Interview with Jennifer Chamberlain

LEH: All right. Recorder's on. All right. This is Lena Evers-Hillstrom. I'm interviewing Jennifer Chamberlain for the UW Restructuring Oral History Project. Could you say your name and your last name, and spell out your last name?

JC:Sure. Jennifer. C-h-a-m-b-e-r-l-a-i-n

LEH: All right. I think we're all set. Okay. So what brought you to the UW Colleges?

JC:I was originally hired as the interim library director for the University of Wisconsin Washington County campus, which is located in West Bend. So I worked initially for one of the thirteen campuses as a library director there in September of 2009. And what brought me was the opportunity to work as the library director. It was an interim position, so I was hired and then nine months later had to apply for the job permanently. But that was at a time when we had local campus library directors.

LEH: Okay. Could you expand on that? What the structure was, and then how it changed?

JC: Certainly. Yep. So in terms of just the libraries, correct?

LEH: Yeah, sure.

JC: Yeah. Okay. Right, so each campus library was kind of self-sufficient. Although even back in my first years working for the Colleges, our structure was that we had thirteen independent, locally staffed, local collections for each of the campus libraries. We worked cooperatively on, in a shared ILS, so a library catalog. And we had a centralized cataloging and technical services office or department called the Library Support Services. And that was located on the Fond du Lac campus. But they served all thirteen of the two-year campuses as well as the online library program.

That structure stayed in place. We had a governance structure, a library council, with a chair, elected representatives on that group. Committees. Lots of cooperative type of work, but it was all done sort of voluntarily, or a structure of our own making. And 2015, on the heels of the budget cut to all the UW, but which hit the UW Colleges particularly hard and I think it 00:03:00amounted to about 20 percent of our operating budget, in that restructuring we needed to change the way we administratively operated our libraries due to a directive from our chancellor, which was that there would no longer be local library administrators, switching to one executive director of libraries overseeing the thirteen two-year campus libraries, as well as the college's online program library. And there was a downstream sort of subsequent restructuring of those local staff directors. Former directors became senior academic librarians and lost their administrative roles.

And then that snowballed a whole series of additional kind of structural changes in how we ran and operated the library, how we built collections and how we cooperated. So it changed some things. We had already, like many libraries, were very cooperative in nature and had already been sharing and working together. So that, even though that was a difficult time for my colleagues that I'd worked alongside and we were peers. And then when I became the executive director of the libraries sort of shifting that role was not easy. But it, in many respects, it didn't affect us as much as other departments who had to now work together or in a regional or centralized capacity. So I hope that answers your question.

LEH: Yeah. Somewhat. (laughs)

JC: Okay.

LEH: I guess, what were the difficulties with sort of like moving people down, and then like the sort of like structure?

JC: Well, I mean the loss of local, a bit of loss of local control. So each of our libraries, again, we were very cooperative, sharing of resources and materials. But when it came to how we built our collections, what services and programs we offered, our instruction programs, those were all under the kind of authority and auspices of those local library staffs and under their local director. Those library directors were often integral parts of a campus administrative structure, where there'd be like an administrative staff meeting of all the, you know, someone in charge of student affairs and academic affairs and marketing, all the main operational areas of a university. Our libraries were more involved in those local decisions before we sort of 00:06:00designed this executive director of libraries.

There were opportunities that definitely came out of it, including there are efficiencies when it comes to, say, collecting. We were duplicating efforts, right? Every small campus offered roughly, especially in the two-year campus system, they're offering very similar courses. So you're building collections to support those general education required courses. Which had different flavors and different looks at each campus. But doing that thirteen times over, or fourteen, if you include our--sometimes I'll say thirteen campuses, sometimes I'll say fourteen. It really was fourteen with the virtual campus. We shifted that work into more what a large university would look like in having subject liaisons that were a touchpoint between the library collection as a whole and the program that supported the academic departments that were already cross-campus.

So, the UW Colleges had one English department with faculty on fourteen campuses, right? One history department, and so forth. So we then aligned our--so our librarians sitting on a local campus were then buying and liaising with, buying collections and liaising with their department colleagues to support the history program of the UW Colleges and the curriculum across all of the physical campuses.

So we found ways to better, I think, reduce sort of duplicative work, whether it be reading reviews, and all the work that goes into cultivating a collection. But it came at the cost, the people cost. So no one wants to be demoted. No one wants to lose that local control. So it was an emotionally hard time yet the colleagues that were in those positions were quite professional and able to sort of separate those things a bit, and could see some advantages in moving in a more unified direction. But like anything, change is hard, right?

LEH: Yeah.

JC: So again, I hope that, ask me a follow-up if that didn't totally answer your question.

LEH: That was great. Yeah, so obviously that's the change after the initial restructuring.

JC: Mm hmm.

LEH: And then how, could you talk a little bit about how that changed again in the second part of the restructuring?

JC: Right. Right. So as the colleges became, in 2015, they became 00:09:00less of a consortium of thirteen independent campuses that did certain things together, they became administratively unified. I mean, we always had a chancellor and we always had a provost over all of the campuses. But from a practitioner or an operational standpoint, having regional deans instead of campus deans, having regional academic and student affairs leaders instead of one in every campus, and then in terms of the library, marketing. I'm trying to think what other areas took a centralized approach. So when we restructured, positions at the administrative level either became aligned with regions, four regions. Or, if regions didn't seem to make sense, like in the libraries it didn't really make sense, we might as well all be joined together, because we had so much in common and we had some shared services already at a centralized, I'll use centralized, level. I've lost my train of thought. Let me think here. You asked me the second restructuring.

So what was a bit challenging then, and we were eighteen months into thinking like a singular body, right? The libraries were a one library, one Colleges library, one administrative layer, doing things in a unified, standardized, consolidated way. Then when we were facing aligning campuses back to sort of a regional model, now, a different region, but aligning those local campuses with their nearest four-year partner. We were unraveling kind of what we had just moved away from.

So what was difficult or tricky is that we then had to figure out, and now I'm trying to remember the number. Maybe you can help me. Seven four-year institutions took on the thirteen campuses? Or six.

