Interview with Kevin Niemi

Troy Reeves 00:01

Okay, today is July 28 2021. This is the first interview with Kevin. Is it Niemi? Correct, Kevin Niemi. This interview is being done for our academic staff award winners oral history project. My name is Troy Reeves. This interview is actually being done face to face in Steenbock Library inside the University Archives. So Kevin, for sound quality purposes, could you say your name and spell your last name?

Kevin Niemi 00:24

Kevin Niemi. N-I-E-M-I.

Troy Reeves 00:28

So we should be able to talk at this voice and it'll pick us up just fine. So as I said, before we turn the recorder on, I gave you a list of topics. We both have them in front of us. And we're just going to start with this big broad question. What brought you to UW Madison?

Kevin Niemi 00:42

Great question, trying to think back 25 years 1996. I was at Olbrich[?} Botanical Gardens. I started the education program there and was about four years into it and not terribly happy - did not have a really good director there. A lot of hard work and which I don't mind. But I saw this opening for an outreach specialist at the Center for Biology Education, which is the unit that I was hired by. And it was pretty much in its infancy, maybe, definitely less than five years old and guessing maybe two or three years old. And applied for the job and luckily was finalist and was hired offered the position as an outreach specialist with some very clearly defined projects that I was to take on immediately and feel my way around the university. I had postdoc-ed here. It would have been six, seven years earlier in the biochemistry department for about three years. So I knew UW Madison having come down here from the University of Minnesota where I got my PhD in plant physiology, plant biochemistry, came down here to do some research in the biochemistry department and realized I didn't want to be a researcher. So it was kind of a career change in my postdoc. And that I went to, I'm doing kind of fill in history to spend a couple years at Grinnell College as a assistant professor sabbatical leave replacement kind of position. One year turned into to my wife was up here. That's when the olbrich [?]job open. So I took that and enjoyed that for a while and then luckily got the position here where I finished off my career.

Troy Reeves 02:41

So did you know - did you know about the Center for Biology Education before?

Troy Reeves 02:46

So can I,

Kevin Niemi 02:46

Yep,

Kevin Niemi 02:46

Yes, I did in that. When I was at olbrich [?], one of my challenges, or one of my working goals was to integrate it more into the outreach community in 00:03:00Madison. So I knew some of the campus people. Obviously we did a lot of public programming where I relied on university, staff and faculty to do lectures and talks for our clients at olbrich [?] gardens. And somehow in there I had connected with the Associate Director of CBE at the time, Jane Kramer, she had communicated with me about something and so I was aware of it. And luckily, and I don't even remember probably an ad in State Journal or something, maybe an email connection, early days of email. But I also at that time started, I was part of a group called nature net, which was a network of public nature centers, museums, botanical gardens, zoos all in the Madison Dane County area. And we met routinely and at that time, there was some UW Madison representation in that group. I can't say who it was I don't remember it's way too many years ago. So yes, I was aware of it. But again, it was a new unit. And in talking with this staff at the time, it just was very appealing. At that time, basically I said my job was to connect the resources of the university to the K 12 community. Because I was specifically hired to do professional development program for elementary, middle and high school science teachers. And the projects I was brought into were funded at that time with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant, of which the unit has had probably three of them over the years. They're a significant source of outside funds, I was hired on on GPR Position 101 funds, but those kind of funds help hire other people. So we use the Howard Hughes Medical Institute grants, I brought back a staff person who was on leave, who was very good at her job. She was on maternity leave, and I convinced her to come back because we had some money to play with. And specifically the three projects I remember being told, here's what you're going to assume leadership on. One was called bio net, which is a network of the time of biology teachers around Wisconsin. And the job was to have them meet in local networks, and talk about teaching biology, share resources, share expertise, just kind of really start to build a community of biology teachers in Wisconsin. And we did do 00:06:00several meetings and events at the state science teachers conference, which is what's gone society of science teachers, so I got connected with them early on. And that was funded by HHMI, so I'd pay for pizza for the teachers to just congregate in Ashland or Menominee Falls or wherever I had a number of directors who I hired, not hired, but recruited to have access to these funds to put on events. And it was really quite effective that way. I mean, we'd get fifty, seventy-five teachers at a bio net sharing session at our state science teachers conference. Another project was called the Science Ed Scholars Program, which here's where campus really came to be connected. Through my in my job to connect campus to teachers, the science Ed Scholars Program in conjunction with the school of Ed Science Education team, and specifically Jim Stewart, professor, and Paul Williams, who was our director at the time, plant pathology professor wanted both teachers and teachers to be so pre service and in service to get lab and research experiences. So I would recruit students, the pre service students who were - had interest in science. And maybe were going to be a high school science teacher, or more probably a middle or elementary teacher, I would pair them up with teachers from the community, who wanted to do some research project during the summer, and then find a lab on campus to place them in. So the teachers would get stipends, the student would get a stipend and the lab would get a stipend. And we would, I think that ran about three years with the HHMI money. And we'd probably had between five and seven teams each summer. So that's not trivial finding seven labs that would want to spend time with a couple of very novice science teachers because unfortunately, most science teachers do not have research experience. And it was a neat way for me to understand some of the research being done in CALS [?} or LNS or limnology. I mean, wherever I could find a lab to place them I would go and talk to the professor. Say, here's your commitment, here's what you'll get out of it. And I still to this date, remember a story by a prof in entomology, Walt Goodman, who recently retired. He said 00:09:00after one day and this teachers, I think fourth grade classroom, he said, "I learned more about teaching in that one day spent with her than I had ever gotten here at UW Madison" and it's like "Yeah." So it was impacting faculty, it was impacting teachers, and the students. The students, I told them, talk to your cooperating teacher, find out what the profession is all about and how you can do it more effectively, more efficiently. And so it was a nice program that unfortunately, it was not cheap. And I think the School of Ed enjoyed it for their students because at one time Chuck Reed was the Dean of the School of Education. He invited me to a conference of deans - it was in Harvard 2001 like September 18, maybe if you know the date there, he and I flew into Boston, totally empty airplanes to talk about this program with some of his colleagues because he was so enamored with it. And I think it really showed the role that the Center for Biology could play in kind of being this interdepartmental, inter school, Switzerland type of institution that could program for the needs of both faculty and students, and teachers. So that one was, I enjoyed that program a lot. And now I already forgot the third one that I was supposed to be doing at the time, I guess it was the first year of the grant before I came on board. CBE offered just a grants program, a small grants program to anybody, it could be faculty could be a grad student, to come up with an outreach project in science, and we would give them a small small stipend for supplies or for time or whatever. And I had to collate those and characterize and try to figure out which ones were effective. And again, I think it showed that the CBE had this, as I said, this neutral position where we weren't fighting over turf. We didn't care if we got more money from the university, because we didn't, we just had positions, very little ongoing program money. And it relied upon the staff to write grants to find the money to run programs. So I think that set me up early on in thinking about where our sources of funds that I can do that would make this connection with faculty, staff, students, grad students, undergrads, and 00:12:00get them involved in the professional development of science teachers. So for the first 20 years of my career here, that's basically what I did, partnered with others wrote my own grants. And, and really very entrepreneurial - I think that was the key we had people. And early on, we both had a very strong outreach group of three or four people, staff members, and we did have professional development for faculty. And that was a strong group led by Lily and Tom, in programming, how do you get our faculty to think about their teaching expertise, and there's teaching inefficiencies and things. And she ran a very good program in that arena. So we basically had those two groups, which unfortunately, in the last five years kind of disappeared, the emphasis of the unit changed in the last five years. And that got me strongly thinking about retiring because I did not enjoy it as much as I did when I was hired. And I mean, for the first, almost 20 years, we had a Faculty Director, whether it was Millard Sussman, or Kerry Balser[?], or Dave Nelson, all faculty, some on the latter end of their careers, others wanting to make an impact, who let us do what we felt needed to be done. Very little oversight of us as program managers and I went up through the ranks of promotion, or re re now I can't remember what the HR terminology as I was reclassified outreach specialist, outreach program manager one, outreach program manager, I think I ended up at three or whatever. And it was a way to recognize that I was basically an independent researcher, to a large degree bringing in money to do programming. It wasn't research. And early on, and this is where the governance thoughts come in. I got involved with shared governance through the academic staff assembly and was a rep for 20 years before moving further on in the leadership, but quickly it was there's this thing called faculty, these people called faculty who run the university. And I know one of the questions is the connection between faculty and staff, academic staff primarily and early on, it's like, you can't do research if you're doing outreach or if you're teaching. I never adhere to that. I was doing all three. 00:15:00To me writing grants and submitting evaluation of your programs is research. I did not publish much, if at all, because there was not that pressure. But I was doing outreach. Eventually I was doing teaching because I taught courses for teachers under the guise of the School of Education, or the Department of Genetics, when we had a connection with a faculty member there who could put courses in. So I did all three without doing it blatantly, I guess I kept it under the table to a large degree, which, early on, I recognize that let the faculty think they can run this university by their selves. And I'll just do my job, because I get to work with teachers. And I really enjoyed doing that. So that was kind of the early years of CBE. And

