Interview with Clifton Ganyard

LEH: All right. Could you say your name and last name, and then spell out your last name?

CG: Sure. It's Clifton Ganyard. G-a-n-y-a-r-d.

LEH: All right. Looks like we are good to go. So why don't we start with your background? So, could you talk a little bit about what brought you to the UW System? And how your roles have evolved over the years?

CG: Sure. That's potentially a long story. Let me see if I can get it short, shorten it a little bit. So I originally came here in 1997. My wife and I came to Green Bay. She got a job here in the library. And I was fortunate enough to pick up some work teaching first English composition and then humanities and then history over the years. In 2004, I was hired as an assistant professor of humanities in history. I was promoted to associate professor in 2009. And so I've been teaching history and humanities here for twenty-two years, basically. And did quite well in those roles. In 2015, I stepped up to become the associate provost for academic affairs, which is my current position. So, yeah, if you want more detail than that, that's pretty simple.

LEH: Yeah, yeah. I mean, sure. If there are any other details you want to provide.

CG: Not unless you want to know them. I don't know what other details you want.

LEH: I guess could you speak more about your role as associate provost?

CG: Sure. So, the associate provost is an administrative position. It reports to the provost, who's in charge of academic affairs. And my role as associate provost, I oversee a lot of the quality of education programs. So I'm in charge of things like assessment of student learning, accreditation, articulation agreements and relationships with other institutions. I serve as the program planning liaison to the UW System. And I oversee a number of offices, including student success, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, distance education, international education, the Center for Civic 00:03:00Engagements, and probably a couple of others that I'm forgetting right now. So I oversee a lot of things that are related to undergraduate teaching, learning, student success and those kinds of areas.

LEH: Oh, man, that's a lot. I guess going into talking about restructuring. Could you talk about, I guess why don't we start with like articulation agreements and programs? How those were impacted, or how your role was impacted by restructuring.

CG: So restructuring was added to my job list, right? When we started this back in 2017, when it was announced October 2017 that we were going to do this, the chancellor of the university, Gary Miller, asked me if I would be kind of the leader and coordinator for the project. And I agreed to do that. We'd just finished our Higher Learning Commission accreditation visit. And so I was in a good position to take on some more responsibility. And having worked with a lot of people, I had some really good relationships, both within the university and across the system. So I was kind of the perfect person, I guess. That didn't come out right. But it made a lot of sense for me to take on that role.

So I was kind of in change of trying to coordinate all of our efforts as we brought on the three additional campuses: Marinette, Manitowoc and Sheboygan. So I did that by putting together a number of working groups and a steering committee to try and facilitate communication and understanding across all four of the campuses.

So it was a big project. And articulation agreements and programs don't really come into it until a little bit later on. Programming was probably the most important part that was impacted by the restructuring. Because we're really looking at two different kinds of institutions, right? So, UW Green Bay was a four-year comprehensive institution. We have somewhere around forty-five baccalaureate degrees, an associate's degree, and at the time we had about six master's programs. And the other campuses, the UW Colleges at the time, really just had the one degree, the associate of arts and sciences.

So there was a lot of discussion about how we would merge these 00:06:00different missions, the different roles that the two institutions had. And very early on we decided that we wanted to create a single institution. So you may have encountered already, Lena, different institutions took different approaches to integrating the branch campuses. We decided to try and make the campuses as integrated as possible. And so we see it as a single institution with one faculty, one staff and one student body. And that really guided all of our decisions in trying to make it a single institution.

Other campuses, notably Milwaukee--Milwaukee's just the easy example--decided that they had to keep the branch campuses separate, as separate institutions. So they have, if you look at Milwaukee, for example, they now have, I forget what it's called, but they have something like a dean of student success, or something like that, who oversees the branch campuses. And the branch campuses still have separate programs, separate faculties, separate student bodies, although they have very careful agreements between those with Milwaukee.

And our goal was to not do that. It was just that students at Marinette are Green Bay students. And they can move freely back and forth across the campuses however they want to do that. Does that make sense?

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

CG: Okay. So what we decided to do, then, was to start planning how we would roll out new programming. And that proved to be very difficult for a number of reasons because there's all kinds of questions about delivery of coursework and curriculum. What can be delivered face to face on campus at one of the branch campuses? What needs to be delivered via distance education programming? And those kind of things.

But there were a lot of other logistical questions. For example, what about transportation? How are we going to manage tuition and fees? What about student government and influence like that? So all these things have come together as kind of the core of what the project was about.

And initially, of course, we just had to keep programming going. So last year, for example, the last year that the branch campuses were still being administered in part by UW Colleges, the programming was still, to a large extent, separate between UW Green Bay and the branch campuses. But now we've tried to integrate them as much as possible. This year we rolled out four new baccalaureate degree programs that are available at the branch campuses. So students can go to Manitowoc and they can major in psychology, for example. And they can take the vast majority, if not all of the curriculum 00:09:00that they need to complete that baccalaureate in Manitowoc. Now some of that is delivered online via distance education. So it's not perhaps exactly what the student might want, if the student wants all face to face. But they can complete the degree there.

Alternatively, they could go to Manitowoc for part of their degree, take some courses there, and take some courses in Green Bay. They would just have to travel to Green Bay to do that. And we have about four of those programs. So there's psychology is available at all four campuses. We have English composition programs. A BFA in writing that's available at all four campuses. Environmental science is available at Manitowoc. We'll be launching an engineering program at Sheboygan very shortly. And we have business administration at all four of the campuses, too. So those are, we've moved as quickly as possible to roll those out, to find ways to deliver the curriculum across all of those campuses.

Does that make sense, Lena? Any questions?