LEH: I think it's, yeah, it's in that--

JC: That range.

LEH: It's either six or seven.

JC: I could count it up. I think it is seven.

LEH: I think each of them took on roughly three.

JC: Well, some took one. Some took two and some took three. I think only one campus took three, and that's UW Green Bay. Regardless, though, so then we had to, it was like basically it's like taking a pie or a pizza, right? And they were cut into thirteen pieces. Then we put it all as one big piece. And then we 00:12:00had to divide the pizza into these new sort of unequal pieces.

So for any, I wouldn't say the libraries were unique, although we were one of the few administrative departments that had just restructured centrally. That was problematic or difficult. Because all of these conversations among the new four-year receiving partners, receiving campuses, and their new satellite branch campuses, those conversations started taking place independently in seven different ways. What did surprise me is that even though the decision was made at the UW System administrative level--one decision, right? This is the new structure, this is the regions, these are the marriages we're going to be creating, right? The partners didn't decide who they were receiving. Even though that decree was sort of made from an upper administrative level, the roadmap on how to do it was determined by each of those seven receiving partners. So they went at different paces. They addressed different things in different orders. And so when you're working under those conditions from a centralized, we had done it the same way. It did help, I mean, we could field some of those questions. But pretty quickly, my role became diminished because they had to work with those local campus staff librarians again. They were the experts, right? The person who knew best how to serve the UW Sheboygan campus is the librarian sitting on the UW Sheboygan campus. So anything we had sort of just done consortially or together had some bearing. But at the end of the day, it didn't, because they had to figure out what would work best in their region and in their new structure.

LEH: So where was it important for you to be involved in like decision making, like things had been centralized, student services had been centralized. How was that sort of like broken down in dealing with like collection stuff and all of the sort of like services and everything?

JC: Yeah. So when it came to things that, around the catalog, for example, how we did things in the ILS, how we broke up our budget, right? So we had just also, we unified all our dollars. So these libraries were funded by their local campus body. I was able to make the case and the central business 00:15:00office of the UW Colleges agreed that for us to move together, we couldn't have thirteen small buckets of collection dollars. Our staffing had to be unified and the monies for that so that if we were to see savings or if we were having vacancies, we could deploy staffing and make decisions kind of again at an upper level. So we had just a year earlier pooled all the money. That had to then be figured out how they were going to break that out.

Our library support services office was probably the busiest when it came to how we, you know, our cataloger was there. We had one cataloger for all thirteen, and that was being done in a centralized fashion. Database negotiations and subscriptions, things that we had acquired. And in that case, maybe that was nice for the receiving four-year partners. They could see at a glance what we offered in sort of the big-ticket items, because we did that all the same. There were no local electronic collections, for example. We did it all in consortium. But it's a little bit hard for me to remember.

I became involved then as a member of the library's functional team. So in the UW restructuring organizational chart for how they kind of addressed, there's a steering committee and then there were restructuring committees at the campus level. And then there were some like functional area. I think marketing probably had one. IT certainly had one. And libraries had a team, a functional team. And I helped with that.

But when it came to decision making, I mean, really decision making on how they were going to be absorbing these libraries, "they" meaning the new four-year receiving library, they were interested in our input, they were interested in how we had done things. But they were ultimately the decision makers when it came to how they were going to merge their staffs, how they were going to oversee the satellite campus. They did it all differently. In one region, in the Milwaukee region, there's a manager, one of the librarians at, one of the former directors at one of the branch campuses became sort of the branch manager for these two two-year campus libraries. As like a go-between between the four-year library staff and the two-year library staffs. Others, you know, the 00:18:00librarian on the campus just reported directly to the library director at the new receiving library.

So again, it's a bit hard for me to kind of parse it all out. And things happened slowly. Oddly, very slowly, for a long time. Lots of indecision. Not enough information to make a decision. It feels to me like that dragged on for an awfully long time. It was hard for the libraries to be nimble and institute change when so many other areas had not been kind of solidified. We were sort of dependent upon seeing how other administrative decisions were made before we could, I think before they could fully solidify things like staff reporting and how that was going to look, collection building and how that was going to look.

But on the flipside, I guess I'd also say at the same time because our UW Libraries as a whole, beyond the UW Colleges, all twenty-six campuses, or what is it, fourteen institutions, we also shared an ILS, right? We also, with search at UW and Alma, we had just, we've always shared resources and worked together. So there were also some things that I think were a bit anticlimactic because libraries again were already there. The marketing departments of every four-year UW and the colleges, maybe they met at a conference, but they didn't do any work together. We have the Council of UW Libraries. I was chair of the Council of UW Libraries at the time of the restructuring. So I guess that's important to note. That was where I was helping to make decisions because I was chairing the very council that brought all the UW library directors together.

So, it maybe felt like there was a lot of lag time. Because I think other departments were taking that time to get to know each other, to learn about how they operated. We already knew all that. Because we had been working in some an integrated fashion already.

LEH: Yeah. Could you expand on why that kind of lag occurred between like the dependency of libraries on other services?

JC: Sure. Well, IT. Or libraries and the technology departments work 00:21:00really closely together. So for example, and it's going to sound nitpicky but it had a lot of bearing on how students were going to be, when and how they were going to be integrated into the student information systems of each of the four-years. So at what moment in time does a UW Waukesha at the time, before it became, well, when it becomes UW Milwaukee at Waukesha, they were operating, I don't even know, honestly, where it looks today. I assume those students are in the SIS of the Milwaukee campus, the Student Information System. But that transition mattered because we pull students into the catalog, into the ILS, based on where they're enrolled, and if they're active or not. And that was a really complex, I mean, the merging of these databases of, when a student is wearing the new UW Milwaukee sweatshirt is different than when a student actually lives inside the UW Milwaukee like family database. So the enrollment pieces were hard. They were also, I think, by the Higher Learning Commission, we were mandated in the college. And I only know a little bit about this. But the UW Colleges had to matriculate, had to fulfill the curriculum. If a student was in the middle of their program, they had to be able to complete their associate's degree under the conditions, kind of, of what, you know the rules of the game that were in existence when they started the program. So they also had to keep those students.