Troy Reeves 14:53

Jump in here. Because the the next question kind of lets us go a little bit back in time. And that's kind of the factors that led to your work or research interests. But maybe let's start with the research interests. You said you were plant physiology. So what in your -what in your life led you to an interest in that?

Kevin Niemi 16:25

Oh, man, that's going way back. I, as an undergrad, I went to Macalester College, got my biology degree, BA. So we didn't really do research. But I knew I wanted to further my education. And I took a couple years off, and then applied to grad school and had a couple of offers and decided to stay in the Twin Cities and went to Minnesota and just happened to like plants more than animals. I, to me, they're a whole lot more challenging to understand than than animals and a lot easier to deal with. So the other area that intrigued me at the time was environmental physiology, how plants are adjusted and have evolved to live in different environments. And I found a lab at Minnesota that did cold hardiness, how can we improve the ability of plants to survive freezing, frost, cold temperatures. And my advisor at the time was, or my advisor, was a physical scientist in a horticulture department. He did not know anything about plants, but he knew about physical chemistry, biophysics, really interesting approach to questions of how things change in plants. So I did some differential scanning 00:18:00calorimetry to measure changes in the proteins of the photosynthetic apparatus and did a few things like that. And I kind of understood the biophysics, but I was not a great mathematician. And I did enough to get my PhD and enjoyed it and had a number of publications, including one that still being cited, which amazes me it was working with another grad student while he had gotten his degree and was post doc-ing in a different lab. And he asked me to join him on a little weekend study in his lab that was in plant pathology. And we were the first group to ever show that there was differential gene expression during cold acclamation, which is really cool. That was in 1985. So it was way early in molecular biology days, we didn't have a lot of fancy equipment, but we had enough to figure out that the mRNA populations were very different once a plant is subjected to environmental conditions that harden it. So it can tolerate three or six or seven degrees, colder temperatures without being harmed. And we were able to publish that in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and it is still being cited today as the first paper in that. So I mean, I was not unsuccessful as a scientist, but I just didn't enjoy all the grant writing and - which sounds silly since I eventually came back to writing a whole lot of grants, but they were for more people projects rather than plant projects. So when I was postdoc-ing in in biochemistry, both my advisors there really questioned why I would ever want to become just a faculty at a small college? And how could that be rewarding? Well, the science was somewhat undergrad research, it was appealing. Unfortunately, I never got an offer for a position in school or location that was really very intriguing to me and my wife. So that's when Olbrich Gardens [?] opened up. And I said, let's try that for a while because I had worked at the Minnesota zoo, between undergrad and grad days, and was in the education department at the Minnesota Zoo when it had recently opened. So I enjoyed talking about sciency stuff. So animals are not not in my background, but I prefer plants and did a lot at olbrich[?] to get things pretty stabilized in their education program and get school group visits 00:21:00and public programming and using the garden to talk about plants, etc.

Troy Reeves 21:07

So was your outreach experience then, like hands on experience or your like work experience as opposed to the classes or things like that?

Kevin Niemi 21:16

Yeah, yeah, I probably say this a little too much. I did education for 25 years and never took an education course ever. Which I took the science because that's what CBE wanted, they wanted somebody both who knew the science that we were trying to get our teachers to think about and teach better. But also, they recognized at that time that in order to work with faculty, one had to have a PhD and research experience, to understand the challenges of the researchers here. Because I was asking them to do things that were not really in their wheelhouse. They're researchers. They know how to write grants, they know how to do research, they know how to, in most cases, advise grad students, postdocs, undergrads, all that kind of stuff. But they don't know how to work with K 12 teachers, or talk about their science in ways that can help. So I think that's one thing that carried on throughout my career was helping scientists communicate their interests, their passion, about science, and why it's needed. Because at the end of my career, the last five years, I very much was involved with broader impacts, which is part of the NSF grant programming - you have to have broader impact statements and programs. And at some point, we'll get back to that, but so I kind of went full circle of communicating and involving scientists in K 12, professional development programs, because throughout, we've always had them as science experts. And if you can't talk about your science, you're not an expert, in my opinion, maybe you can talk to your real subset of your subset of your subset of your discipline. But that's not going to do much good if you're talking. And I always say, my, I never knew my grandma's, but if I had to explain my science to my grandma's, that's the level you need to communicate with most general public people. And I think that was why CBE was such an effective unit early on. Because we were in that realm all the time. We being the outreach team.

Troy Reeves 23:45

Okay. So you had a great, like, quick quote about, you know, when asked, "How do you describe what you do?" I think you said, like,

Kevin Niemi 23:56

Connecting your resources. Yeah, yeah.

Troy Reeves 24:00

So maybe I'll move on to - I put the word typical in quotes, because, you know, 00:24:00I know enough to know there's never any such thing as a typical day. But what tasks might comprise a typical day and you could talk about it either.

Kevin Niemi 24:13

Oh, yeah. It depends on when in my career was right.

Troy Reeves 24:16

Since you've been talking - since we've been talking about the early years. Let's start with that.

Kevin Niemi 24:21

Okay. I'll think back on some of the early dabblings in trying to formulate a program that could be fundable. I remember going out to Crestwood Elementary and talking to a couple of teachers, both of whom were in science ed scholars, so they knew me from that program and did research for like eight weeks, six weeks during the summer with the lab and then wrote that up. So I went out - they were classroom teachers went out to them and said, what, what else can we do out here to help your fellow teachers and your students to become more science aware and science skilled. I mean they had a little forest in the back of their school they had the big Owen [?} park. I always forget which [Words unclear} Park, it's, you know where it is

Troy Reeves 25:13

Right across the street.

Kevin Niemi 25:14

Just down the hill from the president's house.

Troy Reeves 25:17

Yeah.

