Interview with Keith Montgomery

LEH: Okay. All right. Could you say your name and then your last name spelled out?

KM: Yeah. My name is Keith, K-e-i-t-h. Montgomery, as in Alabama. M-o-n-t-g-o-m-e-r-y. (laughs) You'd be surprised how many people don't know that.

LEH: What?

KM: Alabama.

LEH: Montgomery is in Alabama. Oh, I'm kind of not. I'm kind of not surprised. (laughs) So why don't we start out with what brought you to UW Colleges? Your interest in the system. And, yeah, that.

KM: Well, I was attending graduate school in Canada at University of Waterloo. And then I did some ad hoc or instructional academic stuff teaching there while my wife went to medical school for her master's in Hamilton. So what brought me to the UW College is, I got a job. (laughs)

LEH: Fair enough.

KM: In Wausau. At University of Wisconsin, Marathon County. And with her being a family physician, she could go anywhere. So it was great. We came to Wausau one afternoon in August of 1991.

LEH: (laughs) Long time ago.

KM: So, yeah, so the colleges were finally disbanded in the end of May of 2018. So I had a long career in the colleges. First as a faculty member, until 2011. I spent time also as department chair statewide as a faculty member. And then 2011, I became the interim dean and then the dean of UW Marathon County. So the chief executive officers of the campus. And then in 2015, under some financial pressure, after the dean of UW Marshfield/Wood County retired, they made me also the dean of UW Marshfield/Wood County. So I had two campuses. So when we finally regionalized and I became the dean of four campuses, I was used to, to some extent, I had twelve months' experience in doing two campuses. So anyway, back in '91, I got a job in the department of geography, UW Colleges, on the Marathon County campus in Wausau.

You know the thing about the Marathon County campus, there was a lot of people there from elsewhere, you know what I mean?

LEH: Really?

KM: We used to have Thanksgiving dinner at someone house, his wife was from Ecuador. These other people had come from Sri Lanka. Other people had come from Brazil. You know, it was a very interesting faculty at that time. So 00:03:00I certainly didn't feel, I loved Wausau, but I certainly didn't feel that I'd come to a strange place.

LEH: What do you think made people from a lot of different places want to stay in Marathon County?

KM: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, obviously they came for the job. To stay? It's a good campus. At that time it had very high standards. The majority of the students who started there came to Madison. You know, the colleges had just been formed in 1971 when the UW System reorganized. And UW Marathon County actually used to be a branch campus of UW Madison. There were six branch campuses of UW Madison. So they were kind of run out of Extension. So until 1971, they didn't have their own chancellor. They were run out of Extension. And they had a provost in Extension.

So when you got to UW Marathon County, even though it was twenty years after reorganization, memories were long and people still held fast to this association with Madison. I think Madison reciprocated, too, in a sense. I mean, as a faculty member there you could come to Madison and get a summer research grant and do research on the Madison campus. So I think people stayed there because Wausau's a great place. It's in nobody else's shadow, so to speak. And also because you felt you were on a good campus. We know you're only teaching 100, 200-level courses, some 300-level courses. But you knew you were preparing students for, mainly for Madison. And that shifted over time.

LEH: What did it shift towards?

KM: It shifted to UW Stevens Point. Eau Claire was always strong, too. So Madison now has become, became number three. I mean, bear in mind, obviously, that the branch campuses were formed in the '50s. And people were a little bit more provincial, I guess. Highway 51 was not a highway. It was a two-lane until the '70s. So I think there were families in the Wausau area that felt more comfortable going to a local campus first and then transferring to Madison. So I think as highway systems changed and just as society changed, people became a little more comfortable with going directly to Madison.

LEH: Yeah, that makes sense. So for faculty, you talked about teaching lower-level courses.

KM: Mm hmm.

LEH: For faculty, what are the benefits of, well, the former UW Colleges? And did you see those change at all, either in positive or negative ways?

KM: The departments were administered statewide. So you know, I think we had, it varied from department to department. I saw that after I became dean more than anything else. No, even when I was on the campus tenure committee. But there was variation. But generally speaking, you were expected to do research. I would not say as much as Madison. (laughs) But you were expected to do research and to publish before you would get tenure. So I think there was a reasonably high standard on campus.

Another thing is, there was over thirty-odd faculty on campus. So there was anthropology, there was archeology. There was geology, geography. It was kind of a full service academic campus. And the great thing about it being a campus is that you didn't just, because I was the only geographer on campus, and that was true in most other departments, too, you generally didn't have colleagues within your discipline. So you really had to interact with colleagues across the whole campus and in other disciplines. And that was a great experience, actually.