Financial aid was granted to the student at the institution that they had enrolled in, which was the University of Wisconsin Colleges. So they had to play that out, too. They couldn't just yank students out of the colleges and make them Milwaukee students or Madison, not Madison, sorry, I saw your name tag. Milwaukee students or Whitewater or wherever they were now going to be affiliated with. So there had to be time to do that. So those were some of the decisions.

Our online program was a huge, the UW online, I'm sure you've talked, I hope you'll talk to some people at the university of, colleges online, which was our most profitable and our largest campus. I mean profitable in a sense of, you know, growing enrollments. Our area of growth in the two years. That had a whole layer of complexity.

The flexible option program, where you have students that are in courses that run on a different model than a traditional semester program. They were in subscription periods. It's a competency-based, where they could 00:24:00enroll in a course, as many courses as they wanted to over a subscription period. Prove their competency and achieve that credit. And they could come to it in a nontraditional way, with prior learning and things like that. These new programs we were developing.

Again, all those bigger things had to be sort of parsed out before. Then again we would know in the library, well, how are we going to serve those students? Because where they live in the student information system and how they get into our shared catalog also has to do with authenticating into databases and resources. And so they sound like, again, sort of maybe very minute, very detail-oriented questions that don't seem particularly like what does it matter? Just serve those students. But they had to kind of, they had to funnel through the proper channels all these things that happen in the background to get students where they need to go. When you go into a database, it's because all those proper steps.

LEH: Oh, no, it tells me every time, log in on UW

JC: Right, right. And that log in is tied, because our vendors want us to prove that, so, right, all those other things that we had to understand. We had to understand what the curriculum was going to be looking like and changing. We were also in the middle of an associate degree reimagining project. We had just been in the thick of responding to UW System guidance and decisions around modifying the associate's degree. That work had been going on for a couple of years. We were culminating a total redesign of the two-year degree. All of that got halted, obviously. At some point I'll talk about it.

But I was working on a project that was sponsored by President Cross around open education in October. In October we were, I think it was October, we received a large grant to develop a degree pathway around open resources. So students, in a real basic way, using open access materials as curricular materials. Building a pathway so students can get a two-year degree at zero textbook cost. Within weeks of getting that announcement that we had that grant, they announced that the two-year colleges were going to be absorbed into the four-years. And so there was just a lot going on that seemed at odds with each other as well. I'm getting off on a tangent.

Yeah, so that lag time, back to your original question, that lag time was understandable. Because they couldn't just (snaps fingers) make a flip 00:27:00decision. So I'm not saying that people were withholding information. They kind of had to wrap their minds around how they were going to be and when they were going to be transitioning students to the new campuses with these kind of restrictions in the background around financial aid, around just like the work that it takes from taking two different systems and pushing them together. And pulling apart, right? We only had one Student Information System. Students enrolled centrally and then aligned with a campus. So if I was at UW-Marshfield, they enrolled me in UW Colleges and they assigned me to Marshfield. So then how do you take this database and pull out properly just the students that are going to Stevens Point, and just the students who are going to go to Whitewater? So, it's understandable. But all those things, we couldn't make some of our kind of basic decisions until we knew how that was going to play out.

LEH: Yeah. I mean just, I mean like databases, too. Like if you're moving to a two-year affiliated with a four-year, like what resources did they have?

JC: Yes.

LEH: How does like resource sharing end up really changing?

JC: Right. Right. Our faculty were very excited. So you know, what you buy, what we could afford at the two-year campuses, and what we had to support. Our primary mission was supporting the research needs of freshman and sophomore students in introductory level courses. That doesn't align, necessarily, with a faculty member with a PhD and his or her own personal research interests. So even though the UW Libraries, and I use that meaning all the libraries at all the UW campuses, worked together a lot, when it comes to negotiating resources. So Madison would negotiate resources for the entire state. So we did have access to resources that we would have never been able to purchase on our own. Because Madison, the strength and size of this university, maybe, depending on the vendor's pricing model, were already at the top tier. So throwing in all the other campuses in the state into that arrangement amounted to no additional cost. But not always. There were cases where the UW Colleges were penalized for being multi-site. Some vendors charge you based on how many sites you have. So oddly enough, Madison would be one site, right? Even though you have forty libraries. You can negotiate terms for vendors and say it's one university, it's one IP range, one. Serving forty thousand students. They would pay a single member. We would pay a thirteen-site license--

LEH: What?!

JC: I won't name the vendor. But a supposedly very library-friendly vendor charged us exponentially more than Madison. And our population was one-quarter, right? But because we were located at all these different sites, they charged us for multi-site. So, right. Not every four-year had all the resources that we had. And so our librarians all were used to a singular resource like Canopy, which is a streaming video database. Depending on which four-year was picking them up, they may be taking that resource with them, they may not. They might be losing it. And our library staffs are primarily focused around instruction. They do a lot of instruction in the classroom with those early freshmen, sophomore students. They're teaching them those basic skills on how to navigate and use information. When do they know what they're going to have in their new environment so they can rebuild their curriculum and rewrite their lesson plans? Because they may be showing resources in the classroom that aren't going to be at their new home library.

And we had just, also in our restructuring, I should point out I was able to tap three different librarians spread out throughout the state to take on an additional role of a coordinator position. So I decided that we had to move more uniformly in areas around information literacy, really designing a more holistic curriculum. So if we're going to align building our collections at the department level, one history selector or several, we had several history selectors if it was a bigger area, working in lockstep with the history department chair in their curricular decisions. Again, around this new degree being created. And then we're buying databases and collections that support that. Then we should be teaching, our information literacy should be mapped out and we should have a curricular plan that aligns with that, that everyone's doing whether you're at the Marshfield campus or Waukesha campus.