LEH: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

CG: And so one of the biggest barriers to that that we encountered, though, was tuition. So UW System decided very early on that we could do whatever we wanted to with curriculum, but we had to maintain the tuition level that the UW Colleges have had. So the UW Colleges had a much lower tuition rate. They paid about two-thirds of what students at Green Bay paid. And so we have to maintain that for students that are at least in an associate degree program.

So this caused a lot of logistical problems, because we wanted students to be able to move across campuses and take courses wherever they wanted to. And so we had to build a very complicated tuition process, tuition model, that defined what the tuition would be for one and two hundred level courses if you took them at the branch campus or if you took them at the main campus. What the cost for three and four hundred level courses would be, what the cost for online courses would be. And became very, very complicated. And in fact, until this semester, we were not able to implement it fully. And it's only this semester that we were able to implement the full tuition model so that students can move across the campuses as freely as they like, take whatever courses they want, and pay the differential tuition based on which course they're taking.

So it's been a long road. It's been over two years now since this was announced for us to get to this point where students are actually able to do this. And we only have a few programs, but we're looking at expanding the number 00:12:00of programs and delivering them as quickly as possible. We have some ideas about some new programs that we'll probably be rolling out in the next year.

So that's a little bit about programming. Is that what you wanted to hear?

LEH: Yeah, yeah. No, anything that you think is important or you want to talk about are things that I want to hear. (laughs)

CG: The other area. So you mentioned articulation agreements, too. Let me just talk a little bit about that. This, too, is a larger issue for us. So for quite a while, even before the restructuring project was announced, we'd been working to develop closer relationships with Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, which is just across the street from us. And we have a very good relationship with the administration and the faculty over there. And we developed a project that we called Crossing the Bridge, because the Fox River runs right through Green Bay and there's a number of bridges between UW Green Bay and NWTC.

So we built these relationships, some of which included articulation agreements or memoranda of understanding about how students could move between the two institutions. And really encouraging students at NWTC, after they completed their associate degree over there, to come on to Green Bay and earn a baccalaureate. But we also opened it up so that students could move to NWTC if that made sense for them.

When the restructuring project developed, an issue arose very quickly because NWTC has a campus in Marinette, literally across the street from the UW Colleges campus. So we had to work out a way to collaborate between our two institutions, because it was pretty clear that competition would lead to the closing of one or another of those schools. And to be frank, it probably would have been the UW Marinette campus that was closed.

So we did that, and we're still working on it. But we've developed an agreement with NWTC to coordinate our educational delivery in Marinette between the two campuses. And so we now are working on a way to figure out what courses NWTC will offer, and what courses UW Marinette will offer so there isn't competition. Does that make sense? In other words, we want to make sure that Marinette is offering different courses from what NWTC is, so that students need to take courses at one or the other. They can't just take wherever they want to.

And then we're building, we're trying to build pathways between those two campuses. So the students can move smoothly between the NWTC campus 00:15:00and the Marinette campus. And this is a much more difficult project, because they're two different systems, the Wisconsin Technical College System and then the Wisconsin University System. Each of which has its own rules. So we have to be careful not to violate those rules, and tuition needs to be kept strongly apart, and all that kind of thing. But we also need to figure out how to pay for all of it.

So we've developed this relationship and we're still working on it, it's not finished. But we're working very closely this year on coordinating both curriculum between the two campuses and also student affairs services. So what we're trying to do is get to the point where, for example, academic advisors on Marinette or NWTC act as advisors no matter where the student is going. So if a student goes to NWTC and starts taking courses and then says hey, I'm really interested in psychology, the advisor at NWTC is able to advise that student in how to take courses on the Marinette campus in psychology. So really trying to serve the community as best we can by presenting a collaborative and comprehensive curriculum, educational experience, up in Marinette.

So that's been a really interesting and complicated project to work on. It's taken a long time, but I think it's starting to come together now.

LEH: What have sort of community members, what have their reactions been in Marinette and in those other communities?

CG: That's a really good question. So, there was a lot of skepticism when this project was announced about why the university system was doing it, what it meant for those colleges, those campuses, how they would serve the community. What was UW Green Bay going to be able to do? I mean, it's an hour away from most of these communities. So there was a lot of concern.

This was particularly true of Sheboygan. So there was UW Platteville, for example, had a collaborative engineering program at Sheboygan. So when the restructuring was announced and Sheboygan was added to UW Green Bay, there was a lot of concern in the community about what would happen to engineering. Engineering is a really important program for Sheboygan. So we worked very hard to expand our own ability to offer engineering, which we've done. Last year we launched a program in mechanical engineering, for example. And we're working on an electrical engineering program right now. And we're working on 00:18:00making sure that that program will be available at Sheboygan to serve that community.

And I would say that there were similar concerns, if not identical, across all of the campuses. What was clear is that each of these communities really values having that campus right there in that community. That they serve a lot of purposes, they provide education to students, returning adults, people just with interests. They serve community in terms of entertainment and cultural enrichment. There's the Lakeshore Wind Ensemble, for example, that functions out of the Manitowoc campus.

And so there was a lot of concern that the campuses would be closed and that they would lose access to those things. Or that we would drastically change things. That programming would be lost, and all those kinds of things.

And we worked very hard to reassure those communities, to build relationships with those communities, and to deliver things that they wanted. And so we've been able to keep those campuses open for now, although I have to admit that it is a challenge. Financially it's hard to make those campuses function. So we're working hard to find ways to keep them open and functioning.

We've worked hard to reassure campuses that certain programming would stay there. Engineering in Sheboygan has been the most difficult. But we're getting there. We'll be able to offer engineering I think starting in the fall of 2020. I think that's the launch date for that. And just build relationships with the community.

