Interview with Robert Cramer

LEH: All right. So can you state your name, and then spell out your last name for the record?

RC: Yeah. Robert Cramer, spelled C-r-a-m-e-r.

LEH: All right. I think we're good with the sound. So why don't we start like super basic. So what brought you to the UW system?

RC: So I've been in the UW system since 2007. From 2007 to January of 2017, I worked at University of Wisconsin, Platteville as their vice chancellor for administration. I came to the UW system administration in January of 2017 as the vice president for administration. What brought me here was my interest in working on higher ed across the state of Wisconsin and the system. Having been at the campus was very interesting. Going to the system looked like a fun challenge.

LEH: Why did it seem like a challenge?

RC: Because I think higher ed is so important in Wisconsin. And the mission of the UW system really speaks to me. And all the way it manifests from Madison with very much a research mission, to Milwaukee, which is kind of access and research, and then to the four-year institutions around the state and at that time, the two-years, also, with really providing opportunities for people to get education.

LEH: Yeah. It's important. So when did you become aware of plans to restructure the UW Colleges?

RC: So we started talking in earnest sometime in the fall of '17 about restructuring. And more proposal, I would say, because after the board approved the proposal, we had the authority to plan and implement. So it was interesting moving from that proposal discussion to really putting together a plan that we could then work with the different campuses, work with the faculty, students, the communities on, to implement. Yeah.

LEH: What was the proposal like?

RC: It was very high-level. Essentially proposing to go for UW Colleges, from the one institution with thirteen branch campuses to aligning each of those branch campuses with one of the existing four-year schools that we 00:03:00started referring to as receiving institutions. Based in large part on geography. So for example, UW White Water, the proposal was to have UW Rock County align with them. Green Bay, the proposal was to have the three campuses up there align with them. And then the other half of it was for UW Extension to have a large portion of that move to UW Madison and then other parts of that move to the system.

LEH: So what were sort of like the first things to consider after that proposal went through?

RC: Yes. So the board of regents approved it. The very next day, we had the first meeting of the steering committee. So we said in anticipation if the board approves this, we need to have the steering committee come together to really start working out what does the plan look like? What are the things we need to make sure happen? At that meeting we I think talked about communications a lot. How do we communicate with the different stakeholders on this as we move forward? What do we have to do with respect to the accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission? Because we're moving out from one accredited institution, UW Colleges, with its thirteen branch campuses, to the receiving institutions, which is already accredited. So we had to think about how do we do that. Financial aid was identified early on as an issue, to make sure we kept our eyes on for the students. There were no problems created. And then what does the move of the major chunk of Extension to Madison look like? And I think coming out of that meeting, the sense was there's a lot to do here. This is kind of complicated.

LEH: Yeah. (laughs)

RC: Which we knew already. But that really reinforced it. And a big chunk of it was, that first meeting, how do we make sure we're engaging with the governance groups? Because they had expressed concern beforehand about not being involved in the proposal development? So we spoke at length about how do we make sure the faculty, the academic staff, the university staff and students, have a voice through this process?

LEH: Could you expand on that a little?

RC: I certainly can. Yeah. So when it was announced that we were looking at the restructuring proposal, those groups I think fairly kind of said you know, what is this and why haven't we been involved in the development of the proposal. At the board meeting, I think the president made a pretty strong commitment to engaging them and involving them in the planning and 00:06:00implementation. And that really got started then at the steering committee, getting representatives from the different groups to help guide and inform. Initially the sense was they were not going to be members of the steering committee, but they would be there and could provide input. Pretty quickly we concluded that they should be on the steering committee, because having that more formal seat at the table was an important thing to insuring that we listened to and heard their concerns and got their advice and feedback and that they had an opportunity really to be involved in the process throughout.

LEH: What were some of the concerns of the different groups of people?

RC: So I think some similar concerns, some various concerns. So obviously for the employees of Colleges and Extension, it's what's going to happen to me as an employee. I was very impressed with the focus all of them showed with respect to the mission of Colleges in terms of providing access for Wisconsin residents to higher education, to the two-year associate's degree, to preparing students to be successful, whether they went for the associate's degree and then transferred to another institution, or if they went into the workforce and did something else. A lot of questions about just the facilities and what's going to happen to the campus. A lot of passion and commitment around those two-year campuses. I think for the students it was that and also the practical realities of where will I be a student, where will I get my degree? How do I continue to make progress that I want to with respect to kind of my life plans and getting an education is part of that. So we spent a lot of time early on listening, and really trying to make sure we were hearing the concerns that were being raised.