LEH: Do you think that that influenced the like structure of the courses that people ended up teaching?

KM: No, except that eventually as part of our associate's degree, we did introduce an interdisciplinary studies requirement. And so that did get watered down a little bit over time. But generally speaking, you either had to have a seminar linking two courses, or else you had to have two courses that were merged into one. So I did one on global threats. So we had a political scientist, we had a biologist. I did the sort of weather and climate piece, and someone else did something else. We actually had four instructors for that. We got quarter-time credit for that. So yeah, you certainly knew what other people were doing in other disciplines. And it's quite different, maybe than the experience you might have on a campus like Madison or any other baccalaureate institutions.

LEH: Yeah. So you talked a little bit about the history. I know I think you said in one of your emails that you think the prior restructuring was important to talk about. Could you expand on that?

KM: Yeah. I mean, the colleges, like most UWs, whether they knew it or not at the time, had hit an enrollment peak in 2012. We'd been pumped up by the recession. So students were staying a little closer to home. Twenty-five percent of our enrollment was adult students, or non-traditional students who 00:09:00were coming back to get a degree. But while that was happening, high school graduating classes were declining. So you could kind of see that once enrollment started to drop off after the recession peak, you could see there was a lot farther to fall. Because high school classes were declining, right?

LEH: Yeah.

KM: Also, under the Doyle and Walker administrations, it didn't matter whether it was Democrat or Republican, we had a 300 million dollar cut to the UW base budget. So we also knew that tuition had become 60 percent of our revenue. So every student you lost was worth, or cost you a lot in terms of revenues. Much more so than was the case in the '90s, when our enrollments went down 25 percent.

So it became obvious to the colleges that we had to, we actually looked ahead and saw the problem coming. So we implemented what was called integrated enrollment management. But what I chose to call on UWMC integrated campus budget management. Because I liked the acronym ICBM. So what that was was--

LEH: Fair enough. (laughs)

KM: Well, also if they had a description of what it was, because we were kind of given permission to move money between different funds. Nothing illegal, but we could be a little bit more flexible and invest money. And we could also do some program revenue hirings, rather than making sure that we had a separate funding stream established for a position, we could say, no, no, we're going to add 50 percent to the recruiter and that will pay for itself, because we'll get more students coming in. Or we could invest money in, let's say, student tutoring. And again, we can say that will help retention, and that would [go for?] help our revenues.

So we tried some stuff between 2012 and late 2015. But it was pretty obvious that the demographic problem was becoming really pretty intense. At that time, we were really losing students. Also, more and more students were picking the technical colleges. Because from 2010 onwards, there was a lot of lobbying, basically, in the states at the techs. You know, technical education really had to be promoted because there was a skills gap in the state. Some people would say it was actually a wage gap. But anyway, there was a skills gap in the state. And we had to put more students through the technical colleges.

So by 2016 or '15, it was pretty obvious the colleges were really in sort of a deficit situation. So what they did is they completely reorganized themselves. This was called regionalization of administration. So up until then, you had thirteen campuses that basically replicated themselves. Everyone had a dean, you had thirteen deans, you had thirteen CFOs, you had thirteen 00:12:00assistant deans for academic affairs. You had thirteen of everything. Although they didn't replicate themselves perfectly. I mean, there were always slight differences on each campus. Different configurations of positions and so on.

So when we regionalized, we did two things in the colleges. One is we absolutely slashed administration. So I went from being a dean of one campus, well actually two, if you include Marshfield, to being the dean of four campuses. From Marinette, Wausau, Marshfield and Rice Lake. There must be a fourth one in there somewhere. Other regions, other deans had only three campuses. But that's what they meant by regionalization. And then we also had a campus CFO, assistant dean for financial. Um, in her case she did four campuses instead of one. And the assistant dean for academic affairs did four campuses, did the academic planning over four campuses. And all this was put together in the middle of the academic year. And it also used very sophisticated, I think, business processes, communication processes. So the colleges, I'm very proud of what the colleges did between 2015 and '16 in putting that into place.

So just myself alone, I think I figured out doing the job of three deans, I think that saved like $400,000 right there. And you know what? It was really good. The faculty weren't too happy, always. It was really good. But the financial situation just didn't get any better. I don't think our recruiting was the best under regionalization.