You know, these are all unique communities. Marinette, Manitowoc, Sheboygan. They all have different characteristics. They have different social and economic backgrounds. They have different kinds of people who live there. They have different needs. So we've been working to try and meet the needs of each of those communities, to reach out to them and be more engaged.

Probably the most important thing we did was to hire a campus executive officer at each of the campuses. This was a little bit different from what UW Colleges had. They had a few years previously consolidated administrative leadership of the campuses. And so they would have a single dean that was overseeing a group of campuses. Three or four campuses. And in our case, it was a different dean for each of the campuses.

We didn't replace the dean. We had to figure out a way that academics would report to our own academic deans. But we recognized the importance of having somebody in that community who was recognized as the leader of the campus, who could make decisions about that campus. And more importantly, though, 00:21:00who would serve as a liaison to reach out to each of the communities, to work with the chamber of commerce, the county executives, the foundational boards of each of the campuses, etcetera. Businesses, schools, to build relationships between the university and what that community needs.

And it's been slow going, I think. But again, two years on and I think we've made a lot of progress. We have very good campus executive officers. Cindy Bailey up in Marinette, Rachel Bakic in Manitowoc and Jamie Schramm down in Sheboygan, who are doing fantastic work reaching out to the communities and building programming.

Just one example. We're working on creating a high school associate degree. So we're working with one of the high schools in Manitowoc, I think it's Lincoln High School. So that a select cohort of students at that high school will be able to take courses at the UW Manitowoc campus and earn credit both for their high school diploma and towards an associate's degree. So by the time they graduate high school, they will have earned their high school diploma and their associate's degree. And this has been very popular. The principal at Lincoln is very excited by the prospects of this. But it's largely because of the relationships, the communication that we've created between our campus and the local community there. So that's one example.

LEH: Yeah. You said that there are sort of continued financial challenges. Could you expand on that?

CG: Sure. This is no secret, right? About seven or eight years ago, the UW Colleges were doing quite well. So about 2010 I think they kind of hit their high point in terms of enrollment. So you'll remember this was just after the great recession, 2008-2009. A lot of people lost their jobs, unfortunately. But what that means for higher education is that people tend to go back to school to retrain, to gain new skills and so forth. So there was a surge in college enrollment in 2008-2009. And by about 2010, the UW Colleges, the various campuses, had kind of hit their high enrollment point. So things were doing pretty well for them.

After 2010, however, the economy started to recover, and recover rapidly. Especially in Wisconsin. So our unemployment dropped pretty quickly in 2011, '12, '13. And as you know, the economy in Wisconsin now is quite 00:24:00strong. There are a lot of jobs available and so forth. And so there's, that enrollment has declined. It's been declining for the last seven years.

There are some other changes as well. So demographically speaking, the number of college-going students is declining, right? So the population of Wisconsin and nationally of younger people is declining. There are just fewer people in the next few years will be of age to go to college.

And then there's the question of what do the two-year colleges actually offer. There has been a national trend away from associate degree education.

So those three things combined: a strong economy, declining demographic population and a desire for different educational goals has meant that the enrollment at the UW Colleges, at the two-year campuses, declined sharply. So by 2017, enrollment at these three branch campuses was half of what it was seven years earlier. So that had a huge impact on tuition, on the finances of those colleges.

In addition, under Governor Scott Walker, the UW System received some pretty severe budget cuts. So that meant we have less money, fewer resources to try to overcome the shortfall from enrollment and tuition. So it's kind of a perfect storm.

And that's one of the reasons I think we needed to do something with the UW Colleges. Nobody wanted to close these campuses, which is kind of the last resort. All right, we can't afford them, we've got to close them. But that's not good for anybody. People are out of a job, students don't have access to education, communities lose their resources.

So instead, it was decided that we would try to develop a different administrative solution. And President Ray Cross decided that he would ask several of the comprehensives, plus Milwaukee, to take over administration of some campuses and see if we could turn them around. So that was part of the basis of, not entirely, President Cross said it was also about access and delivering education, which it is. But certainly that was a factor in the decision to try to restructure the colleges.

UW System agreed that they would help finance that for a couple of years. So when we took on the campuses, what we learned was that in terms of budget, each of those campuses was running in the red, right? They were spending more money than they were taking in. And that's not sustainable. The UW System agreed that they would help us overcome some of that for a couple of years. That's going to end after this fiscal year.

So the challenge now is how do we pay for this, right? We've got 00:27:00these three new campuses. We've rolled out new curriculum. We've got strong relationships with the community. We're building interesting collaborative programs with NWTC. This is all really good. But we need to be able to afford it.

And so we're hoping, of course, that enrollment will turn around. That what we're doing by offering baccalaureate degrees or developing new programming, that students will be interested and want to go to these campuses. We're also hoping that businesses, local businesses, will see an opportunity to promote education amongst their employees, and maybe be supportive of returning adults, too.

But we haven't overcome it yet, right? So it's still costing us more money to keep these campuses open than we're bringing in by delivering the services. So there's a budgetary shortfall with these campuses that's taking some money. So we're working on trying to solve that. We don't want to close any of these campuses, obviously. But we do need to figure out how we can pay for it. And either enrollment needs to turn around so that we overcome that shortfall, or we just need to decide what level of expense are we willing to pay to keep the campuses open. And that's kind of a practical approach, but it's nevertheless important.

So we see all the campuses as very important to our identity. We're delivering good curriculum and services to those communities. So I think we would continue to run them even if we lost money there, because it's delivering an important service. It's meeting part of our mission as a Wisconsin comprehensive university. But if it got worse, it would be much more difficult to do that.

And all of the comprehensives are struggling with that. None of the branch campuses was financially sustainable on its own. Some were worse than others. We happened to inherit three of the campuses that were in the most difficult position. So we're really struggling to get them up and running. But they do seem to be turning around. Enrollment at each of the branch campuses is a little bit better than it was a year ago. So there are some signs of promise that we've turned the corner and that we're moving in the right direction.