LEH: So from your end, from an administrative standpoint, what were your biggest concerns?

RC: So my concerns evolved as we learned more about what actually had to get done. Early on, we had identified that putting in a submission to the HLC was critical. So the board approved the restructuring proposal in November of 2017. The submission to the HLC was in January of 2018. And I think there's about a thousand-page plus document--

LEH: Oh my God! (laughs)

RC: --outlining the change in structure.

LEH: Is this like single-spaced? Is it double-spaced?

RC: It was not nearly enough white space.

LEH: Oh, no!

RC: It was pretty thick. So it laid out for the system as a whole the case for the restructuring. This, and I think the language for the HLC is the change in structure. And talked about the overall approach we wanted to take. And put forward that we anticipated roughly six months of preparation. And then a phase one and a phase two. Phase one being from July first of '18 to June thirtieth of '19. Phase two being July first of 2019 to June thirtieth of 2020. So early on, there was a lot of just how do we get this put together for HLC? Those first roughly twoish months. But in parallel then, thinking about how do we start building out a method to communicate, a way to capture decisions, putting some web content together, identifying the pieces of work, starting to think about a project plan to guide the work at the UW System level. But then also helping each of the receiving institutions and UW Madison for the Extension put together project plans that were consistent but were not, I'll say, I guess, in lockstep. So we all knew we had to cross the finish line together, but there were different ways to get there, different timelines to get there. And trying to start to strike the balance of what had to be directed more from the system level, and what activities really the receiving institutions, UW Colleges, UW Extension had to drive. And making sure that we stayed in touch and on top of those, that they were getting done but on the right schedule. And then identifying for the different employee groups again, what's the path and where we're at to that post-restructuring situation.

As we went through it, I think we learned elements that we'd anticipated would be challenging were like financial aid. Just because working with the Department of Education's complicated. And making sure that students don't have any interruptions. We spent time looking at the student information systems, because we were obviously moving from the one student information system at UW Colleges to needing to get the student data into each of the receiving institution's student information system. UW Madison with Extension obviously needed to start strengthening its relationships around the state with every county 00:12:00where there were Extension activities and engaging with those communities and talking about the change that was coming so that they were informed. But then also just the mechanics of like local offices. What's in the local Extension office, and what happens to it on July first?

LEH: Yeah. That's truly a lot of stuff to think about. (laughs)

RC: Yeah. It became fairly complicated. Yeah.

LEH: Yeah. So I guess what were some of the things that were decided, like this is a System thing versus these can be kind of different, like depending on like the institution? Like how did you guys decide things like that?

RC: So one of the early decisions was for 2018-'19, all of the two-year campuses would move to the receiving institutions as branch campuses. And that was done, I think, based on one feedback from the faculty in particular at UW Colleges. Because in the structure of the accrediting body, "branch campus" has a different definition than "additional location." And so early on, we said let's do branch campuses, because that's what we're hearing matters for the employees. And candidly, there's some simplicity if we do it all the same in the first year.

But we recognized that later on the receiving institutions, once accreditation had transferred, that was something they would then be responsible for going forward was the structure across their different locations.

The transfer of the different governance activities really was something we said to I think all the receiving institutions and Madison, you need to work with the governance groups locally and decide for your institution how do you want to do this transfer? That's not something that we should from the system level have one answer for all the campus. Because of the governance culture in each campus, it varies. And it's part of the, I think, the richness of the UW system.

The financial aid, we said now we need to have a very structured program there because of the federal requirements around financial aid and getting everything appropriately moved from the one entity, UW Colleges, to each of the receiving institutions.

Student Information System. Same thing, we said there we need to have enough structure so that everyone stays on top of the milestones. Because there were something like sixty-five critical milestones that had to happen to move the student information system from the one so that students could 00:15:00register for classes at the right time at the receiving institutions. That their grades, their progress would follow. One of the early decisions that we said we just have to do as a group is for the '18-'19 academic year. The students would still be at UW Colleges just because of things like course planning and all those issues. And not being certain if the HLC would approve the change in accreditation. We had to maintain that accredited body for the extra year. So it was challenging, yeah.