Kevin Niemi 25:17

And - how - do you guys use this very much? And so they, we came up with a plan and said let's do some after school for interested teachers and just talk about what we can see here. And these guys shared some of their programs that they developed in science ed scholars. One of which was he got placed with Dan Young, who ran the insect herbarium and was interested in beetles and all kinds of insects. So Peter playing the teacher learned how to do capture of insects and pinyon [?] of insects for collection. So they started that summer and it kept going with his students. They put pitfall traps out in the woods and catch things and it just got the kids excited. So I was up there. And so that kind of got me thinking that there's got to be more we can do with that type of programming. About that same time I got a call from Ken Shapiro. Well, actually, Ken Shapiro and Jose Ariels [?], who was on staff at CBE had a program called Project Seed, which is funded by the Kellogg Foundation. It was not a huge grant, maybe 300,000 for four years, but it was again enough money for us to start doing things. And Jose left - he wanted to be faculty. So he, he departed and I got handed that project and in talking with can Project Seeds stood for Science Education, and -what did it stand for?Economic Development, I think, 00:27:00Projects Seed. Yeah. Goal of modeling science education reform in elementary, middle and high school. So that was like the second year I was at CBE had the pot of money. So I worked with Mendota Elementary on the north side, Sherman Middle School, which was a feeder school from Mendota, and then East High School, because East High School was again in a feeder system for those students. So the idea was to try to impact students, K through 12. But it was just practicing because it was only a four year grant. But at Mendota, I got to know the principal who is brand new, didn't know science at all. The teachers so we did a lot of professional development with the teachers at that time, just whoever wanted to come, let's talk about science. I funded building a science library of books that are of interest. We use the Kellogg money to buy the books. We put in a school - little small little school garden, used that during the summer, paid some teachers to run it during the summer. At Sherman, we put in a school garden, worked with a handful of teachers there. And then at Madison East, I worked with the ag teacher for the district. Mary something or other I can't think of her name. But they the ag. The ag program had some plot of land out off Milwaukee Street on the east side. And we bought some equipment to help her with high school kids who wanted to get into I think she had some apple trees out there and just basic kind of farming, horticulture kind of stuff. And that grant was for that purpose to try to figure out how to improve the engagement of the students with science. And that was Ken's grant, but it led to some successful second kind of generation things over the years, smaller grants. But just it was a way to get me in the classroom working with teachers, both in the classroom and after school. So the education part became hands on learning for me. I don't have kids, we chose not to have kids. I, the youngest, I had no young have no younger sibs, so I didn't really know kids except that olbrict [?]. That was a good experience that at olbrict [?] of dealing with 20,000 kids on a field trip over a year. And that set me up and I think that came out in the original interview of - yeah, I can work with kids, I can work with teachers 00:30:00because I did teach it programming up there. So it just dovetailed into this nice application for CBE outreach specialist and career. So the outreach has just always been natural to me. And I guess it started at the zoo when I was putting the zoomobile together and driving around Minnesota with snakes in my van and just sharing stories about animals and their adaptations, etc, with kids. And it just I guess I enjoyed it. So it's just kind of dovetailed into a lifelong career.

Troy Reeves 30:39

So I don't know if you could quantify it or not. But how much of your time was - then was spent not in your office but out in in the field? If you will, at these you know, either classroom or....?

Kevin Niemi 30:53

Yeah, that's a great question. And it was a large part of it. Because I mean, I had no time commitment other than getting the job done. And like with bio net, that program, I would go to these meetings. So I just drive and attended night meeting up in wherever and go in the hotel and stay in. At the time, yeah, I was accountable. But I wasn't to a large degree, which gave me the flexibility of thinking like faculty really, and not having the pressure of tenure was really good. If I needed money, and I could find a source, I could write a grant. They were small to start with, but by in one of my ladder programs, well it was actually 15 years in, was titled to a money from the state to run week long - what we called science futures - was a week long residential up in northern Wisconsin at a I think River Falls ran the camp at that time, it's subsequently been given back to the state and is closed, which I feel really bad about. Pigeon Lake Field Station, we have 25 teachers for a week with five teacher instructors. And we just delve into teaching science well, could be elementary teacher could be high school, we've mixed them up in groups and had them do group projects. And it was all around doing science in the science classroom, not reading science, not doing worksheets, but doing science. And back in the 90s. That was a novel idea. That was not how I really grew up learning science. And I think most science education programs, and which is why I think Jim Stewart was interested in helping reform his program over in education, with 00:33:00some experiences that really mimicked science - what scientists do - and work work getting there as a nation and talk a little philosophical inquiry. The Next Generation Science Standards is all trying to integrate doing science with knowing science, and how we know science and making it much more than science is that book on the shelf with all these facts in it. And if you memorize the fact, you're a scientist. No, it's about how you think about the world and how we know what we know, and believing facts rather than beliefs in science. And that's where the reform efforts in science have gone. And I guess we were kind of at the forefront of that with our small little programs here at UW Madison.

Troy Reeves 33:56

This isn't a question on the list, but I you know, I said I reserve the right to ask. Because I too, have done some grant writing have found money to do things and I'm, I'm always curious, when when someone else has done that, too. Does the- is it the project? And then you find the money? Or is it the money and then you find the project?

Kevin Niemi 34:19

In education, it's kind of the money has to be there. And you have to figure out what would fit the funder's wishes. Like the title 2A was a very small pot of federal money that was reserved for - in Wisconsin - UW and higher ed institutions to come up with programs to improve k 12. And its emphasis at the time was on science and math. So they had a UW System person who is a retired math professor run the program. So they'd fund maybe five to eight small grants. And I say small - it was, I think I had maybe a $60,000 a year budget. And the first year I wrote one, he said, I really like this, but I'm not convinced it'll work. Let's do a pilot. So he gave me one year of funding. We did a pilot and wrote up the report. I can't even remember who did our evaluation. I hired somebody from the School of Ed, they had so many different evaluation units over the time, I can't remember what it was. But it was an outside evaluator. We did the week up at Pigeon Lake, we did a before and after, got quotes from the teachers in the evaluation. And they were all glowing, because teachers rarely have the time to think about one thing for a whole week. And at the time, Pigeon 00:36:00Lake had no cell phone service. So they were isolated; I had them or we had them. It was a team that did the teaching. And we could do with them what we wanted. And they did what they wanted to do at night, which was talk about teaching and drink beer, and party, and it just worked out really well that way - good food, good location. We go wolf howling. And here the wolves, the pack of wolves that were residential up there. And it just does - was very isolating, but rewarding that way. So after that first pilot year, he said, I'll give you three years he got 200,000, or whatever it was to run it. And I didn't take any salary out of it, because my salaries covered so we could hire teachers to give me probably a two week stipend. So we can plan throughout the year of what we're going to do each day, and then teach it as a team. And it wasn't necessarily me being at the forefront, because what are my credential; I'm just the scientists. So the team effort with the teachers, in developing the curriculum, basically for the week, and running the program, it was colleagues teaching colleagues, which helped a lot, I think, in the acceptance and the first few years, we had three times as many applicants as we could get. Third year kind of dropped. And by the fourth year, it kind of run its course, so I decided not to pursue that anymore. And there had been a program back in the 80s, called science world, which was funded by the Department of Public Instruction, same kind of focus. But they also had students at the camp and the teachers practiced teaching with the students. When I wrote the grant, I said, I don't want the liability of having young children up there because I just didn't want to do it. And it would have been really a lot of money. And this program, this gets to your question, wasn't for students; it was for teacher professional development. So we narrowed the focus. Science world also ran its course in looking at reports from it and talking to participants that there's a bubble of enthusiasm, and then you get all those who want to do it. And suddenly you just kind of peter off. Well, we're back at the stage where and this is current. I'm the one of the executive directors for the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers. That's one of my hobbies, I get a small stipend to do the books, the finances, but I can steer the organization in ways I want it to. We're going to resurrect science futures and call it Wisconsin Institute for next generation science or something, and 00:39:00bring back the idea of getting a group of teachers together during the summer for a week. And it's been a good 10 years since science futures had run its course so we're thinking we're going to get that next group of what the heck was science futures. I never heard of it. Because that's what we got with science world. They had not heard of it. So it - about every 10 years, you can resurrect these programs and find somebody to fund it and this time will be self funded because another real tangent but it's relevant in that the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers has a large endowment. We got the endowment because [words unclear] was a UW Madison science education professor who lived into his early 90s and when he passed, he gave us about 4% of his - in his will of his estate to the society, Wisconsin Soceity of Science Teachers. And it's like, wow, that was like $300,000. It's since grown tremendously. But it was his foresight, he actually started WSST while he was here at UW Madison. So these connections are just really neat in thinking that I never - don't think I even ever met him. Because he, as I said, this was would have been at least 10 to 15 years ago, he passed, and he was in his 90s. So he probably retired in the 80s. So I would never have crossed paths with him. But it was his legacy and his legacy of founding this professional organization. And then recognizing that it was a good organization and putting us in is will, which I have no idea how he made the money, but he had a few million dollars there. I could do the math sometime. But I've never had because I don't want to know. But he set us up for it with an endowment that we need to spend. So we're gonna have money to run these kinds of programs. And I keep pushing our board to come up with ideas. So this one was my idea to say, let's put 30-40,000 into a program for multiple years, and bring back to the next generation, that experience of being out in the wild and living in dorms with your colleagues and talking science 24-5, because it's about a five day program.