So the reason that's important, though, is that what we did there was we made things leaner. We also standardized them between each campus. So let's say when we finally dissolved in 2018 and Stevens Point inherited Wausau and Marshfield, inherited two campuses that really had the same administrative structure, the same staffing structure. Not necessarily the same FTE, because one was larger than the other. But basically what you did with one you could do with the other. It was really easy. It turned out to be really easy to, well, the word isn't "marriage," but change control to WSP. If you'd done that before regionalization, you would have inherited two campuses that were very different in their staffing configuration and their FTEs and it would have been a lot harder to integrate them into Stevens Point's administration. So that's kind of what I meant by saying that what went before the change of control, what went before the colleges were dissolved, actually turned out to be quite important, those two years of regionalization. And making it a much, much 00:15:00smoother process.

LEH: Do you think that there were any, maybe like lessons learned or things changed this time around as a result of regionalization?

KM: Things changed. I mean, after regionalization?

LEH: Yeah.

KM: Well I mean, we don't exist. (laughter)

LEH: But going through the first process and then this process now.

KM: Well, I'm not sure. Speaking for history, on one hand, you could say regionalization, did it go too far in terms of reducing administrative workload or not? And you know, I think some of the campuses, some of the baccalaureates [inherited?] the colleges could have maintained that rather than put some people back on the campuses, in some cases.

LEH: So maintained the levels--

KM: Staffing that we had during regionalization. See, the person who was the regional CFO for four campuses was also the campus administrator at Marshfield. Right?

LEH: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

KM: That wasn't, the administrator wasn't one person and then another person was the other. So it was very lean. It was very lean. Yeah.

LEH: How did people react to the first set of changes? And then this most recent?

KM: For regionalization in 2016, you can look at internally what the reaction was, and externally what the reaction was. I mean, internally, processes had to be made the same across all campuses. So just talking about the north, that means that if one campus used to do budgeting one way, another another, another another, there was only one way to do budgeting. (laughs) Every campus got a form. Here's what you had to put on the form. And it all came into, in our case, UW Marshfield/Wood County. Every campus, of course, had to do academic planning, curriculum planning every year. But again, exactly how that was done on each campus, we'd add local flavor to it. There was no way one person could do that for four campuses if in this case he was dealing with four different processes. So there was an internal, there was that to deal with in terms of no, we've all got to do this. We've all got to do this, the same process. You can come to a different conclusion about what array of courses to offer on your campus. But when that gets done and how that gets communicated has to be this way.

And it's amazing that people can be, you know, you have a process that goes two weeks earlier than they're used to, (laughs) or else you ask them to put something on a spreadsheet, it's amazing the resistance you can get! You know? It really is quite stunning.

And then of course it also happened that we had to cut back on academics as well as the budget continued to deteriorate. So anyway, there was an internal reaction to it, right, as you might expect. The staff really got decimated and frankly they were much more compliant. But the faculty, in some cases, kind of gave us a hard time. (laughs)

Externally, you know, the colleges campuses were owned by the counties. Or in the case of Marshfield, by the county and the city. And so what you had to do was to kind of, what I had to do was very quickly get out there and make sure that these external constituencies knew that everything, we're still going to take good care of the campuses. Both in terms of the fabric of the campus, in terms of the education that we offer the students. (laughs) Famous last words. That it wasn't going to go away. So you know, there was the external reaction as well. Which included the foundations that were affiliated with each campus. Just like they say the Madison Foundation, each campus had its own foundation as well. So you had to also assure the foundations that yeah, regionalization had nothing to do with the foundations because they're independent IRS organizations, right? So it's not like we're going to take over the foundations, or regionalize the foundations. So externally, you had to assure some people that things were not going to change.

LEH: Well I could see where with, not regionalization, but restructuring, that people might think that that's--

KM: Oh, the same issues come up. And I think some four-years dealt with that better than others. But you knew you had to get out there ahead of the game and meet with people. That was the other important thing is telephone calls. You've got to meet with people and assure them, okay, Stevens Point has taken over control of the Wausau campus. Marathon County still owns it, right? And then Marshfield/Wood County, they'd just constructed a new science building. So you really had to get out in front, just as I did in regionalization, and make sure they understood that those campuses were still going to be taken good care of, that there would still be a UW education offered on those campuses.

And then there was also, again, internal constituency as well. Faculty were nervous about tenure, and also they knew in a year's time they'd have to change over to the Stevens Point course catalog and numbering system. You 00:21:00know, some of the colleges were still proud of the fact that we used Madison's numbering system. (laughs) Right? For courses.

LEH: As opposed to, oh, it's different, the course catalog is different in Madison than it is in other--

KM: Oh, yeah.

LEH: Oh, boy. (laughs)

KM: Oh my gosh!