LEH: Yeah. So in terms of that mission statement, what was the process of sort of integrating the colleges, those mission statements, into Green Bay?

CG: That's a great question. It was actually a lot simpler than we expected it 00:30:00to be. So that was one of the primary concerns, especially at the branch campuses, right? And so the faculty and the staff at the branch campuses are extraordinarily dedicated to what they do out there. They're really fantastic people. And one of the first things they were concerned about is that they would come in and just eliminate their mission and impose our mission. When I looked at the two missions and the vision statements of each campus, the value statements at each campus, though, what I realized was that they really weren't that different. There are a couple of things that are a little bit different. And so the colleges, the UW Colleges, had a very clear statement about open access. And so they're open access institutions. Anyone can go to that campus, no matter what.

UW Green Bay is not technically open access. And so we do screen candidates. We look for certain characteristics, achievements and so forth before admitting them. But what we were able to do was essentially find a process that allowed us to keep open access, actually extend open access, so it was covering almost every student.

So the missions really weren't all that different. And we were actually going through a process of rewriting our mission when the restructuring project hit. So all we did was to incorporate the restructuring into the process of rewriting our mission.

So our new mission, which was just approved last year, now incorporates all of the branch campuses and in fact declares that the university is a multi-campus institution. And I think our mission was the first one to make that change. So again, recognizing all of that development.

There were still concerns. There still are concerns, frankly, about what students will be served and so forth. But we were able to reassure people that the missions really aren't that different. It's about access. It's about student success. It's about community engagement. It's about reaching out and really delivering education in an innovative way. So we were all pretty much on board with that idea. And it's really more just a technical and practical process of figuring out how to administer different admission policies, for example.

And it took some work. But we did it. The admissions office figured out a way to advise students on which campus to go to. So if we found that a student was probably going to struggle at the Green Bay main campus, we encouraged that student to go to one of the branch campuses first for a semester or 00:33:00two, take some different courses, build up their GPA, become familiar with the college setting. And then they can transfer to the main campus if they want to. So in that sense, it's kind of extended an open access model across all four campuses.

And so, it's worked out pretty well so far. We haven't been doing it long, I should say, so it's possible that other issues will arise. But we seem to have integrated the campuses without too major of a change to mission statements.

LEH: And why is something like a mission statement important?

CG: Yeah. The mission statement defines what the purpose of the institution is, right? So depending on what your mission statement says, that gives you direction toward what kind of programming you should have, how you should treat students when they come in. In other words, what audience are you trying to recruit from? What kinds of students are you looking for? What kind of programming are you trying to deliver? What's your role in the community? So different institutions have different goals.

Looking at Milwaukee and Madison, for example, is a good way to distinguish those. So those are both what are called R1 institutions. They're primarily geared towards research. So a very important part of their mission is not just education, but for their faculty and their students, particularly their grad students, to be engaged in and conduct research, and contribute research, right? So that really defines a lot of how the structure of those institutions is created, what their faculty do in terms of teaching, research, what their students are expected to engage in, and frankly what kinds of students are attracted to that institution.

The comprehensive have slightly different kinds of missions, right? So a place like UW Green Bay, while we certainly value research to a high degree, we're also trying to serve our community more directly, right? So we have to deliver a more comprehensive array of programming. And that means that our faculty are probably not going to have as much time to do research, so we have to take that into account. They teach more, they do a little bit less research--not to say that they don't do any research, but they do a little bit less research, perhaps--and then that also affects the kind of students that we attract.

So what the mission statement says is a really important defining factor. That issue of open access is a good example for understanding that, right? So the UW Colleges were open access. That meant they took anybody who went in 00:36:00through their doors, whether they were academically prepared or not. So that really affected how they delivered their curriculum, right? They had a very different approach to supporting students, to the kinds of courses that were offered, and that kind of thing. A place like UW Green Bay is not quite open access, right? So we expect that students have met a certain level of preparedness for college.

And so that's been one of the things that we've had to work around and negotiate, as I was suggesting, is how do we blend those two different approaches to admissions to figure out what our true goal is? Does that make sense, Lena? In terms of why the mission statement is important?

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Let's see. I guess, hmm. Could you maybe expand on sort of how some of like the student services and like support networks, like how you deal with those between the campuses? Yeah.

CG: Yeah. So that's been a very difficult part, too. Resources, again, have been a problem. So what we've found when we took over these institutions is that the branch campuses just didn't have the resources they needed to deliver the support services that they did. They had some, but not really enough. And so we worked very hard to try and provide better support to the branch campuses.

And that hasn't always been easy. One of the things we did was to hire the campus executive officers out there, like I said before. So part of their job is to make sure that there are the right services at each campus to meet what the students need.

We also integrated those services so whether that's admissions or advising, student life, event planning, student success, the learning center, we've integrated those with our main campus as well. So our advising office, for example, at the Green Bay main campus is responsible for advising at all four campuses. But we have advisors physically at each of the campuses. And they communicate with our advising office to make sure that a consistent message is being delivered across all four campuses.

Same thing with student life. So there are student life coordinators or event planners on each of the campuses. They report to the student affairs, student life directors at Green Bay at the main campus. But they're physically on Manitowoc or Sheboygan campus to coordinate those events that need to 00:39:00take place, to help students find resources that they need, and so forth. So part of that's been a real challenge in coordination.

