative paucity of those in academic governance.

Troy Reeves 32:31 Thank you. So, before I get to my last couple questions, is there anything else that is either on your mind or any notes you may have taken about your your time in academic staff governance that you'd like to get on the record?

Bruno Browning 32:44 I can't think of anything in particular, I think I've mentioned everything I wanted to say, Troy Reeves 32:51 Okay. I do want to ask, since we have a few minutes, just your thoughts, you know, as a now retired academic staff about the, the pandemic and you know, again, even though you're not working day to day on campus, how this pandemic has affected you, and maybe from what you know, affected people that you used to work with.

Bruno Browning 33:15 Oh, as you say I've not been on campus. And so it hasn't... the campus aspects of it have not affected me a lot. I since this, over the last six months I've been going back and forth about how lucky I feel. On the one hand I'm retired and this isn't hitting me upside the head, it really would have if I was still on campus, on the other hand would have been a really fascinating professional challenge because a large part of what my group did was, in Letters and Science, was support for the use of technology in instruction. And so as we suddenly pull up roots and try to move all of our instruction online overnight, I'm sure that, that, that my former colleagues were squarely in the crosshairs on that. So that would have been a really great professional challenge that in some ways I would have really enjoyed tackling, and on the other hand most days and glad I can be out of it.

Troy Reeves 34:36 Okay.

Bruno Browning 34:36 But most people seem to be holding up reasonably well and, from what I can tell at a distance, I think I seems to have gone better than I... my horseback expectation would have been. Clearly it's a lot of adversity, but we had a lot of, still have a lot, of instructors who had not previously done much with online or video-mediated instruction, didn't have much interest in it. And they've all kind of risen to the occasion in rather surprising way. My hat's off to them as a group.

Troy Reeves 35:23 Okay. Thank 01:18:00you. So my final question is about legacy and it's you know, how do you think your time on campus will be remembered?

Bruno Browning 35:35 You know, I... you said you were gonna ask that and that's, that's an interesting question. I feel like I've made a lot of solid contributions while I was on campus and I'm glad that I did the things that I did I think I was able to move move a lot of things in good directions and that overall the campus is at least marginally better off for my participation, but my experience has been with retirees that they are outside, in some cases of faculty out of sight is out of mind, so I'm not sure that I will be much remembered as such. Some of the things that I put in place will survive, some of the committee that I started are still functioning and doing good things but I don't think that people go to those meetings and think "oh, you know Bruno... this wouldn't be happening if Bruno hadn't been here and done that" and you know, that's fine. Was it, was, it wasn't about me. I don't feel like I need to have my name on anything. But yeah, I think back on all of my other colleagues that I've known over the years that have retired before me. It's generally the case that when somebody's been gone for six months you don't hear a lot about them. There are exceptions to that among the faculty because departments tend to a lot of times keep their own departmental history up to date and you know, name rooms after people and things like that.

That happens much less often among the academic staff and I honestly I don't have a problem with that. But I did chuckle when asked how I would be remembered and kind of think for the most part I probably won't.

Troy Reeves 37:50 Well, thank you for that, that answer I do appreciate it. Bruno, anything else on your mind about your time on campus? You know, either your your day job as I've been saying, or academic staff governance, you'd like to say before we wrap up.

Bruno Browning 38:04 Nope, I don't need to wrap up. I think I've had my say.

Troy Reeves 38:07 Alright, well, Bruno, I want to talk to you after I turn off the recorder. So this concludes... but this concludes the oral history, follow-up interview and the oral history with Bruno Browning. Bruno, thank you for your time today and previously, I appreciate it.

Bruno Browning 38:22 Well, thank 01:21:00 you.