Troy Reeves 41:42

So maybe just one more thing today cuz we're okay, we're again,

Kevin Niemi 41:46

Yep. We are

Troy Reeves 41:48

And that it's a question on the list. I do have some follow up questions, but I'm gonna save those till our follow up session or a subsequent session. And that's the question about technology. I mean, you alluded to the fact that this is probably one of these projects succeeded because there was no cell phone, no 00:42:00cell phone coverage. So I wonder how, you know, in the course of your 20 plus years, how technology has changed your work.

Kevin Niemi 42:09

I'll and I'll be very specific in that. One of the reasons bio net early on succeeded was teachers felt isolated. This was a lot of rural teachers who may be the only science teacher may be the only biology teacher in their school out in rural Wisconsin, and just giving them the opportunity to get together with their colleagues and talk science. Back in the 90s, when even email was not that used, definitely not anything like zoom or chat, or some of these new social media, Facebook, I mean, I was myspace originally when, when those social things came out. And so at that time, bio net succeeded because teachers wanted to talk. We are struggling right now of keeping teachers physically engaged, I think they're too used to putting out a call on Facebook saying, "Hey, I got to teach this topic, anybody have any ideas," and it's all electronic. So, to me, we need to keep the person to person connections. We've had to cancel our state science conference last two years, we get 400 to 550 teachers for a weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday for a conference. We haven't had that for two years now because of COVID. And I think we're going to do gangbusters the next couple of years, because I think teachers miss that face to face that technology will never replace. It's sitting down at a bar and talking science, or sitting at breakfast and just talking science with a colleague, that it's just like you and I I'd rather be in the same room with you, because of where we can go with the conversation that I feel a little stilted with zoom. So I yeah, I there's a lot of great technology and information sharing and how teachers, it's changed my job in thinking that you need to teach your students how to access information. And that's not something science teachers typically did was like, well, there's a reference book on the shelf, look it up there. Now kids are searching the internet and finding bogus information and saying, "This is my citation of wiki." No, that's not really a credible citation in your report. And so they're having to do different things because of technology. And one other comment the last two weeks I been teaching an AP Summer Institute for biology teachers 00:45:00through the school of Ed. And did it at- at Wisc science for probably eight, nine, ten years now. It's a summer institute. We did do it in person the last two years, we've had to zoom. But one of the AP discussions we always have is, you can't give a test without probably having the answers on the internet. So be aware of that. And College Board does a really active job of protecting some of their questions from being published online. And it's just something teachers didn't have to think about. And yet students cheated, but it was writing on their hand, it wasn't looking them up looking up the answers on a on a cell phone. It's just a different way to have to teach. And yeah, technology is great, but it's got its limitations in education.

Troy Reeves 46:04

Yes, is more of a comment than anything else. But like the process of writing the answer on your hand, too cheat. It still required you to write the answer.

Kevin Niemi 46:14

Yeah. And I thought about what the answer was-

Troy Reeves 46:17

Whereas just typing it in, and then seeing it and pasting it in or whatever.

Kevin Niemi 46:21

Yeah, yeah.

Troy Reeves 46:22

Is a different-

Kevin Niemi 46:24

What, what information do I want to write on my hand that what's important, right, so I had to do a little bit of triage and not that I ever cheated.

Troy Reeves 46:33

Yeah.

Kevin Niemi 46:33

Maybe in high school? I did. I don't remember. It's too far ago. But yeah, that's a good point.

Troy Reeves 46:40

So the last thing I usually ask in these sessions are and we've been going for nearly fifty minutes. Is there anything on your mind, you know, as you've been talking that you would like to discuss, for fear that it may not be on your mind next time?

Kevin Niemi 46:54

Well, I - this is the interesting history. I was hired by the Center for biology education. Then we got put under a provost probably 15 years in and asked to reorganize, and Tom Sharkey [?] became our director. He was in botany. He subsequently left. But he changed our name to the Institute for Cross College Biology Education, or ICBE. Then Tom left and we got a different director, I think it was maybe Terry Ballsur[?]. She changed the name to Institute for Biology Education, or IBE. Then we got another - then Dave Nelson took over. And then Janet Bradshaw, one day retired, was appointed. And again, the Provost said, "Well, we don't like what you're doing, we need more control of you." And we became the Wisconsin Institute for Science education and community engagement. So I, I have to put all of this on my CV to reflect - No, I'm in the 00:48:00same unit. But we've had four different names over the years. And it kind of shows the shift away from just biology education to science education, community engagement when that became very popular. When Morgridge Center for Public Service, we were in on some of those early discussions about how do you do service learning in science? And so we'd be doing just because of that finger from above, just say, No, you're gonna go this way. You can't do that anymore. And this is basically about three, four years ago, I was told by Janet, our director, you don't do outreach anymore. You can't. It has to be all about undergrad education. It's like jeez- I was not hired to do that. I'll do it because I'm nearing retirement. But that, and I don't, that came from up above on bascom. And it's just kind of the role - life of the academic staff. Even though we were incredibly successful, and I think I at some point, tallied up all my money, and it was millions of dollars I brought in with overhead. I had no choice. I had to do what she said I had to do, and that that the real life of academic staff in many units and maybe next time when we talk shared governance that became kind of my goal of recognizing academic staff for what resources and what expertise they bring in. They - they're incredibly talented. And I often said and I'll end with this, I wish we would have as academic staff just taken a day off all at the same time and see what the hell would happen including university staff, and see where the faculty would be without us.

Troy Reeves 50:05

I think that is a appropriate place to end our first

Kevin Niemi 50:08

Okay.

Troy Reeves 50:08

So that ends the first session with Kevin Nieme. We will be doing a follow up session so until then, take care and thank you so much for your time.

Kevin Niemi 50:18

This pleasure talking to you.

Troy Reeves 00:01

All right, Today is August 16 2021. This is a follow up interview with Kevin Niemi. This interview is being done remotely. I'm in my home. And Kevin's in his. My name is Troy Reeves and with the UW Madison archives, the oral history program, this interview is being done for academic staff award winners oral history project, Kevin, to help me out with my recording here. Can you start by saying your name and spelling your last name?

Kevin Niemi 00:30

Yes, it's Kevin Niemi. N-I-E-M-I

Troy Reeves 00:35

Beautiful. So it's picking us both up nicely. And since we are doing this 00:51:00virtually, with possibly sketchy internet, why don't we just get right into it? So I sent you a list of questions and some follow up questions. I want to start sort of start at the beginning, which or the end actually start the beginning with the end, which is how did COVID-19 change your final months of work?

Kevin Niemi 01:02

Interesting, yes. When you're doing community outreach, and you're having undergrads go out into the community, and suddenly the community is closed off the last couple of months of 2020. Am I right? And I got to think of the years. Yes, we're interesting to say the least. One of my responsibilities in my last few years was co teaching a service learning course where our students went out into the community and organized and ran after school science clubs at about, typically, we had between 20 and sometimes up to 30 undergrads. So oftentimes, they were solo, sometimes they were duplic, there were two students at a site. So we did the training on campus. And obviously, that had to change as well as everything out in the community, basically ground to a halt. And it just basically, the course ended, it was tough to say that, but when we're trying to figure out what in the heck we're doing remotely with instruction and your premise for the course is activities out in the community, and suddenly the community is off limits. We couldn't do anything. And basically, we shut down the courses. My recollection, and I have to say that 2020 was an interesting year, personally, and I'll share why in that I was diagnosed with cancer in December 2019. So after many months of COVID, delays, I finally started treatment in late spring of 2020. So it kind of coincided with all this COVID stuff, and the course closing and my thinking about retirement and all of that. So I spent a summer in multiple treatments for for my cancer. And luckily, we're still in remission, or are in remission. So at that point that kind of prompted my, I think I need to call it and I informed my unit, probably in April, May of this spring semester last year that I've got about six or seven months of accumulated leave. I'm going to start in July. Thanks. But no thanks. And so my last few months, were really just clear and cleaning up and clearing up projects 00:54:00that may or may not have continued after I was retired, and working remotely on some of those and making sure information was shared of things that I knew that nobody else knew about what I was doing and some of the financial commitments etc. So even though I did retire, or went on accumulated leave technically, in July, I kept working on a couple of grants that I had with the National Science Foundation that took up maybe 10 to 20% of my time. And I want to talk about those at some point because I think that's an interesting story. But COVID I feel for my colleague who continued the course in the fall of 2020, after I had gone off on my leave, and she had, I think upwards of 20 undergrads that remotely did science clubs. So after thinking about it and planning - it seemed to have worked out very well. I saw some of the presentations the students did with their clubs, and the clubs may not have even been meeting out in the community. It may have been home activities for the kids, but it was a virtual community engagement course, that Anna Cortier [?] pulled off in the fall of 2020 and out as well as the spring 2021. So it can be done and community outreach in times of a pandemic is an interesting dilemma. And I still feel restricted that it's going to be restricted again, probably this coming year because of the Delta variant that's come about, and we'll see what happens. But I'm retired. So basically, I don't care right now. Even though that was a lot of my legacy was was getting these types of organizations involved with UW Madison programming.