Another area would be tutoring and the learning center. So each campus had some tutoring services. We've been able to expand our services, the Green Bay services, to better serve those campuses. So, for example, one thing we've invested in is a collaborative program called Brain Fuse, which is an online tutoring service. And our subscription to that at Green Bay has been extended so that it covers all four campuses. So students at any campus can take advantage of this service. It's not perfect. Sometimes students need face to face tutoring to really understand what's going on. But it's at least a way to provide more support to students at the branch campuses.

So we've been struggling with this. It's difficult to provide all of the resources that are necessary across all four campuses. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges has been in disability services. Providing accessibility and support to students who need that. This can be very expensive. Hiring, for example, sign language interpreters or stuff like that for students can be very expensive. But just meeting the needs that our students have has been difficult. We've done that. So we hired a position that helps support disability services that provides capacity to our disability services director to spend time on each of the branch campuses, talk to the executive officers, the faculty, the students, to make sure that the needs of those campuses are being met.

Does that answer your question? So it hasn't been perfect, Lena. We've still got a ways to go to really deliver all these services, because the resources are missing. But I think we've done a pretty good job in looking at alternatives. Either hiring another person to support that office or providing some kind of electronic resource to help students be successful.

LEH: Yeah. So I'm just sort of wondering, immediately like when restructuring project was announced, obviously some of these things have sort of come over like the long term of like looking at this over time. What were some of the problems that were sort of like an immediate thing that like this needs to be solved versus some other things that might have been problems or 00:42:00positive things that emerge over time?

CG: Mm hmm. Yeah. It's a good question. Some of the things I've been talking about were immediately apparent. So just a couple of examples. One was communication with faculty, staff and students, right? So we realized immediately that we needed to create a very transparent and clear communication process to communicate with the faculty, staff and students on the branch campuses, to hear what their questions and concerns were, and to try and answer those questions and concerns.

So we did that immediately. We set up a number of city hall meetings to talk about these issues. We transmitted those via digital resources to all of the campuses so that faculty, staff and students could watch, could call in. We invited them to participate in those meetings. When I set up my steering committee and the various working groups, we were very careful to include representatives from all of the campuses to make sure that everyone had a voice in what was happening and in decision making. So that was one thing was how do we communicate and integrate all of these different groups into a single institution.

A second area, we've also already talked about. So another area that was very obvious in importance was community. So as I said, the communities really value these branch campuses. So it was clear very early on that we needed to reach out to the communities, talk with them, find out what their concerns were, and communicate with them about what we were trying to do. And we did that as well. So we also, we held a number of open fora and meetings on each of the campuses. We invited the community to come and talk to us and voice their concerns. And again, trying to be transparent, trying to promote communication.

A third area, I would say, was the budget. And in some ways, that was the biggest concern. We knew that these campuses were struggling. We ourselves were struggling with a difficult budget. We were still recovering from some of the budget cuts that had been instituted in 2015. And so we knew that that was going to be a huge struggle of bringing on these three new campuses that were themselves struggling financially while still trying to overcome our own financial and budget deficits. And we've been able to do that, for the most part, at least on our own campus. But it's been a difficult struggle.

Those would be the three things that I would say were immediately apparent, right? How do we integrate the faculty and staff and students? How do 00:45:00we communicate with the community? And how do we deal with the budget?

Very quickly, a fourth one that we've already talked about became apparent, and that was programming. What was going to be the benefit? A lot of community members said to us, well, why should I care that Green Bay is taking over? Our answer to that was well now, these are essentially four-year campuses, not two-year campuses. And we'll be able to deliver more curriculum.

So that led to a very quick understanding of having to promote new programming, new curriculum, different degrees at all of the campuses. So I would say those were the big issues that came up.

And of course there's a lot of stuff related to that. So when you think of faculty and staff and integrating them, a lot of questions came up from faculty, for example. Well, what does this mean for my title, for my rank? What does this mean for tenure position? What does this mean for salary? Because there were some disparities between salary, between faculty at the Green Bay campus and at the branch campuses. And those have all been related with budget and human resources. And it becomes a very complicated mass that we have to work through.

So a lot of these issues started kind of small and okay, we know we're going to need to address issues with faculty. And then as you start to learn what those issues are, it quickly balloons into a huge process of how to deal with that.

Same thing with students, for example. How are you going to handle student government? How do the different student government associations interact across four campuses? So we encouraged our students to meet with each other and talk about how they wanted to handle those kind of things.

Students were concerned about how they would transfer. If they take courses at Manitowoc, how do they count at Green Bay? So we had to talk about how we would just consider them to be a part of Green Bay, that they don't need to transfer courses anymore. They take courses at Manitowoc, and then go to Green Bay campus, they're just automatically there.

So the number of issues quickly expanded to be a wide range of issues. But if I was to summarize them, that's how I would summarize them. Does that make sense?

LEH: Yeah. Would you say that student concern, how did student concern and like the reception of students to restructuring sort of manifest itself? Would you say it was more the former UW Colleges students that were concerned? Was there a concern among Green Bay students? Or-yeah.

CG: That's a really good question. So there was concern. Often the concern was--well, there were two types of concern. So I've already mentioned one. One at Sheboygan, the students out there were really concerned that they would lose some programs, like engineering. So that was a really big problem. We 00:48:00needed to reassure students that they could continue their education, that if they were already enrolled that they would be able to finish their programming, and those kinds of things.

Student concern also often centered around tuition. So we needed to reassure them that no, their tuition wasn't going up. They could continue their education, pay for it the same way, pay the same amount, and so forth. So those were very common concerns.

Another concern was about transfer. So once I complete my associate's degree, some students said, what does this mean for transfer? And our answer often was well, in some ways, it's easier. Because now if you go to Green Bay, there is no transfer. You're already a Green Bay student. Just continue your education. A lot of students liked that, because they were planning to go to Green Bay anyway.

