Interview with Casey Nagy

LEH: So could you say your name and then spell out your last name?

CN: Sure. Casey Nagy. N-a-g-y. Should I sit closer?

LEH: Yeah. Slightly. Okay. All right. So why don't we start with what is your position in the UW system and your history.

CN: Okay. I am the interim vice provost for Extension and Public edia. And that means in effect during the period of time we were planning for the transition of Wisconsin Public Media and Cooperative Extension and the Department of Labor Education from UW Extension colleges into UW Madison, I was the person charged with managing that merger. And as we accomplished the merger physically this last July first of '19, I'm now focused on issues about more fully integrating Extension into campus and identifying ways in which the campus and Extension can explore new kinds of collaboration, new kinds of synergies, that enable Madison and Madison researchers to more effectively communicate with stakeholders throughout the state. So that's the current focus of activity, along with continuing to manage integration issues relating to everything from governance to how they handle different aspects of volunteers. Those are dissimilar from the ways the campus does it. You need to align them. There's a lot of alignment going on now. But that's the gist of my current appointment.

My employment history here at the university starts back in the early '90s. I worked in the legal office as an attorney for about three and a half years, and then was asked to become chief of staff to the provost, which was John Wiley at the time. I did that for seven years. And then when John Wiley became chancellor, he asked me to be chief of staff to the chancellor. So I did that for a period of seven years. When he retired, I returned to the legal office for about half a year before I moved to Yale and worked at Yale advising the president of a new college they were building in Singapore for about five years. And I recently returned to Madison about two and a half years ago, and was doing small projects for the Vice Chancellor for Research. And I was asked by the provost and chancellor to lead this merger. That's a thumbnail sketch.

LEH: All right. What made you return to Madison?

CN: Well, it's a complicated question. When I left, I departed with some measure of ill will toward the incoming administration. And I had no intentions of returning to Madison where I had spent twenty years. With the elapse of time, I remembered fondly why I liked working here. I liked working with the people in Wisconsin, particularly in Madison. And an opportunity arose. My wife is a microbiologist and she was recruited to run the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. And we decided now would be, or then, two and a half years ago, would be a good time to return to Wisconsin. And we've been glad that we did.

LEH: Okay. So why don't we start with the initial, the first restructuring phase and how that phase influenced Public Media.

CN: Just Public Media, or Extension?

LEH: And the Extension.

CN: Okay. So originally, the restructuring was announced in November of '17, I believe. And immediately, like within a week, I was asked to at that time run the proposed merger of Cooperative Extension into Madison. Because as the restructuring was initially announced, that was the only entity coming to Madison, the statewide Cooperative Extension Program.

In March of the following year, the decision was made to also designate Wisconsin Public Radio and Public TV and the Department of Labor Education for assignment to Madison. So I folded those two additional entities into the planning for Cooperative Extension.

Within a week of my appointment, so this would still be in December of '17, I believe, yes, I put together a steering committee of people throughout, in key positions throughout Madison campus and Extension, from Finance, Budget, HR, Risk Management, things like that, so that we could have key people in the conversation about all the different areas we were going to have to address in order effectuate the merger. And we met weekly until, at least for 00:06:00six months. And then we moved to a biweekly or bimonthly calendar. And our early priority was by July first of '18 to transition, there was one other piece of the transition. Conference centers and Bulk Mailing was also a part of Extension, UW Colleges and Extension. And we set a timeline for July first of '18 to transition that group. It was about sixty-odd people. The Pyle Center, Lowell Center, Upham Woods, a small camp up in The Dells, and then the Bulk Mailing Services for campus.

And the reason we designated that for July first was it was relatively contained as an operation. And we thought it would be a good beta test for all the things we needed to do to effectively merge an entity coming in from a completely different organization with a completely different processes and technology before we undertook the larger transitions of Cooperative Extension and Public Media. Together, that's something on the order of eleven hundred employees. And we thought doing a smaller merger first would give us insight into areas we might anticipate being more difficult and that we would have to plan for accordingly or to schedule out all the different operational transitions that would have to be calendared. That worked pretty effectively. Other than IT, we transitioned fully by July first of '18. For a variety of reasons we can discuss if you're interested, the IT transition took a lot longer. Mostly because there were three different entities involved. And getting them to talk to one another and getting them to actually integrate the technology involved was a time-consuming process. But it didn't inhibit operations. So I considered that merger largely accomplished by July of '18.