So we hired someone to be the information literacy coordinator, to help make tutorials, live guides and other resources that would be used kind of by everybody in a very consistent way. I hired a collections coordinator to help figure out the workflow that would then happen when you go from local collection building to consolidated collection building. And then an assessment coordinator, so that we were unifying our assessment. If we're teaching the same things, if we're building the same collections, then we should be assessing students' learning in a similar fashion.

So it was very exciting. I was really excited.

LEH: Yeah. (laughs)

JC: It was sort of my mantra during this whole time period was, it was going to be cool. You know, like we were really kind of building towards 00:33:00something exciting. We had been talking with our associate degree reimagining committee and chair. And we had pitched to them building information literacy explicitly into the curriculum, the curricular requirements. And where we were landing, we hadn't finalized anything. But we were working toward a digital badging model, where we were going to be having students assessing, we were going to be assessing students' information literacy skills across courses and showing proficiencies in specific information literacy areas. So let's say it's you know, something as basic as understanding how to read a citation. You might learn that in your English class. You could learn that in psychology. You could learn that in history. You could apply those skills in different ways. And there was going to be sort of a backbone, an online backbone that was going to help students sort of showcase their skills that they started to acquire like through a credentialing, sort of, a badging and credentialing model that they could then take with them into other courses. This is where I'm at. A professor could then see oh, they've had experience understanding a research study and the components, and they have shown proficiency in this area. So they should understand this next step. So that was also going to be really cool.

So we were building the libraries more intentionally into the curriculum, and we were excited about that.

LEH: Yea. (laughter)

JC: It was going to be cool. That's okay.

LEH: All right. (laughs) Well I guess, people could still be doing that.

JC: Of course. Yes. Yes. Yep. Right. We were not, you're exactly right. We were not the originator of that idea. We were learning from other libraries around the country. And who knows where it would have landed? We may have also landed in a different place. So it was a kernel of an idea that we had been sketching out. But clearly, right, that work can be used by others. And there's clearly that type of work happening at all of the UW libraries.

LEH: I think some of that goes a little bit into the question of like the relationship between like the culture of the UW Colleges and of the students that the UW, the former UW Colleges served and libraries.

JC: Right. So, being nonresidential campuses where students don't have, you know, they're not going back to their dorm. There's not, you know, 00:36:00somewhat a Student Union but it doesn't serve the same purpose, right? It's not an afterhours or social area. It's something that's happening between classes. Our campus libraries were often an academic and social hub. So it was, and not unlike a four-year campus, but really needed on a nonresidential campus. So the culture in our libraries was one of these are small campuses, small student populations. A lot of our librarians, whether they were, regardless of their position, and a lot of the library staff knew the students pretty well. So there's a real, there's an opportunity there that isn't necessarily there on a campus the size of Milwaukee or Madison.

So our culture in the colleges was, I think it was unique. We maybe weren't always constrained by a formality that maybe the four-year campuses have to have because of the structures in place when you're talking about something that much bigger. Our library staffs know the faculty well. They're living in small towns. They're socializing, right? It's its own community and environment.

We also see in the college libraries a fair amount of community members. So all of our--and I'm using present tense but clearly I know this is in the past--but the UW college campuses, the buildings, are owned by the municipalities that they sit in. So often it's a county level. So UW Marshfield-Wood County, that facility is co-owned by the city of Marshfield and the County of Wood County. So the notion of that concept of the Wisconsin idea where the university belongs to the citizens, right, and we push the resources of the university out to the borders of the state, you've probably heard about that, the Wisconsin idea, right? The colleges, I think, really felt like they were living that because there was a lot of sense of ownership inside our communities of our spaces. Because they were owned by those local residents. So we see a fair amount of community members coming in and using our computers, using our collections. They can have community cards. We didn't charge for that.

So also this mingling of students and community members. Also a student in the UW Colleges, when you have one-third of your population, I think it was roughly one-third of the population is nontraditional aged. So you have 00:39:00auditors, senior citizens auditing classes sitting alongside a traditional aged, eighteen year-old freshman. So our libraries kind of reflected that diversity in age and in sort of how people were coming to the campuses.

We had a close working relationship, I would say, though, that what helped is we had a culture of working with our four-year partners. UW Madison provides a lot support around the shared ILS. We had just migrated a few years previous to a new shared--well, no, maybe, I can't remember when this was all happening. The first restructuring, we went on Alma in I think 2015, in March of 2015. So we had just, with our four-year partners in libraries, worked together to change automation platforms. That's a big job. It's a shared experience. It's grueling. But that brought everyone together.

So we were known quantities. I think every librarian in the UW Colleges knew at least another librarian at one of the four-years. They served on a committee together. So culturally, there wasn't a fear factor because I think most people had somewhat of an understanding of their colleagues at the four-year, even if they didn't know them specifically. They knew of them. You know, we're going to statewide conferences together through the Wisconsin Association of Academic Libraries. That's through WLA. Librarians are a very collegial, sharing kind of, that's the profession. So culturally within the libraries, I would say, there wasn't a huge shift.

Yet, that being said, we had pretty shallow structure. So a campus, none of our campuses have any more than three librarians. And some library paraprofessionals. They're small, small library staffs. I'm sure there was maybe a bigger cultural shift when you were going into, again, UW Milwaukee being the only research unit involved in this restructuring. All the others were comprehensive universities. So just the sheer size of a staff. I'm sure there were cultural changes in just sort of how decisions are made.

Every librarian in the UW Colleges could call me, could email me. I think I was a pretty approachable person. And there wasn't, you didn't have to schedule an appointment. I didn't have an assistant they would talk to to see if 00:42:00they could come see me. At some of the four-years, it's a larger operation, so they have that. And you're a little bit more removed from that administrative layer. So I'm sure that took some change and time to get used to. Yet that being said, I can't think of a single library director at the UW four-years that is hard to approach.

But you know, when you're in a smaller operation, there's sort of like, I can't think of a better word than this, like a scrappiness quality. You're kind of all in it together. It would not be unheard of for a librarian or someone in the staff to send the chancellor an email. Send the provost an email. Ask a question, make a phone call. So that may have taken some time to get used to.

LEH: Yeah. And I'm kind of curious, you talked a little about like UW online.