Troy Reeves 05:55

So Kevin, you want to talk about these couple of grants that you continue to work on? Cause they're on your mind.

Kevin Niemi 06:00

Yeah. One big story I'd like to share is with the Science Alliance, which is a network of science outreaches on the UW Madison campus that started 20 years ago, probably and the dates I'd have to check. And our first real activity was putting on what we called science expeditions. And it was a spring campus open house. And it started with a couple of hours on a Saturday, we started over in the engineering, building and whatever the administrative one is Engineering 00:57:00Center - is that the name of it? Right along engineering drive. And we had a couple 100 people come in for a couple of hours just to engage with science that us outreachers put on and tried to involve faculty and units of that kind. And that led to the basically the science Alliance group meeting weekly to talk about trials and tribulations and successes of doing science outreach from our campus. And as far as we can tell, no other university in this country has such an organization, this loose informal network of science outreach, which obviously is all connected to the Wisconsin Idea. And I think that - that structure leads to a lot of collaboration among us outreachers. And has and science expeditions grew and grew and grew. And eventually, with the building of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery building, we got them involved their outreach staff, so our footprint became much larger for groups and typically 60 to 70 stations are set up for almost a full day on Saturday, then we got West End to campus involved with their own supporting them, the med school, nursing school, pharmacy school. And it's just really a nice collaborative effort to share our science with the community. And we've targeted certain populations and arranged for buses to pick up groups from the north side of Madison, and bring them to campus with families of from disadvantaged neighborhoods, etc. So I think that kind of led to some efforts that I put on nationally, and I submitted a proposal to a triple A S (American Association for the Advancement of Science) at their annual conference on these types of outreach offices across campus. And I organized this session and had colleagues from - let me think back - University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern and Wash U in St. Louis. I knew some of them and others I got names from my colleagues. We did a session at what was called then the teacher scientists teacher partnership program as a kind of a sub strand within triple A S. And we were the four of us were up on in front of this small room. And we literally had people climbing in the door trying to get in we had so much interest in this topic of generalized campus outreach offices. 01:00:00And we looked at each other and said, "Wow, I never expected 100 people to want to come to this session. We must have something going on here." Well, that led to talking and listening to other groups and finding out about an effort at the University of Missouri led by Susan Reno, to deal with campus, broader impact projects. Broader impacts are one of the criterion that NSF requires of all grants. And the broader impact means you need to share your science beyond the typical group of scientists that want to want and understand the research you're doing. And it's not as it's not judged as hard as the intellectual merit part, which is kind of the science research aspect of a grant. But it is a required part of every grant. And Susan was putting on a broader impact symposium at Missouri because she was new to her job. And one of her faculty members was actually on the National Science Board at the time. And again, this is kind of connecting the dots here, but the National Science Board is the overseers of the National Science Foundation. And the National Science Foundation and the National Science Board are beholden to Congress, they have to give quarterly, if not maybe even more updates on the progress of the funds allocated for research through the National Science Foundation, they have to give reports to Congress, and they're held accountable by Congress for their expenditures. Well, at that time, there was some pushback from the scientists primarily about the broader impact requirement. And we felt the value of that as a community of outreaches to help us better entice and involve researchers in outreach activities because of that criteria. You need to share your science period, how that's done, whether it's k 12, whether it's general public, whether it's industrial partnerships, there were a number of points that NSF would suggest as broader impact activities, they never mandate anything. They want creativity from their grant holders. And the same philosophy holds with broader impact projects. Well, we again, had probably 50 people come to Missouri for two days to talk about broader impacts. And we, this led to us kind of forming a subgroup of which I was part of handful of us said we need to approach NSF about this. They never 01:03:00have funded anything around broader impact research that we could tell. Well, we went to NSF and long story short is we first received a research coordination network grant of about a half a million dollars to help NSF better market, better share what good broader impact programming is all about doing little research on it with those funds. And we had about five institutions from Northwestern Penn, Missouri, Madison, Stanford, and Oregon State. Those were the primary starters of this network. Well, we did quite well with half a million dollars. NSF approached us a few years later when our funding was that funding stream was running out. They said we think we want to encourage you to write a bigger centers grant and I, I was dumbfounded at the time because NSF doesn't do that. They usually don't solicit specific programs to put in grants, they'd run open calls in anybody can apply. So it's like maybe we got something going on here that NSF is seeing a value. And and we were because we were communicating very well with our program officer and our, our divisional director, etc. Who gave us that original half a million. Well, we wrote a grant, they came back with some questions. We wrote it; we wrote a reply. We got about $5.2 million. It's now in year four, I think and obviously I've checked out of it, but I was a copi I [?] on both of those grants. Because Madison carries some stature in NSF around broader impact and outreach programming. You talk to most of the program officers and they know about our efforts in those as a campus. So the long story short is this little Science Alliance allowed me to do a national presentation and share our model. And that model became part of this first and second rounds of funding for this national effort, which is now called ARIS, the advancing research impact in society center. So if you look up researchinsociety.org, it's ongoing, we do trainings, we do partnerships. We've recruited at HBCUs. To help them with some of their broader impact work. We do, basically everything around broader impacts for the community. And we've held seven or eight summits that draw - we had I think, at Madison, the third summit, we probably had almost 200 individuals come for our three days summit to talk about broader impacts, and 01:06:00learn and share their programs. So it's become this community of practice nationally around: how do you engage scientists in outreach and community engagement? And like I said, it started because I had another Tom Zinnin[?] in from the biotech center had this idea way, way back when that we need to just get together and talk about what we're doing on this campus. Well, that's led to we need to talk as a community in this country, and involve the federal agencies in funding these kind of sharing activities, because basically, people have lost their belief in science. And I hate to use belief because you don't believe things in science, it's more of a yes or no kind of thing. But many people believe science can be manipulated, and use for their own good even if it's not fact driven. And that's the type of thing we have to have to lobby against very hard. And I think through broader impacts, were able to do that. So that's one story I want to share of how Madison kind of led this effort. And and I take, I take credit for being there at the time with a great idea of doing a session and it's like wow, this just snowballed and snowballed into five and a half million dollar center's grant. So we were able to do a lot with those funds, and I wish I soon they're going to go for more funding. They're looking at impacting other federal agencies like NIH, and education and defense to say, you guys got to have these requirements that your scientists need to share their science beyond the small subgroup that understands totally what they're doing because we need to defend science right now. So that's the one project I wanted to share. And I'm looking at some of your other questions where I could go with that.

Troy Reeves 17:43

Sure.