The planning for the mergers of Extension and Public Media were pretty intricate. And I established two working groups immediately from the steering team. And they were concentrating on HR issues and Budget and Finance issues. Because we had to figure out how to populate the Madison campus technology and programming with not only these additional eleven hundred people, but 00:09:00all the work that they were doing. And that, amazingly enough, was incredibly intricate and required a very systematic approach to each of thousands of transactions we would need to do. We needed to script very precisely, because you could only do one transactional change, for instance, in HR, if you had already done certain things in Budget and Finance. And they were interlocked like that all the way down the line.

So early on we developed a matrix of every single transaction that we were going to have to deal with. And then we calendared in what sequence they were going to take place. And we monitored that on a weekly basis, and we put it up on the website so that everybody could see what was happening. And that basically became the game plan as we moved forward to the planned transition date of July first, 2019. And in the end, we were able to successfully transition all of those functions and all those personnel by July first of 2019.

There was a parallel process that I'll describe briefly. I did not want my steering team to be a governance entity. Because governance has a whole different calendar associated with how things are discussed, how things are done. And I couldn't wait that long. I couldn't encumber the process with that feature in addition to just the operational planning.

So I consulted with all seven governance groups, the three in Extension and the four on the Madison campus. And we all agreed that we would create a parallel steering committee comprising governance representatives. And initially I met with that group once a week. And then it tailed off to once every other week, once every month. The purpose being to apprise them in real time of what we were doing, of any governance implications we perceived, but inviting them to gauge on their own whether there were issues about what we were doing that they had concerns about. And that worked pretty effectively. We never really ran into any governance opposition on what we were planning. And I would then continue to meet with the executive governance groups, probably on a monthly basis to update them and field their questions. And never really encountered any difficulties working with them. But it was important to have a governance component. I just didn't want it to all be lumped into a single approach because it would have been too slow and too inflexible for what we needed.

LEH: Yeah. Because you are, this is in, there's your timeline and then the 00:12:00overarching timeline of restructuring, right?

CN: Right. We tried to remain faithful to that to the extent possible. Which is why July the first of '18, we transitioned that first group, Conference Centers and Mailing Services, because the broader restructuring involving the two-year colleges and the four-year comprehensives was originally calendared to take place on July first of '18. It quickly became apparent that was never going to happen. But we wanted to do what we could to respect that projected date. Which was basically made up by the leaders of this overall project. But you know, you have to set a date somewhere, so they set that one.

More realistically, we then targeted July first of '19 for the full transition. Because that's when everybody was going to transition. And we didn't want to be an outlier if we could avoid it. But throughout, like I did try to necessarily stress to different leadership in UW system that we were on the calendar. We were on, and we would do the best we could to meet their projections. But if the project complexities required us to move differently, then we were going to do that. I wasn't going to try to push everything into a relatively artificial dateline. As it turned out, we were able to meet that dateline. But it was because an awful lot of people worked pretty hard to make that happen. And so we transitioned the same time as the two-years did into the four-year colleges.

One other feature of the overall planning, because I was leading the Madison mergers, I sat on the statewide system restructuring committee meeting with the provosts and other representatives from all the other affected institutions in two years. And we would meet once a month and go over their timeline, hear their issues. We would report on what we were doing at Madison. But for the most part, the priority in those meetings was meeting the accreditation issues affecting all the transitioning two-years. And that didn't pertain to Madison at all. We weren't dealing with any student issues. So much of that effort was about reaccreditation. And only in the latter months turned to issues more operational in character. And I don't know where they are on that. I suspect many of them are still grappling with operational transition questions.

LEH: Yeah. So could you expand on sort of the timelines and those relationships 00:15:00with the institutions?

CN: For the four-years or the two-years?

LEH: For the two-years, I'm thinking. Yeah.

CN: So, when the restructuring was announced, obviously you were moving a number of two-year colleges into a number of four-year institutions. And the immediate challenge became how are you going to accredit the new educational environments? And so those timelines very much reflected the consultation that system administrators were having with the accrediting body, which said if you get this information to us by such and such a date, we'll be able to turn around and tell you what additional things you need to do to receive accreditation, or tell you you're not going to get there. The reason that was important was without accreditation established, the fear was student enrollment would decline precipitously. Because students would be anxious about the benefits of enrolling in an unaccredited institution. And this was going to affect every single institution in Wisconsin outside of Madison. And that, obviously, was a big concern. So that was, as I understand it, one of the key drivers on the establishment of these July first dates for transition, and then the benchmarking of all the data they needed to accomplish in order to get accredited. And they had to arrange for, how to make certain that financial aid was going to be available. How to make certain that students were going to get enrolled and housed and have their tuition bills on time. And all those things that go into administering a program. They had to figure out how to make all those work while they were simultaneously merging all these entities. And that was a huge lift. So.