JC: Mm hmm.

LEH: How did that work? Yeah. I'm curious.

JC: The program? Or the library?

LEH: Oh, like the library. Yeah.

JC: So, I will just say a little bit about Colleges Online, because it does relate to libraries. So a virtual campus, right, so students from across the world could enroll in UW Colleges online courses. And we would see students worldwide coming into the program. Because it was an entry point, a gateway into the UW System. So once you're a UW student, then you have opportunities for transfer and other ways to acquire a four-year degree.

The faculty for the UW Colleges Online were all sitting faculty at a thirteen-branch campus. So, an English faculty member at UW Baraboo Sauk County, one of her courses could be English 101 online. So she's teaching physical courses, and one of her course loads could be an online course.

Even though all the course delivery was in an online course delivery mechanism, D2L, which our campus students were using also, as well, a course management system. But all the course delivery would be offered in that course management system, whether it be video lectures, readings, discussion boards. You've taken online courses, I would imagine, perhaps? Maybe?

LEH: Yeah.

JC: I mean, I know it's now a little bit more of a hybrid even among a traditional student's experience. But those students would still need 00:45:00an English 101 course. They'd still need to receive assistance in how to construct their research paper, how to go about the research process. They need to learn those information literacy skills.

And so we had a librarian working for us half time as the college's online librarian. So she would partner with and work directly with any faculty member throughout the UW Colleges who taught online courses. She would offer live instruction sessions. She would videotape or do tutorials like a Captivate or something where she would take students through the process of using a database. Searching in the catalog, what subject terms mean, how do you construct a search, how do you go from the idea and follow the research process and probably end up with a different idea for your research paper if you do the process right, right? (LEH laughs) You're learning all this. So that type of instruction had to be delivered. And so she would make herself available to construct whatever the faculty member needed. Sometimes she would embed herself in the course and would be like a stalker on the discussion board as they were discussing maybe topics around the research process. And she would be there as someone to answer questions. Just like when you would go to the library for an instruction session and you were working on something and librarians would be circulating the room and answering your questions, she had to kind of figure out how to do that virtually. She also then would build collections, buying e-books and other electronic collections that supported the curriculum for those particular courses.

The fact that the Colleges online, and I have not kept up to date, I don't know where it stands, but as I understand it, it got absorbed with the UW Extension in something called the UW Extended Campus. So it has morphed into that. So that, I think they've taken some of what the UW Colleges built, but I think it's also been modified. They had experience prior with the UW flexible option was administered and overseen by the UW Extension staff. But we were concerned how those students would or would not receive that specialized attention from someone dedicated to being their librarian when you parse it out. So as they, how do I say this succinctly? As they've changed the model and the extended campus now doesn't confer the degree. So the colleges confer the degree. The online program was our curriculum put into an online mode. But at the 00:48:00end of the day, they enrolled in the UW Colleges as an institution. They got their financial aid from the UW Colleges. They would come out with a UW Colleges associate degree online. And all of our collections supported that.

Now they're affiliated with, they can affiliate with all different institutions. And I don't know how that curriculum, when you have a centralized curriculum here, but it could be, but you have to get the input of all these different four-years and all their different, you know, they have the autonomy to design curriculum the way they want to design curriculum. There aren't shared curricular standards across the four-year campuses. And even if they have a library, and they do, and they have a librarian who maybe understand online course delivery, there's a complexity there in how they enroll at a variety of institutions and who they know to go to.

So in the libraries we were concerned about loss of connection. And we felt like that was really, really important in an environment where these students are out there on their own, right? They feel potentially disconnected because they're not sitting in a classroom. So it was really wonderful that inside their D2L courses, they knew Rachel. They knew her by face, by name, by voice, by video. And she was there to help them navigate.

You know, a lot of these students are nontraditional aged who maybe didn't do research in this fashion. They did research using Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and microfiche.

LEH: Indexes. (laughs)

JC: Indexes. Right, right. So there was a real need there. I don't know if there's anything more you want me to say.

LEH: No, that was fantastic. Yeah. It's a really interesting kind of need that needs to be filled. Doing all that stuff online.

JC: Well, and in your program, I'm sure there is sort of a track, or there are at least some courses that pay attention to distance education and serving distance ed students with library services. It is a niche. It is a need. And it requires a certain amount of understanding. We see it, because the UW, even just taking a little bit of online, an online degree out of the picture, obviously there's been a growth in the ability to take a course online. So students now can enroll in a university. And just like they could take a summer's class at another university, right, you would go home for the summer and 00:51:00you'd take organic chemistry at your local whatever because it's offered and it's cheaper, or you do it over the summer because you can just focus on that one course and you would transfer those credits in. Students are using online courses offered by other universities to fill that need. So, I couldn't figure out how to get micro economics into my course load. I need to take it before I can take this other course. So you enroll from another university in the UW and you can take that course.

What's tricky, though is, again, where are you enrolled? And how you get into authenticating into resources. So then you have to learn like oh, now I also have credentials at UW Whitewater. And so if I want to get into this special business database they have, I have to get there using my Whitewater credentials, not my Milwaukee credentials. And students would never even say that, because they don't understand when I say credentials or what that means. So an online librarian with a special eye to understanding those things can help explain that.

Faculty also don't understand that their classroom is comprised of students from other universities. And what they can have access to. So they could show a video. And they could assign the video in class. Watch this video before tomorrow's class. And a student goes and tries. Because also our systems are smart and they try to anticipate. They know you're a Madison student, so they log you in. But oh, you don't have access to this because you're--so there's been like, there's kind of like crossing of purposes.

And we see that with University of Wisconsin Superior had a flood maybe ten years ago and lost much of their collection. And they replaced it almost exclusively with e-books. Those e-books are in search at UW. You can see them. If you ever try to read one, you will not be able to. Because they share our catalog, so their resources are there for their students. But when it comes to e-books, you buy an e-book based on the service population you're serving. So you have to have a Superior barcode. You have to be a UW Superior student. Faculty get frustrated with that. No one understands why. "I see the book. Why can't I?" And interlibrary loan isn't an option when it's an e-book. So there's just little, sometimes there are, they're not terribly, they're not insurmountable problems. But our Colleges librarian online understood all that and was comfortable with that and could really kind of navigate when she would have a student. The Colleges Online student would have a shared experience that she understood and could--oh, this is why this is a problem, and here's what I can do to help you.