LEH: That was part of the plan was maintaining that accreditation?

RC: That was part of the planning process was how do we have an orderly change in the accreditation, so that ultimately the accreditation would be moved from UW Colleges, or effectively removed from UW Colleges. And each of the receiving institutions, their accreditation would be updated to reflect they now had branch locations, branch campuses.

LEH: So could you expand on some of the like IT either challenges or like positive, yeah.

RC: Yeah. So IT, something we learned a lot about through this in terms of UW Colleges and Extension several years earlier had done some reorganizing, moving a lot of operational activities from the actual branch campus level to either regional groups or a lot of it was moved centrally. So a lot of the IT systems had been designed and put in place based on the central architecture. And that worked efficiently if you were running it as one institution. It presented challenges thinking about how do we unwind this so in the future a UW Green Bay, for example, their IT department can support their three branch campuses or a UW Oshkosh can support their two. That was a piece of the work that lagged a lot of the other work, just because of the complexity of reconfiguring that. Then also with the student information system and just who was delivering the courses. So there were actually some dates that were fairly late in phase one where UW Colleges was still responsible for the IT services through the end of that summer course delivery. And then like there was a two-week window to 00:18:00flip everything over into the receiving institutions who became responsible for course delivery at the start of the new academic year.

Dealing with email, obviously, email is a lot more than just email anymore because people have the Office 365. So you have your email, you've got your calendar, you've got a whole bunch of documents, like OneDrive or whatever it's called. How do we take those records and move them for faculty and others without it being too laborious? So we ended up finding some automated tools to help migrate accounts.

Access to information systems was a challenge. Because again, people who have stayed employees of UW Colleges and Extension through a period of time where they also were starting to need to access information like from UW Madison or from the receiving institution. So we had to deal with ensuring people could access what they needed currently. But then also for the institution they were going to be moving to. So that was challenging. Yeah.

LEH: Yeah. I mean there were, doesn't exist anymore, there were thousands of students over in Colleges. I can only imagine trying to make sure that things like weren't lost, that things go where they're supposed to go that take a lot of effort. So you talked a little bit about financial aid. Could you talk more about that, the process of dealing with that? Were there any like college, former UW College-specific challenges with financial aid? Or like with the system as it had existed?

RC: There were, it was fairly complicated. And early on we established kind of a project team that was focused on financial aid. And the financial aid director from UW Milwaukee Tamalka North agreed to leave that team with a number of other financial aid directors, some people from the system. And that was kind of structurally used throughout, was creating teams within the project for particular areas. We called them functional teams. They did, I think, a remarkable job of charting out all the different things that we had to think about as we went through this transition. And when things had to happen. Because within financial aid, it's a fairly regulated, particularly with respect to the federal monies they receive. And there's like a set schedule of 00:21:00activities during the course of each year that have to happen, ending ultimately with the submission of a FISAP, which is kind of a final report to the Department of Education.

So the functional team spent a fair amount of time planning all the different steps that had to take place when the receiving institutions had to submit certain paperwork to the Department of Education. If that was approved, when then did UW Colleges have to submit paperwork to the Department of Education? When were we authorized to distribute financial aid to students? Because you can't do that until the Department of Education has kind of given you the approval. And so we ended up with essentially a thread of planning for each of the receiving institutions. They were all very similar, but varied slightly depending on what the Department of Education did. Because they reviewed each institution's submittal as an independent activity. In their minds, these were all independent things. But they were all the same for us.

And that went pretty well. There were periodic times where I had to call the Department of Education for clarity, or to encourage them to continue working. Overall I would say the department was remarkably helpful and did a really nice job with something that they probably had never seen before, in terms of this kind of change from one to many. There was two hiccups, I would say, one, we found that for one of the receiving institutions that had some financial aid issues they were still working through with the department, and so we actually had to prepare to do some like distribution of university funds in case Department of Education did not approve their financial aid distribution on time, because we did not want the students at that branch campus to not receive their financial aid. And then the piece we're actually still working through is the calculation of default rates for financial aid. Federal regulations describe how the department has to calculate default rates, and is not really flexible around one institution and the students going to a bunch of other ones. So a piece we're still working through as of January 14, 2020 to resolve. Yeah.