LEH: Yeah. Definitely. Could you talk a little bit more about the questions that people had about Public Media and that transition?

CN: Yeah. I think both Public Media and Cooperative Extension were, they were on a spectrum of eager to accepting, I would say most people were in that part of the continuum. I didn't hear any real opposition or how could you do this to us, that kind of thing. I didn't get that sense at all. I think there was an immediate perception that being aligned with UW Madison was 00:18:00value-added. And I think the same is true of the Department of Labor Education. I keep omitting it because it's a really small department. and it moved into the Division of Continuing Studies as an academic department. But there was no opposition. There was unease about what this might mean. I think there's probably still some unease as we now plan for more fully integrating these operations into campus. But there's real enthusiasm, too. And so the feedback, you know, and I put out the website. I regularly communicated with the affected personnel. Invited them to ask me personally by email or phone any questions, or share any concerns or anxieties they had. Very few people took advantage of that. But I thought it was important to make the offer.

So, for the most part, I think people just worked to make the mergers happen as smoothly as possible. And with the least disruption to operations. And I think we managed to accomplish all of that without any operational disruption in the end. Nobody's operations were disrupted.

I think there remains some uncertainty or unease out among the statewide stakeholder groups who work closely with Extension about what this new merger means. And so we're, from the outset we've been talking to people that we weren't going to change Extension once it came to Madison. That conversation continues. As you get further out from Madison, you know, people have a more skeptical view of what Madison offers in the way of resources or things of that nature. And one of the benefits of working more closely with Extension and Public Media now is we have a real opportunity to begin changing that narrative by partnering with entities they're more familiar with and with whom they have good associations. And that's one of the reasons everybody was interested in the opportunity to have Public Media and Extension come back to the campus. Does that answer your question?

LEH: Yeah. Definitely. I'm just curious, why do you think that local communities, especially as you get further away from Madison, are so suspicious?

CN: Well, that's a complicated question. But it's not new to the current environment. There's a great book by one of our professors here, 00:21:00Kathy Cramer, called The Politics of Dissent. And the book was written more about the 2016 election. But the foundation for the book was work she was doing while I was in the chancellor's office, we actually sponsored it, where she went out into local communities and talked to people. And asked, what are your perceptions of UW Madison? Why do you have those perceptions? And a number of complicated and interrelated factors go into it. But in general I think there's less awareness of what it means to have a campus with the, of the caliber of UW Madison, and why it takes the kind of resources it does to keep it at the level of achievement that people have come to expect. When you're in northern Wisconsin and you're dependent on whatever sources of economy are available in that region and they fluctuate greatly and your family income is whatever, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars a year, and you have an economics professor insistent on some several hundred thousands of dollars a year for a salary, there's a cognitive dissonance. And it's nobody's fault. It's just that they're different worlds and different perceptions of what's important. So I think as you move farther out into different regions in the state, it becomes easier to have those misunderstandings or those misperceptions. And that's a big part of it.

I think another part of it is where there is familiarity with the educational landscape, it's more local to the two-year colleges or the four-year comprehensives. And that's a difference in scale from UW Madison. And when they see UW Madison's demand for resources relative to what they see more locally, again you have a bit of cognitive dissonance over what's needed to actually excel at the level Madison does.

And then finally there's, we're a great research university. What does that mean to people who have no direct relationship with that kind of endeavor? Not much. And so there's just a general lack of mutual understanding that I 00:24:00think feeds deeply into the dynamic that we're discussing. But again, I think the best piece I've ever read was Kathy Cramer's examination of some of those underpinnings. And I recommend it to anybody who wants to know more about them. Why that friction or skepticism exists.

And the final thing is I think for a long time there's, the Wisconsin idea has always been a feature of this university. And there is a keen interest in making the benefits of the research done here touch upon different sectors of the state. But there's also a certain arrogance of viewpoint that we know what the problem is, we know how to fix it, here's what you need to do. Rather than engaging more directly with people about their perceptions of the issues they're concerned about, and their ideas about how the university might be helpful to solving them.

It's part of what we're eager to begin shifting as we now work with Extension, who has different kinds of relationships with people and a different kind of rapport, so that they feel more engaged from the outset when issues come up about groundwater contamination or things like that, where our researchers could be of great benefit. But we need to be more effective in communication with the impacted populations. So I think this is an opportunity to begin addressing the skepticism that exists, and more fully realize the benefits of the Wisconsin idea in ways that they will appreciate more readily than they perhaps do at this point. It's a bit of an abstract notion to a lot of people. However much effort goes into it. And I think as we find opportunities to engage more directly, that could change. And I think that would be a good thing.