LEH: I'm just thinking from a catalog perspective, like from cataloging in libraries.

KM: Well, catalogs are fine. But the thing is, every year, over a hundred thousand students transfer campuses, right?

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

KM: Madison has a ninety-eight percent graduation rate, where you come here, most students stay here. But among the other campuses and between Madison and the other campuses, over a hundred thousand students transfer every year. So yes, you get different course numbers. And so you have to have what's called a transfer information system.

LEH: Yeah.

KM: But they're not going to regularize the catalog of Wisconsin soon. (laughs) I don't predict that.

LEH: Wow. That's its own debate about I guess kind of classification systems. But also not really.

KM: That's a great way of putting it. I mean, if every library in the United States agrees that this book is this Dewey decimal classification, right?

LEH: Well, yeah.

KM: Then you think Introductory Sociology should be--

LEH: Yup. But I understand that it's not necessarily going to be, just because it's the same class doesn't mean it's the same thing depending on what professor or what school you're at.

KM: Well, let's just take an example. Well obviously Economics 101 could be taught, assuming everybody in the class is going to get a PhD in economics and it could be highly mathematized with mathematical models up the wazoo, right?

LEH: Yeah.

KM: Or you could teach it a little bit more as a general education liberal arts credential, it basically introduces, right?

LEH: Right.

KM: So you could certainly see that. That varies across the country.

LEH: Yeah. So when I look at like the map of like the former colleges, where they ended up going, some of your campuses, like Marinette is the one that's like right over in the corner--

KM: It's on the border of Michigan.

LEH: Yeah, yeah. So how did those communities kind of like differ? And what are some of the potential problems coming to restructuring that are sort of like dependent on those different communities?

KM: Depended on the community, you know? I think Green Bay had, just before we, in regionalization in Marinette, I obviously spent time up there in the community. And I think the community is very proud of the campus. But 00:24:00I think Green Bay, for example, brought in a little bit more of a sort of economic development type focus. You know, here's what we've done in Green Bay and here's what we can do for Marinette. So I think some people kind of welcomed that focus a little bit. In other ways, though, they were seen as a little aggressive. You know, the foundation especially thought they're going to--because these foundations are affiliated with the campus. They don't exist by right. You know what I mean? So I think the foundation got its nose put out of joint a little bit. I think in Sheboygan, I think the foundation just dissolved, just forget it. You should check that fact, by the way. So it depended on the constituents within the community.

In Rice Lake, hey, you know, what have you got in the UW system? You've got Madison. You've got La Crosse and Eau Claire. And you've got everyone else, right? I mean, usually look at high school rank and SAT score, that's how it works out, right? So Rice Lake is like oh, we're going to be a campus of Eau Claire, that's great. This will work out. They're only forty minutes down the road. And it's a straight shot down Highway 53. So actually, that went really very smoothly. I think there were some people that came in it that actually would have gone in with Stout for two reasons. Because Rice Lake was originally a branch campus of Stout. But second of all, I think there was an economic constituency in that community that wanted Stout because it's Wisconsin's polytechnic, right? So they wanted that.

Marshfield, they were okay. I mean, Stevens Point's in the area. A lot of students go to Marshfield. Actually, slightly more students go to Eau Claire from Marshfield than go to Stevens Point. It's not exactly halfway in between. But they were okay with that.

Wausau, I mean, I still had people even a year after it coming up to me and saying, "What's that purple sign on Stewart Avenue? Did you change your colors or something?"

I said, no, we--(laughs)

LEH: Yeah.

KM: So Wausau, I think, felt a little colonized by Stevens Point. And I think Stevens Point definitely moved up there very quickly and made a strong statement that this was our campus. Wausau was ours. And I don't think that went down too well.

LEH: Oooh. Why?

KM: This is going to be embargoed for a hundred years, right? (laughter)

LEH: Hey, you can if you want to. There's no guarantee that it will exist a hundred years from now.

KM: (laughs) I'll be retired before it goes [public?]. But that's, you know Wausau, in Wausau there was a strong Madison connection. A lot of the 00:27:00support in the community for the campus. If they didn't go to UW Marathon County, they were UW Madison graduates who still saw that red sign out there. My jacket, right? They still saw that, yes, they still saw that red sign out there. It was UW Colleges Marathon County, but it was a red sign. So it didn't always go down too well. So there was different, I'm just asking a question, obviously there were different responses in different communities to what was happening.