But for other students, we had to assure them that it didn't mean anything. They could still transfer with their degree, with their courses, to anywhere. Again, Sheboygan was a good example of this. A lot of students in Sheboygan go on to Milwaukee. Because they want to go for engineering, for example. So we had to assure them that that was absolutely possible. That the restructuring wouldn't affect that at all. They would still be able to go and transfer.

That's actually an interesting part of it. That's something that I ended up bringing up to UW System. To Carleen Vande Zande, about how transfer works. And they were very clear, UW System was, to rewrite the rules of transfer so that it was integrated into UW System policy. So that students could continue to transfer easily from one of these campuses to any UW institution.

So those were often the concerns that students raised. Some students in Sheboygan were confused as to why Sheboygan went to Green Bay and not to Milwaukee. And that took a little bit of discussion. Because there is a certain logic in a geographic sense that they might have gone to Milwaukee. But institutionally, in terms of pedagogy, curriculum and so forth, Sheboygan actually has much more in common with Green Bay. So it made a lot of sense to put it with Green Bay.

There were some concerns for students at UW Green Bay, too. Sometimes they were similar concerns. For example, students were concerned about tuition and fees. And this is an ongoing concern. It hasn't been solved. But there were concerns around segregated fees, for example. Students at Green Bay, for example, than students at Marinette do. So there was some concern that students would somehow be paying lower segregated fees but gaining access to all the same 00:51:00resources that a UW Green Bay student has. So we haven't quite solved how to manage that entirely. But that's a legitimate concern. How do we deliver similar services across all four campuses at a reasonable cost to students so that some students aren't getting more than what they pay for? So we've been working with that.

Students are pretty savvy, though. They're starting to learn already that if they go to one of the branch campuses, they'll save money. Because tuition, at least for lower level courses, is cheaper there. So I think that they're going to figure out some advantages to the merger, to the restructuring, that weren't immediately evident.

There was some interesting perceptual resistance, too. So I had at least one student comment very bluntly--and I think this was a misperception, but it was a really interesting and revealing comment. And the young woman said that she was glad she was graduating--so this would have been spring in 2018--she was glad she was graduating because the restructuring, the addition of the branch campuses, meant that the quality of education was going to drop at UW Green Bay. And of course there's no basis for this in reality. But her perception was that UW Green Bay was somehow going to become an open access institution. That that meant the quality of students was going to decline. That therefore the quality of education was going to decline. And she was happy that she was getting her degree now so that she wouldn't be associated with any of that.

So I found myself having to reassure that student that we had every intention of maintaining a high quality. That while we were going to try and extend access to as many students as possible, we were going to do so in a rational way. That students would gain support. Students that needed extra help would gain support. And we've been delivering that, or at least trying to deliver that. So there was some interesting perceptions about the differences between the four-year comprehensive institutions and the two-year associate degree institutions. That are largely incorrect, in my opinion. But it really brought out starkly how some people were perceiving the different institutions.

And I have to say, I've seen that perception in other places, too. So faculty and staff are not necessarily immune to perceiving other institutions in a negative light. So we've had to work very hard to overcome that misperception and present a more unified and positive image of what the 00:54:00restructured university looks like.

LEH: Hmm. I think that's so interesting. Why do you think she thought, that student thought, that the quality of education would go down?

CG: Because, I think, this is a larger cultural issue in the United States, the way that we view education. We've come, not everybody--I'm going to make some generalizations, but please understand that there are always exceptions, often many exceptions. But in general, Americans tend to view education as being hierarchical. So you go to certain schools to get certain schools. And certain schools have more prestige than others. In very simple terms, for example, an institution like Madison is often perceived as the flagship, as the best institution. It's a research institution so it's going to have the best faculty, the best staff, the best students, the best education, and so forth.

And to some extent, that might be true, right? So you probably are going to have some of the best researchers in the state at Madison. So there might be some other opportunities. But that doesn't mean that a scholar at another institutions is somehow worse or lower just because they're at that other institution.

So you have that flagship. And then below Madison and Milwaukee are the comprehensives, the four-year. Those are still good institutions. They're four-year universities, they're comprehensives, so they have everything you want. They're going to have good faculty, but maybe not the same quality as Madison, just the perception, right?

And then there are the two-year institutions. Those are the schools, the community colleges, they're called in other states, where you go to if you can't get into the four-year institutions. So the only reason you go to a Manitowoc, the perception is, is if you can't get into Oshkosh or Green Bay. This is patently false. There are lots of reasons students chose to go to Manitowoc or Sheboygan or Marinette, not just because they couldn't get into Green Bay or Oshkosh. That may have been a factor. But frankly it was cheaper to go to the community college. And a lot of students chose to go there because it was more cost-effective. Other students chose to go there because it was close to home, right?

And then kind of the fourth tier, I guess, would be the technical colleges. And those were seen even more different than the community colleges. Because those were technical, right? So you only went to those colleges, the perception was, if you wanted to be a plumber or an electrician or an auto mechanic or what have you. And that the faculty out there didn't know how to teach, that no 00:57:00course that was taught at a technical college could be equivalent as one that was taught at a four-year university.

All of this, of course, is false, right? Faculty, there's a wide variety of faculty and teachers and instructors. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good. And while there might be some truth that a place like Madison attracts a certain kind of faculty member, they're not necessarily a better teacher than a teacher at Green Bay or NWTC or Sheboygan. Same thing with students. Students have lots of reasons why they go to college. Yes, students might be attracted to Madison. It's a pretty attractive place. But I hear from a lot of students who choose Green Bay because Madison is too big. Thirty thousand students. Some students just don't want to go to a place that size. And some students choose Manitowoc because it's even smaller than Green Bay, right?