LEH: So I guess sort of like how do you assess needs and get people to want to come to you from these communities? And some of them are like very rural or far away.

CN: Mm hmm. Well, that's the key. That's the challenge. And we're actually spending a lot of time right now developing a game plan for doing exactly that. You don't want to do it too fast. You want to look for key opportunities that demonstrate to people what's possible now that there are closer collaborations possible between the Madison campus and Extension. And this will 00:27:00involve using Extension personnel on the ground to elicit from local stakeholders, local communities, local producer groups, what are the issues affecting you? What's inhibiting your ability to realize the kind of success you think is important, whether it's economic or community-oriented or health? And once that issue identification develops, we have the opportunity to say okay, so how might we access some of the resources available at the university to address these problems? What are your thoughts, "you," the impacted populations? And we start putting people in communication with one another. That's how we're going to change and make more available community input on issues.

And I don't want to suggest this doesn't happen already. There are any number of collaborations already going on between Extension and Madison-based researchers. But it's more ad hoc than it is systemic. And what we'd like to do is create a much more visible platform so people can see how it works and can imagine dealing with their issues in similar ways. And in that, we begin to invite much more directly the kind of community input that I think will be important in the long-term. Extension already gets this. And so what we're hoping to do is have Extension work with Madison so that the broader community begins to get the same kind of input and can engage in addressing these more localized issues more effectively. But it is happening now. It's just, as I described it to my Extension colleagues, right now it's happening all over. And nobody knows, unless they're directly impacted or directly involved. We need to make it easy for people to see everything that's happening so they can begin imagining this being a model for addressing the kinds of issues they have locally. And once we begin to do that and we start making quite accessible the illustrations of these kinds of collaborations, then I'm hopeful that we'll see more and more demand for them, and there will be more and more opportunities to deliver on the Wisconsin idea, but in ways that people will understand more fully as being an extension of the university. That's the dream.

LEH: Yeah. So why don't we move to sort of like programming, like public programs in local communities. How did or did not restructuring 00:30:00change how Public Media is dealt with in some of these communities?

CN: I assume you mean and Extension when you ask these questions.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah.

CN: Not at all. So important background piece, when the restructuring was announced, Cooperative Extension was in the latter part of a three-year internal reorganization. Dramatic reorganization. So that was going on independent of the announcement of the restructuring. As a result of the restructuring, no impact took place on programming. Neither on the planning for it or the delivery. Because in part, I had the support of the chancellor and the provost on insisting we were not going to look at this transition as a change opportunity. There were people advocating to say well, since Extension's coming to Madison, why don't we break it down, see what we like and rebuild it? And I said, that's not going to happen. We are transitioning a fully functioning Extension. And if three, four, five years down the road, the institution wants to have a conversation about how best to realize the mission of Extension in association with the broader mission of the campus, that's perfectly fine. We're not going to do that as part of a transition. And so that helped insulate any programming from an impact as a result of restructuring. We really wanted it to be seamless in terms of the perceptions in the state. And for the most part, we succeeded.

Public Media, same. No impact whatsoever. Because it's Public Media, they have their own ethical standards and guidelines, which pretty carefully dictate what they can and can't do, and what kinds of interference they can harbor from host organizations. So just as Extension respected that, so did the Madison campus. So a lot of the discussions were more about alignment and making certain that avenues of communication were open should issues develop, because Madison is frankly scrutinized differently than other, than the former UW Colleges and Extension. But operationally, in terms of programming and things of that nature, I would say there's been little or no impact on either Extension or Public Media.

Now as we go forward, some of these things we're talking about may in some ways build onto existing programming so that additional features are incorporated that reflect the new association with the Madison campus or a broadened set of priorities. But those are things that are just under discussion now because they're parts of the campus, just like any other school, college or division. So I would separate the kinds of conversations that are occurring now and more in the future from those that occurred during restructuring. Because it was very intentional not to impact programming. Does that respond to your question?

LEH: Yeah. Yes. Definitely. Any response is a great response.

CN: Okay. All right. (laughter)

LEH: So, yeah. So you mentioned the Department of Labor Education.

CN: Mm hmm.

LEH: Could you talk more about that? Its relationship with either the college's restructuring, both, and then the transition that it went through?