LEH: Yeah. But at least the symbol to me brings up kind of like that idea of the Wisconsin idea. That I see people in Wisconsin talking about. Do you think that there was sort of like the mission of the former UW Colleges in like relation to some of these, to like the four-year schools, that played like any part at all into how people thought about--

KM: I think UW Colleges were in part, part of the Wisconsin idea. I mean, in Marathon County they were offering Extension courses in 1935. So they took over, in the 1930s they took over what had been the old county normal school. So Marathon County had its own teacher college. It was a small college.

LEH: Yeah. New York does that, too.

KM: Yeah. Well, there's a little interesting piece of history there, too, in regards to Point. Because people in Wausau would say, "Why didn't Wausau get the four-year campus? Why did Stevens Point get the four-year campus?" But if you look at Point, it's in the middle of a central part of the state that has no other, small counties, no other educational opportunities. So it actually became a state teachers' college. Whereas Marathon County, in a sense, was too big. It got a small college for its own county, more than anything else. So Point went the route of being a state teachers' college to a state college to a state university. Right? Whereas that line, in a sense Wausau had been an outpost of Madison. So it could never develop into anything bigger, in a sense.

LEH: Yeah.

KM: But it had been a part of, to get back to your question, part of the Wisconsin idea, I think. In that Madison saw it important to offer UW classes. So at first they actually offered them a number of centers up there, 00:30:00from Antigo [?] through to Marshfield, you had itinerant teachers, basically, who would offer courses across all that area. And then in both Marshfield and Wausau they, certainly in Wausau they occupied this old normal school on Stewart Avenue and that became, they put the sign out, that became UW Madison Extension. In fact, when I got there in 1991, even though the colleges had been independent since 1971, they were still called the Extension. And that continued up until, well into the naughts. Because some people shortened it to Stench, the Stench. But it was said with great good humor and appreciation for what, so certainly that had been the case. It was seen as part, I think that outreach effort by UW Madison. So don't ask me what the six campuses were, but Marshfield/Wood County was one. Marathon was another one. I think Manitowoc was. (laughs) Menasha. I think Fox was, too. They're all M campuses.

Oh, so what's interesting about that is that back in the early '60s, Stevens Point (phone rings) is that for Troy? Stevens Point--pick it up, if you want.

LEH: I don't want to hang up on them. I'll just turn the volume off.

KM: All right. You know, I wish I could figure out how to switch the volume off on a phone. So, what was interesting on the early '60s when Stevens Point became a state university is they actually lobbied to have Wausau and Marshfield as branch campuses. The argument was, it's a long way from Madison. On a two-way highway, certainly it was. But anyway, they were turned down at that point. So I always thought it was kind of ironic then that in 2018, they finally got the branch campuses. (laughs)

LEH: Just about. Almost seventy years too late? (laughs)

KM: Forty, fifty, fifty-five years too late. So I can't remember what your first question was. But the campus in Wausau has a long connection with Madison.

LEH: So, way back, twenty minutes ago, you said something about recruiting when you were talking about like the decline in like high school classes.

KM: Yeah.

LEH: I mean, high school recession. The recruiting. Could you expand on that?

KM: UWs hit their peak enrollment by 2011, 2012, right? Some of them knew that high school classes were declining, and some had no idea. They actually thought they were really popular. (laughs) But really it was, in the case of Stevens Point, that students were staying a little more local. You could tell that from the bump up in the ACT scores by two points. So the retention rate went up 10 percent. Two point increase in ACT scores is huge. It won't get you as high as Eau Claire or La Crosse, but anyway, it's pretty high. And the retention rates went up 10 percent. I think probably because, I think partly because of the increase in ACT scores or partly because I think kids couldn't get a job. So they stuck around in college. So I can't remember what the question was. Oh, yes. So, coming out of the recession, yeah, of course things were bound to decline. But the techs were really competing for students. And in UWMC's region in north central Wisconsin, high school graduating classes went down anywhere from 15 to 18 percent. And so it's like, you know, if you could have limited your decline in enrollment to 15 or 18 percent, you'd actually be keeping up, right?

LEH: Yeah.

KM: Because your chances of going back to where you were, they simply didn't exist. And you had a lot of competition from the techs. And you didn't have too much competition from Stevens Point, because at the time you didn't know what was happening to it. But you did have competition from other four-year campuses. I mean, four-year campuses can always reduce their, they're usually operating above their minimums in terms of admissions, so they can always, they've got somewhere to go on the downside there and admit more students.