LEH: Why is that something that still needs to be worked through?

RC: Because the way they calculate it, they're treating all of the former UW Colleges students as if they were at each of the receiving institutions. Whereas in reality, there's a group of former Colleges students at, 00:24:00let's say UW White Water Rock County now, a different group at UW Platteville Baraboo. The department's calculating the default rate for UW White Water or UW Platteville as if every UW Colleges former student was at both.

LEH: So is that, that's a negative impact on people in certain places or others?

RC: It's more of a reporting impact, because they report the default rate, it shows a default rate that we're arguing is not accurate.

LEH: Huh. Interesting. That's something I hadn't thought about.

RC: But it hasn't actually impacted the students.

LEH: Yeah.

RC: Yeah.

LEH: Yeah. Well, that's not really--is that something, that's not something that they would even see, right?

RC: I don't know, except that they're aware of it. But the institution's aware of its default calculation. We want to get these right. So.

LEH: I guess sort of a tangent off of that is how much did like some of the demographic factors of the former colleges come to play in like any of the decisions you were thinking about? Or like the background of where those colleges were, things like that?

RC: Yeah, I think the where they were at helped them form the proposal of which of the two-year branches went to which of the campuses. You know, I think the demographics are a really interesting question. And that was kind of, I think, a source of learning for a lot of people. As I said earlier, the faculty at UW Colleges were really passionate about their access mission and providing really strong support for the students. I think there was learning by both the UW Colleges former employees and the receiving institutions about where their student demographics overlapped and where it didn't, and where they had developed different kinds of programs to support students.

I recall at one point the chancellor from Eau Claire, Chancellor Schmidt?, made a comment about the really interesting and exciting things they were learning as they talked to UW Barron County at the time about student success, and how they supported students at UW Barron. And he indicated that there were a lot of things that UW Eau Claire could learn from that as they were trying to help students to be successful.

I think in some other areas, there was a recognition that UW Colleges and some of the receiving institutions were serving a very similar student who had just made a different choice about where to attend, particularly for those 00:27:00first two years. And so there was a lot of similarity in some of the student bodies. Yeah.

LEH: Yeah, yeah. I mean some of them, just looking at like where the colleges are, some of them are very far away. And then others are like pretty close, like thirty, forty minutes away.

RC: Yes. Yeah.

LEH: I could see where that would make a huge difference if like you have a job or children or other commitments.

RC: Yeah. I think the part time makes it, too, was different. And that was something we really pushed to the receiving institution, really a question about what things were done kind of system-wide and what were done at the receiving institutions.

The academic planning and the academic programming, very much so at the campus. Because that is where, and this is part of what's going on in phase two of the project, is the integration of the academic planning for future submissions by the campuses to HLC. The receiving institutions really have to integrate their planning around now a campus and branch locations. Yeah.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah, it's a different model.

RC: Mm hmm. Yeah. I had a conversation with a person who had come from another state. And she was very familiar with the model of kind of a main campus and then branches. That was the structure of their state Us. Which was different than how Wisconsin had been before that, with UW Colleges as the accredited institution with all the two-years, the branches, in one location, or one entity.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. We kind of talked about stuff with the steering committee. What were some challenges with the steering committee that were either presented to staff or students that other parties involved might not have seen?

RC: Interesting question. So as we were identifying kind of things that needed to be decided, we tried to present them to all parties, recognizing that different groups would have stronger opinions or different perspectives. So for example, the financial aid functional team would report periodically to the steering committee. And the engagement for that might be more so like from the student representative to the steering committee than the faculty representative. But when we talked about IT, they might have equal 00:30:00engagement, but recognizing it's impacting them for a little bit different angle.

When the HLC person presented, the faculty engagement might be different than the student, because a lot of student accreditations is not something that they are very knowledgeable about.

You know, I found it very thoughtful, the feedback we got. We did get feedback a couple of times about the differing levels of engagement at the receiving institutions of faculty or employees or students. And so that was where we would kind of bring it into the steering committee, or I might reach out to a campus and say you know, I've heard some feedback, positive or negative about this. Keep in mind, one of our initial commitments was to engage the different bodies as we go forward. So make sure you're working on that, right? Make sure you're true to that charge. Because part of what we did, particularly in the first year where we'd go almost every month, I think actually every month to the board of regents to update them. And one of the pieces we wanted to talk about was the engagement of the governance group, the engagement of employees and students.