CN: Sure. It's a department with a fairly singular identity. Which from a certain viewpoint seems curious. It's an academic department with faculty. But their theme is labor advocacy. And so while they take a scholarly approach as faculty toward issues of labor, they have a very decided relationship with labor advocacy, labor organization, as opposed to a more abstract perspective on labor. It's a pretty small department. I think it has six or seven faculty. And initially they were part of our merger planning. And then when it was decided that they would go to the Division of Continuing Studies, they were small enough that they felt they could navigate their transition independently of this larger effort, but in direct consultation with the Division of Continuing Studies. So that's more or less what they did. And, where necessary, we provided, or I provided, the kind of support and background transactional support that they needed. But for the most part, they actually stepped outside of our process relatively early on and worked directly with Continuing Studies. And 00:36:00that's where they are now.

I don't know that they had any interruption with their course offerings or anything else they were doing as a result of the restructuring. If they did, it was relatively nominal. I think they were pretty much able to continue doing business as they would have otherwise. They did have some remodeling going on that I think did impact their operations. But that had nothing to do with the restructuring. That was independent of that. Other than that, I can't tell you a lot about how they went about their conversations with Division of Continuing Studies other than that they did so in the end successfully.

LEH: And why move them away from Extension?

CN: Yeah. Great question. Why do any of this? The simple answer is, the UW system administration has no capacity to play host to an academic department. And so it needed to go somewhere. It's already located in Madison. And it was convenient to put them in the Division of Continuing Studies. It was not our decision that they would come to Madison. Once it was announced that they would, we had to figure out what the best home would be. It turned out, I think they both agreed that Continuing Studies was a good host. But other than that, as with the announced mergers on all fronts, people simply had to make the best of what they were told they needed to do. We were not involved in any of the planning for the restructuring.

LEH: Yeah. I guess I just wonder like why is the Department of Labor Education a good area for Continuing Studies? But something like the Cooperative Extension, that is in a way like sort of contingent to Continuing Studies is like not--

CN: Well, first of all, different missions. Extension doesn't do academic programming or for-credit programming or anything like that. And while DCS has an outreach component, it really has a different underlying mission than Extension does. So that never would have made sense. Could the 00:39:00Department of Labor Education have stayed within the mantle of Extension? Again, they're an academic department. And at the time, Extension had no capacity to, you have to meet all kinds of criteria to supervise an academic department. They have none of those qualifications. So I think somebody apart from me decided here's where we're going to put them and make it work. I don't know that there was, they wouldn't fit, theoretically could they fit in L&S or something like that? Conceivably. But L&S is already by far the largest college on campus and probably doesn't need yet another department to have to oversee. So I really can't tell you what the underlying conversation was. Because I wasn't in that. That's about all I can tell you.

LEH: Yeah. What do you think were the most like important conversations that you were having with people involved in Extension? Was it more community members' concerns, internal, because I know you said that people were pretty much on the spectrum of like either okay to happyover moving to Madison. If there were concerns, like what were they and where were they prioritized?

CN: So, great questions. There are different pieces to that. I think the most important conversations I was having would be with the governance groups to keep them apprised of things and answer their questions. And my steering team, because they were my direct conduit into all of the offices in Extension and all of the offices in UW Madison that had to be part of this planning exercise. I mean, we're talking probably 350, 400 people working on different facets of this merger, because of the complexities. And so having ways in which to remain in fairly constant communication with different spheres of activity was crucial. And so I would sit in on a lot of the meetings with Budget and Finance working groups or HR working groups or others to make certain I knew how they 00:42:00were approaching the discussion of what issues on our matrix, and ensure that they were making timely progress. Because if they weren't, it was going to inhibit progress in other areas. As I mentioned, they had to be scripted pretty carefully. So much of my attention was in ensuring that the necessary conversations were taking place across the spectrum. And they were making progress in a way that was faithful to the timeline we had established. And then in instances where they couldn't make progress, recalibrate, so that people weren't ending up with nowhere to go with what they were charged with doing. I think they could still be using time productively, too, to plan. So those were constant, daily type conversations. I think those were hugely important.

In terms of the stakeholders, there were times I went out and met directly with different county representatives. But for the most part, we relied on like the Wisconsin Counties Association. Their executive body. Because I don't have the time, didn't have the time, to go meet with 72 different counties, three different tribes, and talk through all these issues. What we tried to do was to create regular communication about what we were doing, the reassurance that it isn't going to have any effect on what you expect from Extension. Public Media kind of does what it does, so it wasn't relevant to this discussion. And when they raised concerns or expressed skepticisms, we tried to address them directly. Mostly I relied on the Dean of Extension and others in his senior leadership team to do that because they had the relationships. They were in a better position to reassure people than me coming in, who they don't know, and saying, "I'm from Madison. I'm here to tell you it's all going to be all right." Great. They're really going to listen to that.