So we did increase our recruiting. We increased from a 50 percent recruiter to a 90 percent recruiter. But it was a very, very difficult environment. And then I'm not sure it was made any better by the fact that we also then regionalized recruiters as well, and spread them pretty thinly. We relied more on technology then. In that sense, it was a really good plan. It was a little ahead of its time in communicating with students. But one thing that we found almost immediately when we sort of spread recruiters a little thinly and regionalized administration, and this was back to your question, this is the one thing that was, I think, a mistake, is that high schools didn't react very well to it. It's funny; high schools really wanted someone to call up on the local campus and to talk about a student. They didn't like having to call someone in Madison. It didn't help, I think, initially that some of the people who answered 00:36:00in Madison kind of made it known that they were in Madison. (laughs)

LEH: Yeah.

KM: So that was kind of a surprise, you know. I mean, we've all experienced this increasingly in our lives when you get a call center someplace else. Or you have to go through a robot to get to what you want to do, and all that stuff. So at the time, it was a little bit more of a surprise that high schools acted that way. So I don't think that helped with recruiting, either. So with our backs against the wall in terms of numbers, in terms of favoritism for the techs. And then those relationships, local relationships in recruiting I think were pretty, were really delicate relationships.

And honestly, the recruiting was run out of Madison. And regionally we were kind of basically told to, we'll do it, don't get involved. Even though I knew all the high schools. (laughter) So it was an interesting, yeah, you could see recruiting was maybe not doing what it should have been. And maybe you'll interview someone who has something else, another perspective on that. But I think that was, I think I mentioned that. That was the one weakness on the regional model, I think.

LEH: So speaking of those sort of like in-person services, (laughs) I have a question. I'm not sure how to phrase it.

KM: Well, just say it.

LEH: I guess like how do you choose what to prioritize in terms of in-person services?

KM: Well, I can talk for myself. I mean, it's kind of like, let's say in Marinette what needed service was the foundation. You know? They didn't have a great relationship with the campus, and they needed to be basically told--now we're getting regionalized. We have some guy coming from Wausau. And so, but I think that Michelle Boernke, who was the CFO for the region and myself, we really gave them actually better service than they had before. So what you do in each case would recognize where the fire was. (laughs)

LEH: Put it out, so to speak?

KM: And that wasn't a preexisting problem. It wasn't something that was caused by regionalization. But I think we did a good job. And in Marshfield, they were coming to the end of a capital campaign for a new STEM building. But you knew that's what had to be dealt with there because there were some 00:39:00funding issues on that. And we managed to get it done. Almost literally to the cent.

LEH: Really?

KM: Yeah. And it's really tough. The original plan was to raise money that was like three million more than they needed, and use that other money for another project on campus. But if you've raised exactly as much as you need, how are you going to pay the bills in the last three, four months before the big donor comes through with his money at the end? So that's, so Marshfield was that. And that works out. We got it done.

In Rice Lake, it was the county that needed sort of calming down a little bit. You could just recognize that. So that's who we focused on more than anything else. And then Wausau--I can only talk for myself here--but in Wausau, I sort of knew everybody anyway. So, yeah. You can literally take everything that you do in Wausau and do it in four communities. You have to recognize what's needed most in each community. And then you also have to kind of delegate it a little bit, too. Like I knew in Marinette, I had a good relationship with the chamber of commerce in Wausau. I knew that wasn't going to work out in Marinette. So the campus administrator knew lots of people there. So we agreed that she could do the chamber of commerce relationships there. Wausau had a bigger chamber of commerce, too.

Now there were things in Wausau that I had to drop. I was chairman of the United Way campaign, and I was going to be president of the board. And I had to say no, I can't do that. I pretty well left the conservatory board. Although I hung on. They wouldn't let me go. But I hung on. So there were things in Wausau I had to also draw away from. I couldn't just be Wausau's dean. So I'm getting back into some of that stuff now.

LEH: Yeah.

KM: Did I answer your question?

LEH: Yeah, yeah.

KM: Now Michelle Boernke, who was the CFO for the region, she had to also work with local foundations, and also with the local counties when it came to capital funding for the buildings and maintenance budgets and stuff. But she was great.

LEH: Yeah. So how do you integrate those sort of relationships when the system changed again and they moved into the four-year schools?

KM: I did the same things I did with regionalization. I got out ahead of the, you know, the Colleges had their own communications plan as a whole. I had my own communications plan. You've got to talk to people. And who I was going to talk to. And I also, within a day I'd talked to all the state legislators, legislators from the region as well. And I encouraged them to talk to 00:42:00me if they had any questions. (laughs) And not to, you know, just anybody. Because I could give them an honest answer that was accurate.