Issues also varied just by kind of campus and the dynamics of the different campuses, and some of the different paths people wanted to take. So there was a lot of variation within it. Yeah.

LEH: How do you kind of come to consensus on something when a bunch of people have different opinions?

RC: So I think it's important to recognize we didn't always reach consensus. Sometimes we got to a great consensus. Other times, we had to take all the feedback, advice and wisdom of the different perspectives and say, you know, there isn't agreement here, but we need to move forward.

As a person who chaired a lot of the steering committee meetings, I tried to be intentional about not cutting off debate and discussion, and making sure if people were looking for more information, we figured out how to get more information. But understanding if we had to get something decided, let's get to a point where we've heard the different arguments and say okay, based on what we've heard, this is the path we'll need to take forward. And again, not every time were all the groups happy with it. But I think--I hope--that they all felt like we'd been respectful and listened and gave them an opportunity to give us input and then make sure we heard what they were thinking about it. 00:33:00Yeah. They would be able to say better whether or not we accomplished that.

LEH: (laughs) I mean, but you were the chair, so you would be able to talk about that, too. I mean, you are. So.

RC: Mm hmm. And there were sometimes they would call me, give me feedback. And sometimes it was at the end of the day we agreed to disagree. But it was always very thoughtful, and I was always very impressed with the passion for the mission. And that was both for the two-year mission and the Extension mission. And the generally really good collegial behavior people modeled. It was very civil in a time of a lot of incivility in our public conversation, public discourse. I was really impressed with the civility and thoughtfulness of people. It was kind of uplifting.

LEH: Yeah. I think that the mission of the branch campuses, what are they called?

RC: Yeah, UW College's mission that now has been transferred, yeah.

LEH: --is really important to serve everyone in the state. Yeah.

RC: Mm hmm. Yes. And that became really one of the key pieces was the access, as one of the three critical goals. Affordability, the second goal. And then opportunity as a third goal. And one of the pieces we had to really keep emphasizing to all involved around affordability was we're going to preserve the stratified tuition structure, so that students who are pursuing that two-year degree, say they would pursue it at the UW Colleges before, their tuition is lower. Yeah. That was a complicated conversation. Yeah.

LEH: Did some people not want it to be lower? They wanted to keep it--

RC: I think some of the folks involved wanted to, for a bunch of different reasons, move it towards where the receiving institution's tuition was. And Wisconsin System right now, tuition varies quite a bit by campus. And then part of it was equity issues with respect to students at the main campus. Why would they be paying a different tuition then the student who's at the branch campus? Part of it was around trying to address programmatic needs that people saw. And part of it, I think, was just it's confusing.

LEH: Yeah.

RC: But we had to kind of keep reiterating, this is one of the kind of base commitments is we're going to continue this differentiation in 00:36:00tuition. So that if you're at a branch campus pursuing your two-year degree, you will have a lower tuition. Yeah. Because access is a critical part of it, and the formula and the access are so tightly linked.

LEH: How important are, could you expand on how mission statements are a function in the UW System?

RC: So in the UW System, the mission statement is something approved by the board. And Madison has kind of a special place in the system with respect to its research status. So it's got a mission statement. Milwaukee then has a mission statement. And then each of the four-year comprehensives have a mission statement, some of which is consistent, some of which varies by the particular campus. And so part of this process was going through and reviewing and updating mission statements to make sure that they were reflecting both the mission of the receiving institution, and then also now incorporating the mission of the UW Colleges. And some were pretty close and some were not quite as close and needed a little more work.

LEH: Could you expand on that?

RC: I'm not quite sure--

LEH: Like what needed work.

RC: Oh, oh, in terms of--

LEH: Yeah.