LEH: (laughs) Yeah.

CN: So I didn't see that was a particularly effective approach. And I think the approach that we did adopt was as good as any. We tried to keep people apprised of developments. And mostly sought to reassure them that nothing's changing in terms of the delivery of services you've come to expect. And nothing did.

Public Media, there really wasn't any concern from stakeholders. Because Public Media has a really established customer base. And as long as they're getting the programming they're looking for, they don't really care where it lives. There was no concern. I never heard a concern expressed about Public Media coming to Madison. Other than before the decision was made to assign it to 00:45:00Madison, there was discussion in the Capitol and, I believe, in the Regents, worried that Public Media, if it went to Madison, would become some kind of ultraliberal spokespiece for UW Madison. Obviously not true. Hasn't happened. Would never happen. But there were some who, as reported to me--I don't know any of this directly--had voiced that kind of concern. But eventually the decision was made to move it to Madison. And I think that's the right decision. It already lives on the campus. It's always been in Vilas. But you know, everything has a political undertone, and that was part of it.

LEH: Yeah, I'm sure, especially with Public Media, because people think like their tax dollars--

CN: Right.

LEH: Or public education, their tax dollars are going towards it.

CN: Well, yes. Although they're largely supported by donors and things. But they do get GPR. And you know, there are many people who think National Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Radio have a liberal orientation or inclination. I mean, that's no mystery. I think it's inaccurate, but it's a perception. And this is just another layer of that perception that they would not be as capable of maintaining an independent perspective if they moved to Madison as they had previously enjoyed. That's simply not true. They would never, I mean, they have ethical guidelines and requirements that preclude them from the kind of influence that I just described. They can't, they wouldn't be licensed to operate if there was that kind of intrusion. But people don't know that, and they form their opinions based on what they see or think. But I think it will all be fine. People will realize that nothing has changed about their programming.

LEH: Yeah, I think that's an interesting concern. It's something I would have never thought about.

CN: It is. And we talked about it. I had to, I mean, if there was any unease on the part of Public Media, it was, new boss. Are they going to try to make us change? Because that's going to create issues, ethical and professional. And I reassured them that nobody's looking to change how you do what you 00:48:00do. Certainly not going to change what you do in the way of programming. And in fact will become a champion for your independent discretion as to what you do with your programming. But should you invite in a speaker who's controversial or do a program that's controversial, we would expect to be advised that you were going in this direction. And there may, this campus has a very established tradition of academic freedom. It's always possible that something might be so incendiary you would have to question whether it was wise to do it. But the likelihood that this campus would intervene and say "You can't do that" to a public program is vanishingly small. But I had to reassure them of that. Because they're moving from Extension to Madison and they don't know the rules. They don't know the traditions. So that was the one area of unease, I think, that we did discuss. But as I've indicated, I think we allayed that anxiety.

LEH: Mm hmm. Do you think that, so, do you think that the sort of traditions and legacies surrounding Extension were able to be like integrated into Madison pretty well? How are those--

CN: It's a good question. It's much more nuanced than you might think, and it's part of what we're working to address now. Extension has had a way of doing business for eighty years. Some of the ways that they do business and some of the ways that their customers and partner organizations expect them to do business probably have to be reshaped a little bit to reflect contemporary realities and the kinds of standards that Madison is expected to follow. And this is an issue we're addressing, for instance, in how volunteers are allowed to participate in programming under the aegis of UW Madison Extension. Principally through 4-H, but not exclusively. They rely on fifteen to twenty thousand volunteers a year. Most of whom have had appropriate background checks, but not all. Most of whom have some kind of monitoring, but not all. And that's not acceptable in this day and age. And so one of the very strong 00:51:00efforts we've been making throughout the transition and coming to fruition now is putting in place a mechanism for much more closely ensuring that volunteers are appropriately examined for any reason that we should not allow them to participate in particular with youth, but other vulnerable populations. Will it be a failsafe? Nothing's a failsafe. But we need to do better than was possible before. And so we have spent a lot of time and attention on that.