Kevin Niemi 17:45

One other personal story that is again, it's sometimes who you know, this was right around 2000. I think maybe - I just looked this. Yeah, was it before 911. And I don't know why I thought of that, because that was one of your questions. But I got a call from the International Dean in Cals [?], Ken Shapiro, who said, I've got a couple of scientists up in my office who - and there's their leaders in education in the republic or the kingdom of Thailand. They both have UW Madison connections. And I was talking to them about a project we did, which I think I talked about last time, the project seed, which was our Kellogg Foundation, Grant. And Ken was basically the PI on that for the university. And he said, can they come down and talk to you about your outreach and your job? 01:09:00Basically, I said, "Sure. I, I don't mind talking about what I do." Well, they came down, we sat in, in the lab, and I just explained what outreach was and how I was working to improve k-12 science education. And after about 45 minutes, they said, that's great. You want to come to Thailand and help us. It's like, what, let's talk about this. Well, I think about 15 trips later and almost 20 years. I'm still working with Thailand, and it became workshops with either universities who had science education centers, more was more of it. And also there's the Institute for the promotion of teaching science and technology, which is funded quasi by the Ministry of Education in Thailand, and they write the national science and math curriculum and do professional development. So it was a perfect connection to what I was doing because that was what I was doing here with schools and school districts back here in Wisconsin, and it's led to some really good friendships. We had over 30 to 35 PhD students come to Madison for up to a year to use our resources and improve their English. So the School of Education got involved with this Thailand project. Several of their faculty have been in Thailand to do workshops and lectures and things of that sort. So again, it was sometimes it's just a chance meeting a chance call that I took from person who had some graduates from UW Madison back in the 60s. And one of them was the president of one of the best universities in Thailand mahidon [?] University. And he's the one who extended the invitation and all, this was all expenses paid by Thailand for me to go, my unit accepted as part of my job, because it really was integral to the Cals [?] outreach efforts. And as I said, I felt I've had some impact on them. And as I said, in retirement, I continue to consult with them. So I think that's an interesting again, the outreach, community engagement, reputation of UW Madison led to some international impacts. And I know there are others around that have from the outreach community that have worked in other countries and other states, etc.

Troy Reeves 21:29

Thank you, Kevin. So there's a few academic staff focus questions, but I want to, I didn't want to skip those and do those at the end, because there's some follow ups from the first session that I want to get in now.

Kevin Niemi 21:40

Okay,

Troy Reeves 21:41

These are sort of in chronological order. I remember when you talked about initially on campus, when you came to campus about working with faculty, and I'm wondering, initially, as a new person on campus, how did you find faculty to collaborate with you?

Kevin Niemi 21:57

Yeah, that's a great, great challenge at times. And a lot of it is just connections, who's worked with whom, who knows someone who might be receptive to a discussion. Early on the Center for biology education, had both Paul Williams from the Department of plant pathology faculty member, and Jim Stewart in the School of Education as active - they were kind of our steering committee members, a couple of them. And they knew of their colleagues and said, Hey, have you talked to so and so, or how about so and so for this program, and it was just name dropping and cold calling a lot of times on our faculty to say, "I got your name from and I named drop, and I've got this program coming up next summer that I think you might be interested in, or be a resource resource for," and just spelling it out to them. And that happens a lot. And even in broader impact work, which if you have an NSF grant, as I said, you have to do it. A lot of them don't know how to do it, or what to do. So even there, it becomes, well, I know so and so has an NSF grant, or as time went on, they came to us to say I've got this requirement, I'd like to work with teachers, how can I do that. And for the most part, they would defer to my knowledge, or my colleagues knowledge of that community, and not come in with the and this is a little condescending, but that attitude of faculty often is I know everything I'm, I'm, I'm a professor, I can do anything. Well, at times they do say, I may not know as much about k 12, and how to help teachers. So help me learn more and help me be more effective. And it becomes more of a network. And there were times when I'd go to department chairs to say hey, I want you to know about these things, if you hear of any of your faculty in your department. Eventually, as I got more of a reputation, I started working at the Associate Dean level and even the Dean's level. At one time center for biology education actually answered to what were called the bio Deans who met routinely. This would be LNS CALS [?], all of the engineering, even I think nursing was involved. All of the unit education was involved all 01:15:00the units that had some kind of biological connection. They met routinely to talk about common interests and more often than not, it was about academic discussions like the intro bio courses and how to fund them. Because early on in my life at CBE there was not a biology major, it did not exist. And there were a couple of bio Dean's who were reticent to even support such a thing. Well, we won that fight. And I think our Center for biology, education, and some of the other staff members in the group, worked hard to get that major through. And it's become either one or two for every year since as far as number of majors. And it's kind of jointly managed at the at the time, it was jointly managed between CALS and LNS. So even talking to the bio Deans and I had a large project that was funded out of the provost office called Wisconsin leads in math and science that was a partnership with the at the time, it was the outreach office in the School of Ed and my unit, I was the lead on it, we got a number of - a large grant from campus to do a better job of meeting the science and math needs of K 12 community. Well, we went to the bio Dean's to involve them and getting some of their faculty involved. So a lot of it at the beginning was one on one on one kind of conversations, and then it just kind of as the network grows, as our efforts become more public, like science expeditions, it becomes easier to recruit. And I have to say, I think there's a generational change that I noticed that many of the younger faculty understand why and the value of communicating to the non-science community about their research. And they were more willing to do it, even though they oftentimes didn't get enough credit in the tenure and the promotion department. And that's an ongoing debate on our campus and nationally of what is the value of this work that really isn't science; it's sharing of science. It isn't publications all the time, but it's valuable, and that I think many, many organization and many, many institutions are discussing very appropriately to reward efforts in outreach and community engagement.

Troy Reeves 27:22

Thank you, Kevin. My neighbor is mowing the lawn, so I had to close the window. But I heard you, fortunately, the window's very close. So my one of my two other follow up questions. I was reminded when you talked about the trip you took with Chuck Reed to Harvard around, you said it was around 911, maybe just after nine,

Kevin Niemi 27:41

Just after 911.

Troy Reeves 27:44

You know, we're coming on the 20th anniversary of that event. And I usually try to ask people who I know who were on campus during that time period, their thoughts and memories, particularly as it pertains to campus about 911.

Kevin Niemi 27:56

Yeah, I remember that morning very, very clearly. I was dropping my car off at a local dealership to get some service done, and was waiting for it in the waiting room when the first planes and I can't remember the chronological order. But as soon as my car was done, I rushed to campus. By then we had set up TVs in the biotech center in the auditorium to just watch. And it just was so unbelievable. And so unexpected that we just sat there for hours just watching things going on. And we at that time, I was not doing any formal courses. So I could not really talk with undergrads or anything, but it kind of reminds me of and obviously the numbers are very different. But I remember being at a conference with a group of teachers that we funded to go to this conference, and they were from one of the elementary schools on the north side that I was working with. And we had the principal and a couple of teachers and Columbine was going on. And the four of us were just sitting in it was probably the bar something watching that going on and the principal just freaking out because she said "I gotta get back. I got to take care of my kids in my school, because of these types of things," and just those traumatic activities, events that just stay with you and forever. Well remember Sandy Sandy Gunderson is the principal's name. She's longtime retired, but we stay in touch but her concern for her students because of this irrational act of these several students in suburban Denver, I mean, just same with 911. It's like, well, if you weren't there, and that's sometimes we forget that a lot is, and I appreciate what Beloit College does when they do their update on incoming freshmen have this in their minds, these are the events that are important to them. It's like, Oh, yeah, they weren't even alive when this happened. And it had such an impact on our country. And 911 is becoming one of those well into five or six classes, now that didn't experience it. And they just read about it or hear about it in history. Well, I 01:21:00remember as a kid, john F. Kennedy getting shot. And I was in kindergarten, first grade, probably. And my teacher just hollering and crying and running out in the hall when we heard that news that the President had been assassinated and say, when you're six years old, those things stay with you. And it's, it's where I appreciate some of the social sciences and the studies of those impactful events and how they can meld a country, if not a group of citizens into understanding things. And then I'll bring it full circle back to science. I mean, I'm not old enough to have been exposed to much of the polio epidemic. But I remember lining up in elementary school and getting my polio vaccine in my arm with there was no question everybody was in line, it was just something you had to do, because of those horrific pictures of kids in iron lungs that - it was before I was born, but we were still at that point of medicine can help us public medicine, public health can help us solve some of these great challenges to our society. Well, we've obviously completely flipped to a large degree of - medicine doesn't have all the answers. It's all a bunch of hoodoo, Voodoo stuff. And it's like, what happened? What happened as this society evolved in six decades, to be this way, and so not trusting a big government. And I get that I mean, I grew up during the Vietnam War, when we were given lines of BS by the government. And only you only can take so much of that before you start to doubt everything. But that does not justify the COVID response of a minority of people in this country. And likewise, the whole African American fearfulness of public health. That was disgusting, the things we did in with the Tuskegee Airmen, and some of the early studies that treated them like guinea pigs, they being African American citizens of this country. And yeah, I get the whole - the whole Helen lane [?] heela cells [?] the the whole, what's the name of the book, Henrietta Lacks book, where it just chronicled how bad Johns Hopkins was in treating citizens that were around that hospital, I get where the fearfulness is, but 01:24:00we've gotta overcome it as a society in order to improve life and maintain life on this planet, let alone the whole global climate change, which I've also sat through as an educator. And remember, even as an undergrad studying the co2 rise on Mauna Loa, in my textbook of plant physiology, and it's like we were talking about that in the mid 70s. It's now almost 50 years later, and we still haven't done much about it. We knew what was going to happen, but the minority voices just started getting bigger and bigger. And finally, I think most individuals believe that, yes, humans have had a horrible impact on the environment of this planet, and we need to do something about it. And we need to communicate what we need to do better, which gets all the way back to science, communication, public outreach, scientists having a vital role in sharing what they're doing and why they're doing it. And what are the uncertainties of science and how does science function? We don't just answer questions, we gather evidence and use that evidence to make a - at that times - guess as to what it means. And we need the public to understand that. Which is why I think my career has been so interesting to me of trying to get teachers to understand how science works.