LEH: Um could you expand on why that's important-- why that's important to talk to state legislature members first?

KM: I talked to the county folks first. I talked to the county chair. And also each county has, well, some counties have an administrator. Wood County doesn't. At least, not a professional administrator. So you talk to those folks about the campus. And then I want to talk to legislators so they know what's happening and they know why it's happening. And again, to encourage them to talk to me. Because I can give them an accurate answer.

You know, occasionally things come up. Like I once had a legislator come to my office and say why didn't this veteran get admitted? And I said, well, it's state law. We can't, if you've moved here from Washington state, we can't give you in-state tuition, right? I mean, it's your law. It's your law, Jerry. (laughs) You can't ask me to break it. Or there was the one time there was strange things going on up at student fees. I know that was a statewide thing, where legislators are saying, you know, how much do you pay in fees at Madison here, a thousand bucks?

LEH: Not quite. I'm a graduate student. So I pay less. But for out-of-state students, I think--

KM: In-state. In-state.

LEH: In-state, a thousand?

KM: I don't think it's too much or we could work that out. But it's five hundred bucks at Stevens Point. So some legislator said, this can't be. But they didn't understand the ramifications of, they didn't understand how the fees were set. And they didn't understand what the consequences would be if you cut it from five hundred dollars to two hundred dollars in terms of, well, some of that fee is paying for capital costs, because students have said they wanted a new union, so they took on some of that cost themselves. You like the Blue Golds football team or whatever, you know? I mean, some of that fee is paying for athletics. It's paying for clubs.

LEH: Right.

KM: So I think it's important that legislators have, your local legislators have accurate information. Now, the colleges of course had a central communication team as well.

LEH: So I guess speaking of like--

KM: I wrote columns about every other month for the local newspapers, too.

LEH: Oh, yeah. I read some of them. Yeah.

KM: Oh, you did some research on me.

LEH: Well, yeah. (laughter) Of course.

KM: What are you doing graduate work in?

LEH: Library science.

KM: Oh. Great.

LEH: So yeah, I'm in my zone here. What was I going to say? Oh, yeah. So like clubs and athletics. Do you think that like those things, how do those sort of things pay for themselves? Do they?

KM: So one of the issues that came up with the merger, no, it's not a merger, it's a change of control with the four years, was can you have a D1 school that has a JVC program? Junior college program? Because they weren't Division 3, they were junior college. But can you have that? So that was an issue that came up. So yeah, so the students at Wausau and Marshfield are paying seg fees. What are they paying them for? Are they going to support Stevens Point athletics? Main campus athletics? Or are they going to get some return on their local campus? Same thing with theater as well. UWMC has a strong theater tradition. Well that's pretty well ending this year. Well, there's no funding for it.

LEH: Where did it go?

KM: We just had the last play last week. Playboy of the Western World. And I think they're doing Godspell as a musical next. And the theater professor is retiring and that's it. If you look at numbers, look at enrollment numbers, I don't think they're going to replace that person. But this is another element of the colleges, too. They were part of the cultural life of the community. And as dean I would also, I would make sure that people were welcomed on campus. So we'll see how that works out. We'll see how that ends up working out in the end. Can those types of programs, like theater program, music program, can that be maintained? But yeah, the students on the campus have set their seg fees and they maintain theater programs. But not the theater faculty. They maintained let's say supplies and expenses for the theater, so that they could have a theater experience.

LEH: Do you think that's a potential like benefit for students now? That they have, in terms of faculty, that they have access to more potential 00:48:00opportunities at Stevens Point?

KM: Well right now they have to drive to Stevens Point.

LEH: Yeah.

KM: And you know, a lot of students have, you know, it's easy to drive to local campuses if that's where you take your classes. So Point's, by the time you get in the car and out of the car, forty minutes. I know, because I commute there every day. (laughs)

LEH: Yeah, that's pretty far.

KM: One day, one day as dean of the four campuses, I drove 624 miles.

LEH: Wow. Oh my God. How?

KM: I started at Wausau. And I'd arranged a foundation meeting in Marshfield at seven AM. Okay?

LEH: Okay.

KM: And then I was to speak to the county board in Rice Lake at seven PM. But meantime, Marinette put a meeting in the middle of the day I had to go to for potential residence hall there. So I went from Wausau to Marshfield to Marinette to Rice Lake and back to Wausau.

LEH: Oh my God.

KM: I put on so many miles, the state auditor noticed me and said, what's going on with this guy?

LEH: They thought you were embezzling?

KM: What's going on with this guy? That was only a 350-dollar day.