LEH: Yeah. This is like vaguely related. But for another class, I saw, she showed us the pictures of the flooding at UW Superior.

JC: Yeah.

LEH: And just like an entire basement that was like, completely like you couldn't see the bottom of the steps because all of the books were just like completely gone.

JC: I know.

LEH: And I think like the archives materials was not, like the materials that they had were not damaged, but just like all the books. I was like, oh! We were all like, no!

JC: Yeah, it's a nightmare.

LEH: Yeah. Definitely. So you talked a little bit about the like online, I mean the open education initiative that you were involved in.

JC: Mm hmm. Right.

LEH: Could you talk more about that?

JC: Sure. Also it was in its infancy and not fully formed. But our chancellor made a pitch to, so open education, let me back up. Open education is a growing worldwide educational trend. It's happening in the K-12 world, it's happening at the university level, and it has two main objectives. It is one way to counter exponentially rising textbook costs that are not in the control of the academic community, right? So publishers are taking, are taking intellectual property that actually emanates from universities, right? The authors of these resources are faculty. They sell that content to the publishers who then sell it to students. But it's a broken model. Very much similar to the pharmaceutical market. Where you have consumers--students--or consumers--sick people--and then you have experts--doctors--experts--faculty--but there's this middleman. I mean, publishers serve a purpose, clearly. Pharmaceutical companies serve a purpose, clearly. But when you have such a, when you have a broken market--and I'm not an economist--but when you have a broken market like this and you have a dependent population--students who need it, they're told by their faculty they have to have these resources and they have no control over the price setting. So it becomes, that's why textbook costs have risen 800 percent over the last decade. So, again, a lot. The pharmaceutical market is a real good analogy.

But so open educational resources are targeting cost. But secondarily, they're trying to make a better educational experience for students. So a textbook goes into production. And all the work that it takes to write it, edit it, produce it and market it, by the time that content gets to a student, it could be one, two, three years old. Because it's a process. It takes time.

If you have an open resource that is live an online, changes can be made, edits can be made anytime. In real time. Right? So you can also make things more flexible. You could have an economics textbook where the examples in them are regional. So instead of having a student in the Deep South reading about something happening in New York City that they feel like, I've never even been on a subway, so don't use a subway example, I don't understand what that means, right? Or racial diversity, you could make more diverse examples that might appeal to and make something more inclusive and relevant to somebody of an identity that's other than the predominant identity that's being presented in one singular, printed book. So there's lots of cool educational benefits.

It's also a tremendous amount of work. It also makes faculty nervous, because publishing has a stamp of approval. It goes through a process. Online resources can still go through that process. But it's new territory.

So our chancellor made a pitch to the state legislature. Every budget process there's opportunities for institutions to try to get a legislator to adopt or what's the word? Offer up a piece of legislation around a particular project. It didn't make it to the floor. There wasn't a legislator who was willing to pitch the idea of supporting open education kind of for all the UWs or for the UW Colleges in particular. But the UW System president, Ray Cross, who was the former chancellor of the UW Colleges, was interested in what Cathy, Chancellor Sandeen proposed. Which was that the Colleges, being, you know, we're a two-year institution, every institution in the UW has freshman and sophomore gen ed courses. But we were kind of a smaller operation that could try things out. We were a little more nimble, a little more flexible. What would it look like if we created an OER pathway? So a degree, from soup to nuts, from start to finish, that would be, you'd build these courses. We would tag courses as being open education resource, OER courses, meaning zero textbook cost. Students could build a degree, if they wanted to do that. And it was a means of helping support our mission, which is access-driven, right? The two-year universities were all about bringing resources to small communities spread throughout the state, an affordable price point, significantly less than the four-years. 01:00:00Because we have different infrastructure. And access meaning we were taking in students that a four-year university may turn away.

So, access is also about affordability. And textbooks were a huge factor in that. You know, sometimes students aren't really fully aware. They know I have to budget for tuition and room and board, or not, if you're in a two-year. But all these costs. But textbooks, you can get an estimate. But if you're a biology student, a major, biology major, your textbook cost is going to be way different than an English lit. And so students were facing, sometimes their tuition bill in the Colleges could be cheaper in a semester than their book bill, their textbook costs.

So we received a grant--now I'm embarrassed to say, I think it was four hundred thousand dollars but I guess don't quote me on that, roughly in that amount--from President Cross to the UW Colleges to develop this program. Within months, weeks to months, the announcement came that the UW Colleges were, in essence, going to be closing. I mean really when that restructuring, even though I understand that the campuses haven't closed, the structure we had in place had to fold. So it seems odd to me. It was very strange that it seemed as though why would you make an investment in a, a large-scale investment--maybe in the grand scheme of the UW budget $400,000 is not a lot, but it seems like a lot--but why would you invest that amount of money and people's time into developing a pathway that was going to align with a singular curriculum. And then, if you already knew you were going to be dissolving that institution and therefore that curriculum, sort of. So that was a bit strange.

I did end up talking with and there were, there was some interest in how we could sort of spin that project into something more of a UW system-wide open education project for lots of factors that did not, or at least I did not continue to become involved in that. And I'm not certain where that ever landed. I think that there's still interest and there's still people exploring how that might work or look. But, yeah.