RC: I think really being intentional about the language of the access mission. Again, some of the four-year comprehensive which were the bulk of the receiving, plus Milwaukee, just had not been as explicit on access. Even though, again, their student bodies in some cases were in part a very similar group of students. So that was a process at each campus, working through looking at the mission statements. Yeah. And the governance groups being engaged in different ways. Yeah. That was, I think, an important learning out of this was the awareness and affinity people had for mission at the different institutions. And that's really, again, informing this phase two work that we're in the middle of is taking the mission now and how does that inform, for example, that kind of plans going forward.

Madison, obviously, with Extension coming here, had to revisit the mission with respect to okay, how do we incorporate the Extension mission? Which at one point in the past had been at UW Madison. And moved from Madison to UW Extension. And now a big piece of that was coming back.

LEH: Yeah. The Extension, or at least the Cooperative like Extension stuff is really interesting to me, because we don't really have any like big equivalent of that in New York. Well, I'm from New York City so that would be. 00:39:00(laughs) But New York doesn't like have any equivalent of that at all. So that was interesting to learn about.

RC: Yeah. So you interviewed Casey, hopefully?

LEH: Yeah.

RC: Good. Good. He did a remarkable job.

LEH: Yeah. Figuring out like where all that stuff goes. Because I mean, Wisconsin, like there's some counties, too, that like don't have that many people. But all of these counties have offices, yeah, have a relationship with some part of the UW System in some way.

RC: Yeah. And I think that was a really big piece of the effort was for that relationship with the communities. Because the two-year campuses were, they'd invested a lot of time, energy and money over the years. And they were very interested in continuing to see a UW presence in their communities.

LEH: Yeah. How much did you, working in like administration, interact with like communities and people about like personnel and like facilities and things like that?

RC: So in the case of the restructuring project, we made a fairly intentional decision early on to try to have the transition be there from the UW Colleges that had worked with all these communities directly to the receiving institution. Rather than having System get involved too much. Because we would have just been one more kind of person trying to schedule a meeting around, or one more kind of who's this person now? In the longer term, the relationship needed to be with the receiving institution and the local government. And so that was an area where we kind of said, this is going to something you all need to really be responsible for. Here's kind of the timeline to think about things that need to get done, what needs to happen. So at one point I thought about going out to visit each of the local communities, and concluded that would not be helpful. Because the chancellors were already doing that very intentionally and very energetically. Yeah.

LEH: Yeah. So obviously there are all these big-scale things at the beginning of restructuring. What now are the sort of things that you're thinking about or that just observations that you've noticed as things have, as time has passed?

RC: So it's been interesting how this has evolved. So pieces that were still, so we still are working through the phase two milestones. I think as of 00:42:00January first, something like 95 percent of the milestones are done. We reported to the board October thirty-first was the substantial completion date. I'm borrowing language from a construction project. That means a lot of the work is done, the big bulk of the work is done. So things like making sure we have an orderly transition of the remaining records to be preserved, archived, destroyed, whatever the record retention policy says. Because you can picture at the end of the day we're essentially closing down an organization with the UW System. There will be a box of file records somewhere that we need to make sure we pick up and get to the right place so that we're following the state's records retention policy.

It's been interesting to watch kind of the evolution at the different receiving institutions. White Water, for example, the board of regents meeting was there in December 2019. The White Water board meeting, part of the board meeting was held at UW White Water-Rock County, which was very nice. It's about forty minutes from the campus. So physically, not necessarily the most convenient thing. But having that very clear involvement of the branch campus was very nice. And it was good to get there and see and hear about what's going on. Yeah, I think unexpected things, staying with White Water, the board two or so years ago passed a new policy around chancellor recruitments and chancellor searches that set a limit on the number of people who could be on the search and screen committee. That didn't really contemplate how do you get a representative now from a branch campus?

And so, through that process, I think we try to be diligent about engaging the faculty, the students, the staff of the branch campus. But the policy just doesn't contemplate that. So that was something like oh, we have to think about this element.

I think we're going to see more and more kind of alignment of the receiving institutions and their new branch campuses away from the two-year kind of general associate's degree to things that are more regional employer and local community-specific. As an example, UW Platteville is talking with, I think the Baraboo community, UW Platteville-Baraboo and Stout about potentially 00:45:00bringing some of Stout's hospitality program to the Baraboo campus. Being near the Wisconsin Dells and a lot of hospitality. UW Green Bay is having conversations at the Marinette location about how do they help that community with the shipbuilding industry. That's something that wouldn't have happened under the old structure. So it's going to be a different I think set of questions that get posed now going forward, which could be very exciting.