LEH: Yeah. That's not enough to embezzle. (laughter)

KM: So yeah, you know, actually it wasn't, it really wasn't sustainable from a physical point of view. I still marvel at the fact that I actually could still be doing that.

LEH: Oh, dealing with four--

KM: Traveling. All that travel.

LEH: Yeah. Well, because they're not, your campuses were not necessarily the closest to each other.

KM: Well, I'll tell you a fact. I'll tell you a fact. If you live in Madison, you really forget that Wisconsin opens up towards the north and that it is a big distance from Rice Lake to Marinette.

LEH: Yeah, right. Because there's no road that goes like--

KM: Well, yes. I have a [twenty-minute?]--

LEH: Really? There's like a bit of lake in there somewhere.

KM: But it's just a big state up north.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah.

KM: And when I first moved to Wausau in '91, Highway 29 from Green Bay to Eau Claire was a two-lane highway. You know, it was like a country road. It was well-paved, but it was a country road.

LEH: Yeah. I have a similar, well, is it two-lane? Is the north way two-lane? It probably is.

KM: One lane each way.

LEH: Upstate, yeah. Upstate New York has a similar thing.

KM: Oh, you're from New York?

LEH: Yeah.

KM: Oh, whereabouts?

LEH: Brooklyn.

KM: Oh, Brooklyn!

LEH: Yeah.

KM: That's not necessarily upstate, is it? (laughs)

LEH: No, no. My dad lives upstate.

KM: Oh, my daughter is a high school teacher in the Bronx.

LEH: Oh, nice.

KM: She lives on the Upper West Side.

LEH: Oh, wow. Damn.

KM: Damn. (laughter) That's where my wife is from.

LEH: The Upper West Side?

KM: Yeah.

LEH: It's fancy.

KM: Upper West? Well, it's not as fancy as the East Side. Now there's a place that's changed. I mean, when I went to the Upper West Side in 1978? You would hear voices all night. If you were there for a couple of weeks, you'd hear gunshots at least once. When you left, let's say you went there at Christmas and you went across the park to Metropolitan, at five o'clock you would run back on the south end of the reservoir with everybody else because you did not want to be in the park--

LEH: After the sun goes down.

KM: After dark. It was like Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

LEH: Oh, yeah. Well, Prospect Park could be pretty scary. Just because it's huge. So.

KM: So that's changed enormously now. I mean, the amount of gentrification that's taken place in the Upper West Side. But my mother-in-law moved in there in 1963.

LEH: Rent control. Yeah.

KM: Which my daughter inherited.

LEH: What? You inherit rent control?

KM: Yeah. Yeah. It's a government, it's government housing.

LEH: Wow. Really? Man, one of my neighbors had that and she paid like, because she had the rent control type that like doesn't, there was like no accounting for inflation in like hers. So it was like insanely low. It was like three hundred or four hundred dollars. I was like, wow. That's insane.

KM: So I'm a big fan of New York City. I mean, I feel like I've been there through thick and thin.

LEH: Yeah.

KM: Nineteen seventy-eight, it was a much, much rougher place. That was just after they'd basically been told by Washington to go drop dead if it wanted any federal funding. (laughs)

LEH: Oh, funding. Yeah. Yep.

KM: So my wife is from there. And she came to Canada. And then she's here. Yeah.

LEH: That's a route. Yeah.

KM: Whereabouts in Upstate New York does your father live?

LEH: He is in, let's see. He was outside of Ithaca. And now he's in this town, Elizabethtown, which is like 45 minutes from Lake Placid. It's very, it's like five hours, I went to college even like further than that.

KM: Canton or something?

LEH: What?

KM: Whereabouts?

LEH: Lake Placid?

KM: No, where did you go to college?

LEH: Oh, Geneseo, it's the state, it's a very rural state school.

KM: Oh, so Canton, which I think is right up there in the part of where Canada almost--

LEH: What is?

KM: Canton. C-a-n-t-o-n? Isn't there one up there? Well, anyway, Placid, too. I've been to lake Placid.

LEH: yeah, yeah. It's near Lake Placid. (laughs) That's how remote it is. But he likes it. So. All right. Do you have anything else that is super important, must go on the record? Anything that sticks out?

KM: No, I've probably been all too jumbled. But no, I think I said some things I shouldn't have said. But that's okay. I mean, it's part of the record.

LEH: Yeah. And you can always--

KM: No, because I'll be retired by the time anybody listens to this.

LEH: Okay. (laughter) All right. All right. Okay.

KM: Well, thank you very much.

LEH: Yeah.