And the libraries were going to play a big role in that. And we were, again, that was where we were really excited. That's where having an executive director of libraries and a new way of kind of communicating from the upper administration, from the provost's office, who ultimately is responsible for the curriculum, right? And then being able to work with the libraries 01:03:00with one singular person and getting us to work together. Because what we were going to do is we have experts in finding content, hosting content, putting it together. Our online program and our online librarian was going to be a big part of that. She was going to help be that expert in how you can pull these resources together and put them in a common platform so that students have them where they need them to be, embedding them in the courses. So yeah, it's a shame that that project derailed. But, again, I don't know. I was able to pass on our findings and the work we had done. So hopefully that will help someone else down the road.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. That's, yeah, textbooks are really a big cost for students. I think it's interesting that the Colleges, because it's like cost is such a huge factor for the student body that like it kind of makes sense that that's something that people at the Colleges would think about. Just because like here, people are willing to pay more and it's just a different thing. So was that also--

JC: I will say, I have to on the record I have to say that one of the leaders in open educational resources in the state is coming out of Madison.

LEH: Yeah.

JC: So there's a lot of work happening in thinking about it here. So I think that textbook affordability, regardless of what a campus' tuition is, is really on top of mind for a lot of people. So I don't want it all implied that the Colleges were sort of the only ones thinking about it. It's just that we were maybe in a better position to just like try it.

LEH: Yeah. (laughs)

JC: Right? Like we again, because of the lack of, maybe not as many people in the pipeline of decision making and a little bit more approachability and more--I don't know, we just, the Colleges were a neat institution because we could, we could test things out. We could try things. For some reason, I feel like we could move quicker than our four-year partners. So, yeah. Okay. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

LEH: Oh, no. I wasn't going to say anything. Okay. We talked a little bit about working groups and that. I guess go with number five, I guess? So 01:06:00when did you become aware of plans to restructure? How was this information presented to you?

JC: That's an interesting question. And I would love to, when all these transcriptions are available, I'd love to see how everyone answers that question. It's sort of like the where were you when JFK--(laughs) Like I think everyone will have a variation of the same answer, I think. Which is that we learned about it from our chancellor the night before a story leaked in, I think it was the State Journal. And she learned, our chancellor learned about the plans to restructure from a meeting that day that was telling them tomorrow there will be a story announcing plans to restructure the UW. So it was very strangely announced. I don't know if they ever, I don't even know if they ever tried to figure out how it was leaked. But it was not a decision made with the input, presumably, of our chancellor. And she apologetically let us know that she didn't really have any more details. But that this has been decided. So that's how I remember. I remember it being late in the day, five, six o'clock or something like that, that we had received an email that this was going to be announced.

LEH: How did you feel about that?

JC: I was blindsided. Yet probably not devastated. Only because we had kind of just been dealing with all this change. So sometimes when a lot of different things are being thrown at you, it's just sort of like one more thing. I was surprised and I will say my surprise grew as I learned more. Because I think I thought, I thought the announcement meant something different than it ended up becoming. I thought there was a grander vision. Or I thought there was, even though they said this was going to happen, I guess I kind of assumed then that there was sort of more of a plan that was going to be revealed that never came to fruition. So it seemed as though what the decision really was a launching point, and not the revealing of years of study and here's kind of what's going to happen. It was we will be doing this restructuring. It will be along these lines regionally. Here are the partners that we will be developing, the partnerships. But beyond that, we'll figure it out, right? No suggestions for how that would look. And so kind of also hand in hand, it felt like 01:09:00no data to know if it would work.

It seemed a bit punitive and a little bit disheartening. Again, if this was something that had been a long time in the coming, something that someone was ruminating on, or if studies were being done to see if this was the right approach, why have the colleges go through this monumental restructuring, rebranding, all the money and time that was spent to redesign how we were running an institution to eighteen months later say we're going to go a different direction. It felt like we weren't given enough time to fully realize what presumably was done with sort of the blessing of the system administration. Although I don't know what that process looked like. So either it seemed like, to me it felt like it had to have been a spur of the moment decision. Or maybe, I don't know, or a trying to get ahead of something else decision. What was, and I presume legislatively, what was maybe on the horizon as a looming threat or change that this was responding to or trying to get ahead of? Because again, you would think that you wouldn't at sort of a, you wouldn't impulsively decide to totally change, undo the last fifty years of how the Colleges operated. You wouldn't do that sort of impulsively or spur of the moment. But if eighteen months previous there was just all this restructuring going on, why have people go through all that work and time and effort and cost if you knew you were going to be making this decision? So it feels like the decision kind of came up suddenly. And you know, I was curious at the time, and still am curious, why.

So I understand. I also, what was tricky is that the way it was announced and continued to be sort of promoted was that it was a response to declining enrollment. It was a response to the demographics of the state, which are saying over the next decade or so there's going to continue to be a decline in the population, the traditional student-age population. We don't have as many people going to school in our state that we used to. I didn't understand how taking, just changing kind of the letterhead, which I know is flip, changing the name of the school was going to have that big of an impact on enrollments. 01:12:00And in the near terms, since that decision was made, it hasn't. Now I don't know how long it takes the pendulum to swing. So it's possible that there is sort of a vision and it will have an impact.

But it seems to me is the problem really that we have too much infrastructure in the state? Is it that we have too many? We no longer need that many university campuses. Is it no longer serving the purpose it really was designed to do? You know, this is also an environment where we don't have the state taxpayer support that we used to. So part of it is that there's just not enough resources anymore. We don't have actually that many less students. In fact, I don't even know, I don't know these numbers off the top of my head. But I don't think there is a great disparity between 1970s, '60s and '70s is when the Colleges comes into being. The student population of the '60s and '70s is roughly the same as it is now. So you had the ability to make all those campuses and serve. But I suppose that was the thought, that there would be much more growth than there has been.

We're not the only state that's dealt with this. A lot of eastern states, northeastern states, are struggling with the same thing. The population growth in our country is not in the north, northeast. So you have fewer families, fewer young people.

The difference, though, is that the Colleges attracts more than young people. I mentioned earlier a third of our student population was nontraditional age. We also have a goal in the state of having, we don't even have 25 percent of the adult population with a four-year degree. Or maybe even, I'm not sure if that includes associate or just bachelor's. So I'd have to look at that. But there's a need. There's a growth area there of attracting people looking to retool and grow in a career. And that's what the UW Colleges would appeal to that population. Does appeal to that population, right? A population of students who maybe will take a course at a time, who aren't going to be coming to UW Madison and joining a fraternity and whatever, right? (laughs) They're not in college life mode. They're in life life mode, and I want to build toward a degree, one course at a time, while I juggle kids, a family and a job. So the Colleges were a lower price point presumably near to them, right, because if you have thirteen locations spread throughout the state, you've got some regional touch. Not everyone can pick up and move to Madison.