So I think that was part of the perception. There's this perception of what these schools deliver and this kind of hierarchy of what the quality of education was led her to feel that way. And so from her perspective, the student's perspective was all right, I'm at a four-year comprehensive, that's pretty good, right? All right, it's not Madison, but it's like only one step below Madison. This is really good for me.

Now you're adding these other colleges that are a step down. That can only drag us further down, from her perspective. And like I said a couple of times, this is a false perspective. It's a misperception of what the institutions do. But I think that's largely how a lot of people view the different institutions. We've worked very hard in the last five years to overcome those perceptions. That program I mentioned earlier, the Crossing the Bridge with NWTC, part of that was specifically so that our faculty and staff could come to understand NWTC's faculty and staff better, and so have a better understanding of what each side is doing. And one result of that is to improve respect for both sides. In other words, we have a much broader understanding that what's being taught at NWTC is in no way inferior to what's being taught at UW Green Bay. It's really improved our relationship and our ability to move back and forth between the two institutions.

So, did I answer your question, Lena?

LEH: Mm hmm. Yeah. I just wonder, too, like for faculty, if there isn't, you know, sort of similar--do you find that faculty both ways had a similar sense of bias? Or was that kind of like a different relationship?

CG: No, I have found that. And we've worked very hard over the last five years, as I said, to try to overcome some of those biases. But we did see 01:00:00that, right? So some of our faculty were concerned, just like the student was, that in adding the branch campuses, that that could have a very negative effect. So there was a lot of discussion around well, are the faculty at the branch campuses, are they really the same quality as faculty at Green Bay?

There were concerns, for example, over tenure. And so some of our faculty at Green Bay asked, and I think this was an honest question, but it revealed that perception of well, if somebody at a branch campus has tenure, is that really equivalent to somebody who has tenure at Green Bay? The answer is yes. The UW Colleges actually had as rigorous, if not more rigorous, process of granting tenure than Green Bay did. So it was more out of the ignorance. They just didn't know what the process and what the standards were. But the assumption was that it was not as good.

And I should say that was true of the branch campuses, too. Faculty at some of the branch campuses were concerned that they would not be able to earn tenure when they came to Green Bay. They assumed that Green Bay's process of tenure was much more rigorous than what the UW Colleges had. In reality, it was much closer. There were very few differences between the expectations. And we've had no problems with faculty at the branch campuses earning tenure at Green Bay.

And that holds, also, for NWTC. And so the project that I mentioned up in Marinette, for example. When we started talking with faculty at the Marinette campus that we were going to do this, their assumption, the faculty at Marinette, was that the faculty at the technical college couldn't be nearly as good and that the quality of education that would be delivered would be inferior.

So again, we've worked really hard to dispel those misperceptions and to help faculty understand that faculty at different institutions are still faculty. They're still as good as anybody else. So it's really interesting to see how perception affects people's assumptions of what is going on. And it's been a really interesting process to talk with all of these different groups and try to help them understand what each group is doing. And while a different institution might have a different mission, that doesn't necessarily mean that the faculty or the staff or the students there is somehow less than or greater than your own institution, your own faculty, staff and students.

LEH: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. What were, so you mentioned tenure. Were there other faculty concerns that came up?

CG: Yeah. And I mentioned one or two of these before. So there were a couple. 01:03:00Rank and title was one. So, faculty at the branch campuses were concerned that they would be able to keep their rank and title. So what I mean by that is assistant professor, associate professor, full professor. Salary was an issue that came up. So there were some disparities in pay, particularly among staff, but also among faculty. The issue of tenure came up. Would faculty at the branch campuses be allowed to keep tenure, or would they have to re-earn it? The issue of what the standards for tenure would be was an issue as well. Teaching loads were an issue. So there was a disparity between the amount of teaching that was required. So there were questions about how we would manage that. The answer to that was that faculty at any institution would have the same teaching load. What else? Rights and responsibilities. So faculty governance, shared governance, was a really big issue. How would the branch campuses have representation on governance committees? Faculty senate? Decision making? Things like that. We worked very hard to make sure there was representation on all the relevant bodies. And eventually we want to get to a place, like I said, where there's just faculty. It doesn't matter what campus you're on, you're just faculty, right? But for the time being, we're being very careful to make sure that the branch campuses have a voice at places like faculty senate and on our university committee.

The same is true of staff. Staff doesn't have the same concerns, so they don't need to worry about tenure and so on. But they were concerned about what rank they would hold. They were concerned about the reporting lines, who would be their boss. They were concerned about salary discrepancies. And we've tried to balance some of those, too.

So we learned a couple of years ago, we learned that there were a number of staff members on our campus and on the branch campuses who were making less than fifteen dollars an hour. And we made a very conscious decision to try and raise all of those people up to at least the minimum of fifteen dollars an hour. And we were able to do that, I think across the board. I think all four campuses now have that.

So those were some of the issues on faculty and staff they had about title and rank, tenure, salary, governance were big. And then for faculty, too, some of the other things I've already mentioned. They were concerned about how we would treat students. What the mission of the institution would be would be changing. And those kinds of things.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. Could you expand maybe on governance? Either as it pertains to 01:06:00the faculty governance structure or students? What have you seen been like concerns that have been raised as part of like the governance structures or maybe changes in how those have functioned?

CG: Sure. So the first concern simply was whether the branch campuses would be given a voice. And that's a legitimate concern, of course. Like I said, we tried in every way possible to make sure that their voices were heard. We included them on working groups that were dealing with restructuring. We held numerous meetings to talk with them. And then we integrated them very quickly into formal governance structures. So for example, on our faculty senate there are a certain number of faculty senators who are from the branch campuses. Their role is to represent the concerns of the branch campuses.

Likewise, we make sure that somebody on our university committee, which is the executive committee for the faculty, that there's at least one person from a branch campus on that committee. Again, to voice concerns directly.