Troy Reeves 35:15

Thank you, Kevin. So I'm going to, I'm going to hold on my last follow up question because I want to make sure we get the the academic staff questions asked, and I, you alluded to the end, at the end of the first session, I believe about your work and academic staff governance, and I know you have been involved in academic staff governance, so. So my question is, sort of, what did you offer do you feel? And then what did you gain from the experience, too?

Kevin Niemi 35:43

Yeah, well, I've one of those wanks, who enjoyed politics. I was a delegate to the state convention in Minnesota when I was in high school, and then continued as an undergrad and grad where we, we had the caucus system, and that was representative government. And so when I came to Madison, and real and actually, as a grad student, I was also involved the University of Minnesota's governance issues. When I came back to Madison, and learned about the academic staff assembly, I said, "Yeah, I can do that. That's once a month kind of thing, a few hours, learn about how things are happening." Well, I got elected from my little district and attended all the meetings in bascom, every month and heard from the chancellor and the provost, and saw those ASEC, academic staff executive 01:27:00committees, sitting up in front and saying, "boy who would want to volunteer for that? I mean, yeah, it's a lot of work. They're doing the needed work, but I don't have time to do that. Well, the assembly got me involved with a committee, I was on the professional development and recognition committee where we gave away awards and money, which is always fun. And I eventually got elected chair of that. So I served, I think six years on the PDRC. And just saw a little more of the inner workings of the academic staff side of governance in Bascom. And I think I worked with four or five different secretaries of the academic staff over the years and met some people and what it gained for me was, I didn't reach out to many parts of campus because there were not scientists there. And I didn't really know that much about some of the social sciences and some of the issues of staffing and just being an academic staff in non science departments, I think I knew the science and end of it pretty well, the CALS [?] departments and botany and zoology and a little bit of engineering, but it exposed me to other parts of the campus and just the tremendous work that academic staff members were doing in running departments around campus and it allowed me to make some friends from these different groups that were non science and colleagues and recognize their contributions to campus. And what early on I think I knew people on the nominating committee and they kept saying, Well, I'd like to put you up for ASEC some time. And can we do it this year? And I'd always say no, because my my job through outside funding entailed a lot of travel, I was traveling to LA to Denver to national meetings giving presentations. So I was on the road a lot, flying a lot. And I just couldn't commit to that kind of weekly kind of commitment until the latter part of my career. And at one point, I finally said yes, and I got elected to ASEC. And that first year was kind of a turnover if I recall of ASEC. And we had a new chair, and we needed a co chair and she - Heather McFadden - asked me to be co chair in my first year, I think, and that was quite unusual. But the co chair really didn't do much. I learned more of the inner workings and help the chair 01:30:00out as could be with various things and helped run the meeting to a certain degree. But then when Heather had a child she rotated off of ASEC and actually took leave so I was elected chair and served as chair for three or four years of ASEC, which entailed a lot more responsibility: meetings before our assembly meeting with the provost. So I served on ASEC with Paul DeLuca. Then we had Sarah Mangalstorff [?] come in from off campus, non UW Madison provost. And a lot of ASEC activities at that time, we're bringing her up to speed on the role of shared governance on our campus. And shared governance, not equally in faculty governance, which is typically what it is at most other institutions. It's faculty governance, I think we have a campus that really emphasizes shared governance because we all have, for example, the university staff answer, their administrative contact is, it was Lauren, whatever his Lauren Heller's position was he ran, the university staff, governance or was responsible for its effectiveness, and its meetings, and we had the provost and the faculty had the chancellor. So we all had our different levels of, of engagement with administration, but faculty governance is faculty shared governance is all workers on campus. And we were there to advise, consult, recommend do things of that sort to get our perspective as academic staff members to administration when they had campus wide decisions to make. So I was off of ASEC when COVID hit but as I know, from my colleagues that they were actively part of the discussion about what is the campus response to COVID back in February, March of last year, because it was impacting over 8,000 academic staff members, and you damn well better consult with us before you give some mandates. And I think Becky, in her term, I mean, I, I knew she's, I don't know how many chancellors back I knew personally from David Ward to John Wiley, and just through various connections - I think Becky took came around and understood the value. And one other role I had with shared governance was early on, I took the UW System reps role for the UW Madison campus. And that group met monthly during the academic year with the 01:33:00president and some of the higher ups in UW system. So I knew Kevin Reilly, I knew well, geez my memories going, who the presidents were - Ray Krause, and I can't think of did replace Kevin, I think he may have. So during my time on ASEC, the six years I was the rep. And after about a year of that group, being very disorganized. I kind of said let me lead it we're meeting in Madison, let me take the leadership of the UW system, academic staff reps group, and kind of get us to a place where we're a little more organized, because we had time with the president. And oftentimes that first year it was we had no idea what we wanted to talk about with him. And I felt really not good at times that we wasted our time in advocating for academic staff issues with the president of system who could do something about many of them. So I kind of did a, I let me try and take this over and run the group for a few years well I ran it for the rest of my five years remaining. And we had some good discussions with Krause [?} and this is when Scott Walker was governor and he did some things rewriting of some of the statutes that took away some of our governance rights. We brought it to the attention of Krause [?] and to our lobbyists. The Jeff and Jeff lobbyists were there. I can't think of their last names. But we had a couple of lobbyists sub in the legislature, and we made it known that we didn't appreciate having some of our rights taken away from us as academic staff members and I called [word unclear] on the carpet a few times to say why, why did this go through where where's the statute that got changed, and he "oh, I'll check on it." And we just had to keep pushing system to respect academic staff. And obviously Madison has by far the most largest number of academic staff. So we had a lot more skin in the game with these discussions with Krause [?] and his staff about issues of concern for us as employees. And there was an equivalent faculty group and an equivalent university staff group. And there were times when we'd meet together with Krause [?] and there were times when we'd meet with each other to get on the same page with some of the issues that were happening 01:36:00and things of that sort so and I enjoyed helping organize the group, I didn't manhandle run it. But we had some good discussions from the representatives from all the campuses. And I think I helped get them in a place that we became much more effective group in advocating for academic staff at the system level. So that's kind of how the academic staff governance came about. And again, it was kind of a political wank at times. So volunteers get called on to do things.

Troy Reeves 46:19

Yep. And so as we're beginning to wrap up here, there's one more question about faculty and staff before we talk about the the award itself. And you've talked about this, both in the first and second session, but I do wonder if you have other thoughts about the relationship on our campus, between faculty and staff.