LEH: Yeah, definitely. All right. Let's see. We've talked a lot about a lot of these. I guess that sort of goes into this question, which is can you elaborate on the input of stakeholders and businesses and how that changed restructuring?

RC: I think the input during the proposal stage, what the president was hearing was that it really matters to us to have a UW institution in our community. Over the years there have been a series of conversations that kind of come on and off about the future of some of these campuses. In the mid I think 1970s there was one actually that was closed. The I think business community, a lot of the conversation was around these serve a vital role as we're looking to try and find employees. They also add to our community. So having these places thrive is really important.

The steering committee, per se, we did not engage directly with the businesses. Again, we kind of said to the chancellors that's a piece of this puzzle you need to work with. I know a number of chancellors who went and met with, for example, local chambers of commerce to talk about what are your priorities, what are the kind of things that you would like to see happening in the future of the campus? And I think those conversations are ongoing.

Another group of the stakeholders was the local governments who, again, own the facilities and invest in the facilities. We effectively lease the space, rent the space. Talking with them about how do we move forward. Stevens Point, for example, had some programs they wanted to get to one of their new branch campuses. So they worked with the local government about renovating some space to make that happen faster. I think we'll see more and more of that engagement.

It also, I think, changes just some of the kind of sense of space or sense of place for the receiving institutions. Because now a chancellor's not thinking about his or her one campus. It might be a four-year campus plus, like in White Water's case, the campus is forty minutes away. Eau Claire, you've got the Eau Claire campus, and then you have Eau Claire-Barron, which is about an hour away. And so how does the chancellor think about that just kind of physical footprint in where she or he needs to spend time?

I think that will be interesting to see. There was an early question, I remember. Public radio did a number of stories around this. And one of them, they were interviewing a member of the legislature. And his perspective was with UW Colleges, we have one chancellor in Madison. Just physically, the reality is you're very far away from some of your campuses and communities. And he said, "Essentially I think it's a good idea to try having a chancellor forty miles away instead of all the way down in Madison. For the communities." That was an interesting perspective.

LEH: Yeah. It's kind of a different, I mean, it's a different model.

RC: It's a different model. Yeah.

LEH: Yeah. How much would you say was System, like what were things that were emphasized from the System sort of down to other people, versus the opposite?

RC: So I mentioned developing the submission for the Higher Learning Commission, about a thousand pages.

LEH: Oh, God.

RC: So a piece of that was the system submission.

LEH: I'm just imagining like--

RC: Each of the receiving institutions also had a component of that. So as we were putting that together, one of the things we were emphasizing was we need to get this done by a certain date. That was coming down from system. One piece that we were emphasizing was basically the table of contents that each campus should follow. Here's how you organize it, here's the information you need to include. Each campus was responsible for the information, the content, though. Because again, it reflected their mission, their accreditation, where 00:51:00they were going to go at that point in time in their minds with a branch campus. And so it was a little bit of kind of here's what we need to do direction, here's how we need to organize it direction. But then very carefully receiving, this is what we aspire to be. This is what we dream of in this new structure.

One of the things that I continued throughout the process--I still do this--is point people back to that HLC submission. Because that was kind of the roadmap, the compass that we needed to stay true to, because we had told our accrediting body this is what we're going to be doing. And really using that as kind of both a high-level and somewhat detailed way to organize our thinking and to stay true to what we communicated to people early on. Because there were a number to times where just the pressures of the moment, you could take an expedient path but deviate what we had told HLC and communicated more broadly to people versus it's going to be a little bit harder, but we've got to stick to this thing.

LEH: Did that impact timelines at all?

RC: We hit all the major milestones. So it did not impact the timelines. But it did I think sometimes impact the nature of the work and what had to get done. It may have been quicker sometimes to deviate it. But by not deviating, I think we did either the right things or we did the things we did more correctly.

LEH: So in that sense it's sort of also kind of like an accountability tool.