Our staff committees have done something similar. And so they've invited representatives from the branch campuses to participate on our academic staff committee and our university staff committee. So we've tried to integrate those voices as much as possible. But in creating a single faculty and a single staff, the idea is that those committees cover all of those faculty and all of those staff across all four campuses. So it has been difficult sometimes, because those campuses are just a little bit distant. So sometimes it feels like communication is not as smooth as it should be. So this is something we've been working on.

Another thing that we did to try and improve that governance is that we hired those campus executive officers. So there was another conduit for communication. And we saw this just recently at Sheboygan, for example. There was a problem with communications. We've just hired a new campus executive officer out at Sheboygan and now it seems like that communication is improving. Faculty feel like they have a better conduit to communicate through the campus executive officer to the provost or to me. And so their concerns can be heard, questions can be answered and so forth. So that's not formal governance. But it was a way of kind of dealing with some of those issues.

There are a few other things, too. This isn't really governance. But up until the restructuring, each of the branch campuses had what they call the 01:09:00curriculum committee that helped them coordinate the curriculum on their campuses. For UW Green Bay, each of our academic departments is responsible for its own curriculum. So the dean s of those academic colleges and the chairs of the programs are the ones who are responsible for making sure that the right curriculum is delivered across all four campuses.

So there was no longer a need for the curriculum committees. And this was an area of contention. A lot of the faculty at the branch campuses were very concerned about this. So what we did is we encouraged the campus executive officers to maintain some kind of advisory committee that could help coordinate the offering of curriculum. So now each campus, I think each campus, has an informal committee. It doesn't have a place in the formal governance structure. But they have an informal committee that works with the campus executive officer, the deans, the chairs, to kind of review plans for curriculum and teaching and make sure that the right curriculum is delivered to each of the places.

So I guess what I would say is that the biggest changes have been to integrate, to make sure that there are representatives of the branch campuses on a number of the key faculty and staff governance agencies. To make sure that their voices are being heard. And of course the campus executive officers also report to the provost. And so there's a conduit there for decision making, and making sure that the branch campuses have a say in what is being decided.

Student government was a little bit different. So we asked student government to make their own decisions. And they chose to maintain separate student government associations. So each campus had its own independent student government association. They elect their own president and officers and so forth. But they communicate with each other regularly. And so the presidents of each of the four SGAs, for example, I think it's once a month, get together or have a phone call and discuss an issue that may be coming up in common that need to be addressed. And then discuss a way of bringing that forward, whether that's through the senate or the university committee, the provost, the chancellor, or what have you. So student government is functioning a little bit differently. But that's probably good, in my opinion, that each campus has its own SGA to deal with local issues of students.

LEH: Hmm. Yeah. It's interesting how different some of like the same 01:12:00processes can be between the universities and the former colleges. Just like thinking about like what you're talking about with the curriculum committee and just how different that is. Do you think, is that a function just of like the organizations themselves and like the size with like Green Bay being much bigger than the former colleges? Or is it something else?

CG: In terms of having like curriculum committees on each of the campuses?

LEH: Yeah.

CG: So that was a function of how the UW Colleges operated. The UW Colleges was a single institution, right? But it had thirteen campuses. And they had created an organization where faculty, a department, was spread across all thirteen campuses. So history, for example. Every campus had at least one historian. But there was a single history department for the entire UW Colleges. So the issue there was how do you coordinate all that? Thirteen different campuses to make sure that a certain base curriculum is delivered.

What was also difficult was that because there were limited faculty at each physical location, they couldn't deliver the full curriculum at that location. So just using history, again, as an example. At Manitowoc, there was an American historian. But he wasn't in a position to teach, for example, European history or African history. So how do you deliver that kind of course to Manitowoc if you don't have somebody there?

And the answer, of course, is that you do that through distance education. So maybe somebody at another school, Rock County or Barron County or somewhere like that, maybe they do have a European historian who could teach that. So you need to coordinate then all right, who's going to teach this course? How are we going to deliver it? If it's done through distance education, does that mean that we need to reserve a special room at Manitowoc, for example, so that our students can use the technology in that room to receive that course, right?

So with that kind of a complicated situation, that's what led to the creation of curriculum committees at each campus to make sure that this very complex web of curriculum was being offered across all thirteen campuses.

In a way, we have a similar problem but it's a smaller scale. We only have four campuses that we're dealing with. So we've been trying to figure out how do we do that at four campuses. And one thing that we've done now is to 01:15:00hire a distance education coordinator to help us with exactly this issue. So we've taken a slightly different route of solving some of these issues.

So I think it was more a fact of the organization. Colleges would have thirteen campuses. Green Bay only had one.

LEH: Yeah.

CG: I think there's just a different kind of logistical problem for dealing with it. And we've tried to work through, now that Green Bay is a multi-location institution, what does that mean for figuring out these issues?

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything else you'd like to add?

CG: No, I don't think so. We've been talking for an hour and twenty minutes. So I hope I've answered all your questions.

LEH: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Very enlightening from the perspective of someone at one of the institutions that received these branch campuses. Interesting to hear what problems or you know, things that you guys have encountered from a different perspective. So, yeah.

CG: Have you been able to talk to other folks about the project?

LEH: Yeah. Yeah.

CG: Who else have you talked to so far?

LEH: I've talked to people from the Colleges, Extension, System.

CG: Okay. Well, if you have a chance, I'd encourage you to talk to a few of those folks that I recommended to you. They'll give you even a different perspective, if you can. And they're all really good people. I think they'll have really interesting answers to your questions, too.

LEH: Yeah. I've already reached out to some of them, so hopefully we'll be in contact.

CG: Okay. Great.

LEH: All right. Well.