That will change. As you described it, some of the traditions of Extension, because we'll still have volunteers. They'll still be doing the things they were before. But we will ask more of them in order to let them participate. That will be a change. So part of the strategy also is how do we implement this without offending or alienating people who are giving freely of their time and have for years, and now Madison's coming in and telling them they've got to go through all these hoops in order to do the kinds of things that they just want to do. That's a challenge. And it's one of the things we're most sensitive about, because we don't want to offend or alienate anybody. But at the same time, it's unacceptable to me and to the campus that we would have people taking youth out on camping trips or teaching them how to shoot guns or whatever it might be who aren't appropriately credentialed and appropriately screened to make sure that they don't represent an identifiable risk. It's the right thing to do. But it does represent a change. I think that's potentially the biggest area where, as you describe it, a tradition might be altered.

The other is in our relationships with the counties and others, it's often been relatively nonspecific in terms of who has responsibility for what. And again, that creates ambiguities, and ambiguities create risk. So as a matter of business practice, we're bringing more clarity and precision to county contracts and other statements of who's responsible for what when these things take place. You have a lot of fluidity in terms of Extension personnel and volunteers and county personnel around things from county fairs to you name it, whatever little local activity's taking place. And people need to think a little more clearly about when something's happening, who's in control. Who's 00:54:00responsible. Who has the authority to ensure things are done appropriately. Because absent that kind of clarity, things get mixed and you create risk. So that's another area where we're trying to modify the tradition to the extent that people are more intentional about, more mindful about who's responsible when we're doing things. Because it just makes for a safer, more ordered environment. So that's the other principal area I'd say we're likely to change somewhat the way things used to be done.

LEH: Yeah. I think, too, that's like might be a difference in sort of the level of like, I don't know, I can't think of the word right now. That's sort of like the level of implied trust that people have in like sort of like the community members that they're dealing with.

CN: No, you're exactly right. That is exactly how you could describe it. Back in the day, Extension agreements were a handshake over a fence. Very informal. That persists.

LEH: Really?

CN: Yeah. And the sense of implied trust or earned trust is hugely important. But it's not enough if you're going to be scrutinized in the event something happens for what you did to ensure as much as possible that those kinds of things wouldn't happen. And as I've been very candid with our Extension colleagues, Madison is held to a different standard than Extension was. So we have to bring practices as much as possible into a framework that is consistent with the model that Madison is expected to exhibit. And there's some work to be done in that respect. And it's ongoing. Because you don't want to overwhelm people with it, but you need to let them know that change is coming. It's not going to effect what we do, but it's going to effect in some ways how we agree to what we do. And that's just inevitable. But I'm trying to make sure that it's not threatening or offensive as much as possible. But it's a great question. It's one of the things I've wrestled with since the day I accepted this role was the worry about how much we were going to need to change and how we 00:57:00could do that without alienating all of our different partners and stakeholder groups. It remains a concern.

LEH: So you also briefly talked about IT and that whole process of like migrating things being more complicated. Could you go into that?

CN: Yeah. So it was initially most complicated with respect to the first transition. That was the Conference Centers and Bulk Mailing. Because there were three and at times four different IT operations responsible for different pieces of what needed to happen. And just getting them into an effective conversation took some time. And then, the intricacies of merging different technologies, fundamentally different technologies, also took time.

For instance, Conference Centers had, it's a hotel and conference center function. And they have a whole building technology program. Madison had nothing like it, and so, how do you migrate or build out the necessary programming to support that function from scratch? That took some time. But they began meeting weekly for about six months and they eventually got it all done.

With the larger transitions, because we had the benefit of that experience, we were more prepared. But we also were only dealing with DoIT. So we didn't have four different voices in the room. We had DoIT and then within Cooperative Extension and within Public Media, they had their own IT programs, small IT programs. And they were able to work directly with DoIT to plan all the technology pieces of these transitions.

And I think that went pretty well. My best indicator of that is we haven't had any residual problems of an IT sort following the transition. But I would say in the end, the IT issues were not as complex as the HR and the Budget & Finance. Those were truly, again, it still astonishes me the number of things that had to be addressed in order to transition a thousand people. You would think it would be easy, but it wasn't.

LEH: Were the HR issues just because people were on different systems?

CN: That was a huge part of it. But not just on different systems, but with completely different rules. Both procedural rules, workplace benefit rules. Completely different system. And in moving to Madison, I'll give you a couple of for instances. Let's say somebody was emeritus at Extension. Do they get emeritus at Madison? Emeritus status. They had very different rules for leave. What leave rules were going to apply? They had very different rules for when you would become eligible, for when you would become eligible for certain things, based on time and service, and Madison does. 1:00:57 Just down the line, lots of those kinds of variances. So for the most part, we're necessary. We try to give a grace period of like a year to allow people to gradually, fully subscribe to the Madison policies. But we had to eventually integrate all those different things into the Madison model. And do the best we could to hold people harmless. If you had vested interests that were suddenly not going to be supported by Madison, was it fair to take those away? We had to work through all of that. So, those kinds of complexities. So it was both. Because they were, not just because they were in a different organization, you had to figure out how to move them in transactionally. But by moving them in, you had to align very different rules, procedures, benefits policies, etcetera. And that was complicated.