RC: Very much an accountability tool. And HLC visited in December of '18 as part of their process. End of June '18 they approved the basic restructuring, the changing in accreditation. December of '18 they did a site visit with all of the receiving institutions and with the UW System. And I think that went really about as well as it could have gone with respect to the complexity of this restructuring, the number of institutions involved, all the different moving parts. They were very complimentary of a lot of the pieces. But they also identified a couple of areas where we needed to really think more carefully about how to serve the students at the two-year locations. The branch campuses. Part of it was around student support services at those campuses. 00:54:00Part of it was communications to really help the faculty and the students understand the new institution they were part of a little better. Yeah.

LEH: So in terms of support services, what are the priorities of System versus the colleges and their associated campuses? Or is it the same?

RC: I think the priorities of System and the campuses are probably at a high level the same. The campuses have to kind of decide the details of how do you want to provide support. So I visited UW Eau Claire-Barron maybe about a month and a half, two months ago now. They have a model where they have a number of people who are fulltime at the Barron campus, a number of people who are fulltime, obviously, at the Eau Claire campus. And they've got some people now who go in both directions part of the week to interact and engage at the other campus and provide services, support, keep kind of in tune with what's going on at the broader UW Eau Claire now. And I thought that was very interesting. I'm guessing at each of the campuses they'll probably tweak that model over the next couple of years as they kind of see what do we need to do here? You know, a number of the campuses have been very explicit with the students at the branch. For example, you can come and use our recreational facilities now, if you want to. White Water is running a shuttle bus back and forth. And the number of people who are attending class at UW White Water-Rock live in the residence halls at UW White Water. So again, it's going to be a lot more, I think, variation, what's going on in these different locations.

LEH: Yeah. Not all Wisconsin is the same. Most of northern Wisconsin remains a mystery to me.

RC: It's a beautiful area. You should go visit it.

LEH: Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. My family is from Minnesota. So I have been up north in Minnesota and it's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So this last question is how, I don't know, I guess do you have any like perspective as someone who worked at like a former, one of the former receiving institutions as well? Because you worked at Platteville.

RC: Yeah. I think I do have perspective from that that helps me think about when more engagement from the UW system is helpful, versus just kind of leave us to our own devices, versus kind of tell us what the guard rails are and then we can choose a path between those guardrails. I probably stayed a little bit closer to some of the Platteville activity with Richland and Baraboo just because of that former affiliation. And I think some of my former colleagues there felt like they had license to call me up and give me tips and coaching through this process. (LEH laughs) Which I appreciated. It was all very constructive. Because we had that deeper relationship, they sometimes probably were asked also by some of their colleagues, "Why don't you give Rob a call and tell him A, B, C?" Which was fine, and very helpful.

I also got a sense from them of just the amount of work that was happening both at the two-year campuses, the people who were there, and the receiving institutions. Because this was a lot of work to do this in the two years that were laid out. And I continue to be remarkably impressed by kind of that we're in this together, let's pull all together to get this done. People spending countless hours to help make sure that the students were not negatively impacted, that this went smoothly for them, that employees were welcomed at the new receiving institution as they transitioned employment from colleges to one of the receiving institutions. Meeting with the chambers, other stakeholders in the community, businesses. So from that, having been at Platteville, I can kind of picture some of that. Yeah. Yeah.

LEH: All right. On that note, do you have anything else you want to add? Anything that you're like, this is very important?

RC: I think the pieces I would add are sitting here January 14, 2020, we don't know yet if this is going to be successful. The mechanics of the transition are going well. The accreditation's got changed. Information system things got done. I think it will be five or ten years before people can look back and 01:00:00say it was successful or perhaps it was successful for this group of institutions in terms of they were able to take advantage of new opportunities, find new ways to serve the people of Wisconsin. But I don't say this is successful yet. Because we don't know. It will be five or ten years down the road, and which of the two and four-year places are thriving and which are struggling with things like the demographics of the state of Wisconsin and just fewer traditional students. Can they find ways to serve more non-traditional students, maybe?

For Madison, with Cooperative Extension I think it's a different kind of calculus. But again, I think it's going to take a little while to identify whether this was successful or not. I think the path we're on was leading to not good results. So making this change was a good policy choice by the board. But I'm not going to declare success for the overall goals of affordability, access and opportunity. Yeah. We do have some things that we have to, campuses and accreditation, HLC will want to continue to hear about going forward. And that will be an important accountability piece to this. Yeah. So that's what I'd wrap up with.

LEH: All right.