Kevin Niemi 46:41

It's good and bad. I think in my tenure, almost 25 years, faculty numbers have decreased, I would say several hundred position wise, I think they're probably around 2000, faculty. Academic staff, early on in my career, were not that many more. We were a few thousand, more maybe 3000, 4000 back in the 90s. Now I'm sure we're well over 8000. So that alone is an issue of a bone of contention with faculty, They realize that many of the academic staff being hired are doing things they used to do and be responsible for. Whether that's specifically teaching. And there's always the as I think I talked about in the first session, this three legged stool of tenure: teaching, research and service. And what separates faculty from academic staff is faculty need to do all three. They're not weighted equally. But they have to have packages in all three areas where academic staff are forbidden from doing all three; they cannot do all three. And I think I said last time that I kind of under the table, never asked for permission to do all three because I was involved. I mean, to me broader impact, all of that is service. But that was also a research project. We were researching as a group of NSF grant holders, what is impactful, broader impact work. And then in my last few years, I was doing teaching and even all the years before, when teachers needed credit, I was doing credit-granting teaching during 01:39:00professional development during the summer for teachers. So I never asked for permission and never really got called on it. But I was essentially doing what faculty are asked to do - all three. And there are departments who would have hammered that harder and forbidden me from doing some of that. And that often became an issue with staff and with ASEC of some of these cases where academic staff were doing good things and being told to backup - can't do that. And excuse me, we had to call him on that and and discuss it with faculty and with deans of units. And I related issue to that is at one point there were a number of us who had rolling horizon appointments, which is tenure-like but it's not tenure because we didn't have life contracts like faculty have, but we had appointments that would roll over and extended a day, every day. So there'd never be a termination date to our contracts. That was the tenure-like kind of compromise. That's valuable when you have a productive academic staff member who you don't want to lose, because of this year-to-year contract kind of stuff. Well, we had to fight that at times with different units. I lost the fight in my own unit, mine got taken away, which I still should have fought. But I chose not to because I was already retiring. But it was something that hurt me as a professional, they didn't realize that was the one little carrot that kind of I was proud of having. And then they went and took it away. Well. The other real pointed ASEC issue that I recall as chair was in a certain unit, they had a number of, of mis-titled academic staff instructors. And the unit was using a different title for these individuals than they should have because we were very locked in to pay scales. And this department was using a lower paying title for academic staff to do X, Y, and Z in their departments. Well, those are the kinds of things that ASEC got involved with when we knew it was happening, and involved HR in these discussions with departments. But we want fairness across campus where if you're doing X, Y, and Z in this department in a different department doing the exact same kind of stuff, and you're at different pay 01:42:00levels, that's inequities. And we wanted to increase the transparency to a certain degree, but call out units that were abusing the academic staff HR system. That doesn't happen to faculty, I mean, you're an assistant professor, you're an associate professor, and you're a full professor. And you basically can pretty much do what you want to do once you have tenure. Well, that does not exist for most academic staff members. So that was an issue that we dealt with, rather routinely when we heard about the stories or heard complaints from academic staff, about their abuse by the administrators in their units. And I don't even remember the original question this time.

Troy Reeves 52:30

Yeah, it was the the relationship between faculty and staff, staff. Thank you. I think you got it. So as we're wrapping up here, just a couple more things. And since we're interviewing you about the academic staff award that you won, I would hope you tell a little story about the the award like you know, knowing if you were nominated your thoughts and reactions when you heard thoughts about the reception, things like that.

Kevin Niemi 52:55

Yeah. Interesting. Since I was on the committee that ran those awards for six years, the professional development and recognition committee. We did both academic staff grants, and we did the awards thing - subgroups did. So I knew about the awards. And I remember getting a call, I think it was a call from Heather Daniels, who at that time was secretary of academic staff saying I'd like to nominate you for one of these awards. And it's like, oh, never even thought of that. That's okay. And basically, what she asked for was a CV of mine, and I sent it to her and kind of forgot about it. And got a call from her, I don't know, Three, four, five, six months later saying that you had been selected and it's like, that was it silence. It's like, wow, I I really was very stunned and very appreciative of it. And it was the Anne Wallace Career Achievement, which in looking at the criteria, it was a lot about governance, because Anne Wallace was very active and shared governance during her her tenure on campus. Then she retired and endowed this award, as well as career work, and I knew, I think I've done a lot to further UW Madison's stature in the area of science education and things. So one of Heather's comments when I think she introduced me or whenever is, its first time I've heard Kevin not talk in my 01:45:00years of dealing with him and I was done and very appreciative of it and it's unfortunate I loved the ceremony at Granger Hall when we would have the award winners in and chancellor would be there and you'd get up in front of your 200 colleagues and family and give a talk. So I lament not being able to do that, plus the food at that soiree was excellent. And as ech as being on the committee, I would go to them because we ran the program. And as ASEC, we were invited. And it was just a neat way to recognize really outstanding academic staff members. And I know how competitive this was. And again, I don't know who I was competing against in this retirement category. But it was when we did those selections back when I was on the PDRC. Whether it was for research, support staff, academic staff members, or whatever teaching or whatever. It was splitting hairs to try to pick one out of numerous wonderful individuals. And I think that is oftentimes lost in by the faculty and administration of how many wonderful, committed dedicated academic staff we have on our campus that do a wonderful job for subpar pay, because we're never going to be equal to faculty in pay. But we still do the job. And one one last issue that we dealt with that ASEC and talked with the administration about was the only really good way to advance your pay as an academic staff member is to take a new position. That's sad to say, because everything you've done prior probably gets washed, it's out with the wash. Your connections are gone because you have to take a different position to get a better salary and the churning that goes on with good people who want to do that because they need the extra pay is some inherent flaw in the system. And yeah, you can raise it all you want with, with administration and we did with whether there was Paul de Loup [?], Sarah Mang, Sarah Mangelsdorf[?], etc, the chancellor. There's not a lot they can do, because sometimes early on our hands were tied because of the legislature setting the HR agenda. We finally got away from that in 2000, late 2000s, and had some control over our own HR 01:48:00rules as a campus and that that changed it to a certain degree where you could give bonuses, whether it was cash, or base pay adjustments, which were illegal, basically, in my early part of my academic staff career, not for faculty, but they were for staff members. And that, thankfully was changed. And I, again, it's marketing to the administrators of all these departments that you can do that you can give somebody a raise, if they do a really good job. You don't have to be totally 2% across the board for everybody. Well, no, you can bury it for your better employees and, and maybe make it an incentive to do the job better. So I was dumbfounded with the award and very appreciative of it.

Troy Reeves 58:31

Great. So, we're right about at an hour. So the final question is just really to you, is there anything else that you'd like to say about your time on campus?

Kevin Niemi 58:46

There were a lot, mostly good times, few bad times when I was frustrated and looked around a little bit, but I - the unit I was in for the first 20 years was so entrepreneurial, and so well supported by our internal administrators within the unit that I felt like I could do what I felt needed to be done to help k 12 science. And I did it and whether that was taking time to go to Thailand because they asked me to and getting paid to do that, or whether it was going to a meeting and just say fon du lac I just did it and never really received pushback on it. And that to me was the extreme effectiveness of the unit early on in our first 20 years as a center and institute but that kind of changed when budgets got slashed and I know my position was not filled after I retired which is disheartening, but I get it when times are tough, and we did not know what the COVID budget situation was. So I feel bad for my unit to a certain degree that I retired. But I just had to like I was losing the drive to get up every day and get in and especially to get into this room and teach on zoom. It's a challenge. And I appreciate all the efforts that my colleagues have done with the zoom instruction. It's not easy, and that's colleagues in K 12, as well, as well as higher education. So that's kind of my parting thought.

Troy Reeves 1:00:35

Well, Kevin, thank you for that. And thank you for this session and the previous session. So I'm gonna do my conclusion here and then stop the recording and then 01:51:00we can talk for a minute or two before we wrap up the zoom meeting. So this concludes the oral history with Kevin Niemi. Kevin, thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

Kevin Niemi 1:00:53

You're welcome. very welcome. It was good to reminisce.