And you had to work with governance, because all of HR, it in some way impacts governance interests. So you had to work with governance to get their, you know, I had several petitions requesting a particular approach to some of these issues. And I would then go discuss those with the chancellor and the provost and the HR department, and we would try to work out an effective resolution.

LEH: What do you think were people's sort of like short-term, long-term reactions to like their change in benefits and like the grace period?

CN: So with few exceptions, I think we were very successful at either holding people harmless or adopting a constructive approach that was fair and 01:03:00responsive to their needs or their interests. So I don't think anybody, I'm unaware that anybody felt aggrieved by the resolutions we were going to achieve on these questions.

There were a couple of individuals who for no reason of their own were put in really unfortunate positions. An example would be a person recruited to be a member of the faculty who had not achieved tenure and would not achieve tenure by the time the transition took place. But didn't have the credentials to get tenured at Madison. And so that situation would result in the decision that the person would either have to agree to become an academic staff person or academic staff status or leave. Because there was not a faculty future post-transition.

And we did a number of things when those kinds of situations arose, very limited, to try to ease the unfortunate aspects of that change by, from compensation to different kinds of protections somewhat tantamount to tenure. We did the best we could. But I was completely candid with the individuals that this, there's only so much I could do here and unfortunately you're a victim of circumstance. So we did the best we could but ideally that person never would have been put in that position.

For the most part, we were almost completely successful in allowing people who were still tenure track in Extension, but not tenured, to go through the tenure process prior to transition so that they were faculty by the time transition took place. And then the Madison faculty voted to give them all tenure at Madison. All tenured faculty came in as tenured faculty. But then that was accompanied by the proviso that all untenured faculty would only be tenured according to Madison standards. And many of the faculty in Extension only have master's degrees or not. And that would simply never get tenure. They don't have a research profile. It's not their mission.

LEH: Right.

CN: That would never get tenure at Madison. So it changed the landscape. But with one or two exceptions , as I mentioned, we were able to avoid 01:06:00people being confronted more broadly with a sudden change in status.

The TTC, the Total Title and Compensation exercises going on, is something everybody's now grappling with that's unrelated to the transition, but it represents a change of scenery now for not just Extension but everybody on campus but was not part of the transition.

LEH: Yeah, I always think that like that research focus of Madison in comparison with a lot of other areas of the system is like, it presents itself like in areas where people wouldn't like necessarily think about like it's there, for like an issue that people just might not think of it, and you're like, oh. Yeah.

CN: Well, and then addedly difficult with Extension personnel, they don't teach. They do programming. But they don't teach. So they don't do research, they don't teach, and a lot of them don't have PhDs. So it's a fundamentally different universe. And that's creating governance conversations that are going on right now because as the now-tenured faculty, within the division they're going to adopt post-tenure rules and rules for tenure. And people in the broader campus are going to see that those rules maybe aren't as rigorous as they perceive it based on research and teaching as what they have to meet. And they're going to start wondering, well, how fair is that? So we're working through those kinds of issues with governance. And that will take some time and some examples. So the work is not done. Something like this will take years to fully, fully express. But I think we're in as good a place as we can be in terms of these kinds of issues.

LEH: Yeah. All right. I think maybe that's a good place to stop.

CN: Okay. All right.

LEH: Do you have anything else you'd like to add?

CN: You know, I'll take this opportunity to share what I tell everybody I can at every opportunity I have. And that is, this exercise reminded me of why I like Wisconsin so much. The people here, three, four hundred people that ended up being involved in this process, I never once had somebody say, "I just can't do it. I've just got too much going on." Not once. And these were really 01:09:00complicated add-ons to what people were already doing. They're already inordinately busy. And they just kicked in and got it done, and took ownership of how to do that. And that's not common, in my experience. And I think we should celebrate that. This happened not just on the Madison campus, but on all the campus transitions. It happened because any number of people made it happen by the industry they brought to the challenge and the innovation they brought to the challenge. And I don't think that can be celebrated enough. Because absent that kind of effort and willing contribution, this whole restructuring would have crashed. So I like to remind people of the fact they live among uncommon peers and colleagues, and they should always appreciate that. So with that, I will conclude.

LEH: All right.

CN: And you know, anytime you have a--