So, you know, how we found out about it was strange. How the motivation behind the decision, how the decision was made, how it was communicated, and 01:15:00ultimately how it solved the problem is still unclear. To me. I've lost touch a bit. But I'm not certain, the grand plan hasn't felt revealed.

LEH: And what were your colleagues thinking during this process?

JC: Oh, all sorts of things. I mean, depending on the personality. Some people were, felt really betrayed. The point cannot be lost that the UW System president was our former chancellor. So I think there was sort of a feeling of betrayal. Because unlike any of his predecessors, he should have really understood the mission of the UW Colleges. And I suppose when someone comes out of your own institution, you kind of feel like that person has your back. I don't think that Chancellor, or, sorry, yes, Chancellor Cross. Right? What is he called? The superintendent or what is he called of the UW System? President. President Cross. Sorry. That doesn't sound right. President Cross, I don't think, had a vendetta against the UW Colleges. I don't think this was anything personal. Yet of course everyone's different feelings take it to a personal level. This is about what they see as potential diminished service to the students that they've grown to love and support. Anyone who works in the UW, worked in the UW Colleges, from our support staff to our faculty, predominantly our faculty, are on the lowest pay scale of any UW institution. These are people who are doing this job because they care about it. They have a passion. They have a, sort of like working for a, the difference between a public schoolteacher and a private schoolteacher, right? It's sort of mission-driven. It's a calling. And so because of that, you get a lot of great ownership and people's passions and sort of, you know, they pour everything into the job. But then they're really quick to feel penalized, or picked on.

So there was a lot of emotions ranging from being upset, shocked. Also exhausted. A lot of fatigue from change. So we had just gone through all this. I mean, all this change kind of all of a sudden felt like it was for nothing. So then it really, I think, made people feel jaded. And dispirited because you felt like, what's the point? Why did we just go through all of that messiness only to now be told, we're going to pull the plug on that. So it felt futile. 01:18:00It felt pointless.

That aside, I think it grew into more feelings of opportunity. I will say. I mean, there are benefits for a two-year campus being aligned with a four-year. The four-years can inject maybe a few more resources into that campus. They can bring more four-year programs to those campuses. I say that, though, and also at the same time realize that there were always those opportunities. So the two-year campuses were always reaching out to their four-year neighbors to work on collaborative programs. So some campuses would offer like a collaborative nursing program. UW Milwaukee confers the nursing degree. You take the first two years at UW Washington County. You do your clinicals in Washington County. You don't have to go to Milwaukee for that. You take some research courses that are offered point to point. You sit in a Washington County campus and you are being taught by nursing faculty at Milwaukee. You do have to go to some of the courses in Milwaukee, maybe labs or things that aren't easy to move. But at the end of it, three-quarters of your experience, you're able to stay in your home county. You're able to still work. It was designed for people often who maybe were already in the medical field but weren't an RN. And those opportunities were always there.

So to force these campuses to join felt a little bit like a parent basically saying, "You will share a room with your sibling and you will get along." As opposed to finding other creative ways to encourage that getting along. I mean, the one thing about the UW System, and this is maybe not unique to UW, it could be other states as well, is that we're competitors, right? So we're supposed to work together but we're competing for the same students. And that competition's only going to get fiercer as that student population decreases.

So I'm sure some of this forced kind of collaboration. And I say forced. I never saw anyone verbally or outwardly saying, "We don't want to do this." People put on a brave face and wanted to work together. But it was a decree. It was you will do this. It was not, will this work? Let's test this, let's explore this. It's this is the decision and now let's figure out how to make it work.

But some of those things that maybe will result in benefits could have been done without fully getting married, without fully joining. You could have found ways to bring more four-year programs to the two-years to maybe re--or 01:21:00bolster those communities, breathe some life into those campuses with some fresh resources. The system could have funded the colleges differently. The money we got was decided and determined by an allocation model that the system created. The state funds the system. The system allocates the dollars. So the colleges were also a little bit hamstrung. We absorbed a 20 percent cut. We adjusted our staffing to be sustainable with the resources we had. And then eighteen months later we were told it wasn't good enough. Which isn't a whole lot of time. Yeah, so it was, the series of events was strange.

LEH: All right. (laughs) Well I see you have some notes. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

JC: I guess what I would say to paint a bit of a better light on it is I'm not certain what a picture-perfect restructuring on this scale would look like. I don't know how you make a decision. I don't know what comes first, the chicken or the egg. Maybe there is--because you can never take two paths at the same time. Maybe there is some wisdom with having it be sort of ripping off of the Band-Aid. This is what we will do. You'll figure it out and we'll figure out the nuances of the plan as we move along. Maybe that was a better, more proactive or a more efficient, for lack of a better word, way to do it. Because I think there is, it's hard when you have a lot of input and a lot of communities and stakeholders and voices. How do you get everyone to arrive at the same spot? So, you know, there may have been no other way to make that happen.

I will just say, though, I think the uncertainty and the chaos it created was challenging yet maybe unavoidable. It's sort of the same, and I hate to use a morbid example. But do you know you have six months to live, or do you die in a car crash? What's better, right? Like can you plan? Or do you not have to live with this feeling every day of finality? So, you know, this approach was the car crash, right? This approach was the it's going to happen, let's work toward this. And it gave something for everyone. It gave a focal point. It gave everyone something to rally around and work toward. Which would probably have taken years to ever come to that conclusion. Which maybe would have been more stressful on people. Because change can be invigorating and can be hopeful. But like I said, these are institutions, the colleges are where people have poured in their hearts and souls. So there maybe wasn't a way to do it that was going to, and maybe this way actually kind of lessened the time of sort of that churning and turmoil. So, just wanted to I suppose put that out there. But no, thanks for the opportunity.