Interview with Martin Rudd

LEH: Turn on the recorder here. All right. Could you say your name and then spell out your last name?

MR: Yes. Martin Rudd. R-u-d-d.

LEH: All right. Great. Yeah, so why don't we start with just sort of the basics? So, what brought you to the former UW Colleges? And how long did you hold your past position in the former UW Colleges?

MR: Sure. Well I came to the colleges in August of 2002 as an assistant professor of chemistry. I was previously five years in a tenure-track position in Louisiana. And was making good progress towards tenure. But some personal circumstances combined with a very heavy workload of teaching and undergraduate research caused me to rethink whether that was the place I really wanted to try to obtain tenure. So I applied for an open recruitment position that happened to be at the Marathon County campus. Interviewed for it, got the position, and so I spent my first year in the UW Colleges teaching chemistry at the Marathon County campus in Wausau. And then took a transfer, an internal transfer that we were able to do, to start there in August of 2003.

So my most recent position in the UW Colleges prior to the UW system restructuring was as the campus dean and campus executive officer of the UW Fox Valley campus from January 2012 until January of 2016. And then in January of 2016, I became the regional executive officer and dean for the UW Colleges Northeast Region after our regionalization project. And I oversaw the operations for the Fox Valley, Manitowoc and Fond du Lac campuses. And I did that until restructuring began.

LEH: All right. Could you sort of expand on like what that position entails? And that position in relation to regionalization?

MR: Are you talking about the regional executive officer and dean position?

LEH: Yeah.

MR: Yeah. So perhaps it would help to know a little bit about when I was the campus dean at just the Fox Valley campus. So the CEO dean role at 00:03:00the UW Colleges was an executive level role. We were actually thought of in some ways as very small college presidents. And there were certain things that came with that. For instance, I had an all UW System parking permit in the same way that a chancellor might. Which was nice that enabled me to come easily to the Board of Regents meetings. And we had our own invitation to system football games with the presidents of the system. We had our own holiday party that the system president put on. So it was an interesting and elevated position because UW Fox Valley, while it was a campus of the UW Colleges, was one of the 26 institutions of the UW System. So in many ways it was sort of like almost a standalone little college, even though we were a part of the University of Wisconsin Colleges.

So the position that I had as CEO had budget, personnel, hiring, decision making authority for the staff and faculty of students on that campus. And we did our own marketing. We did our own recruitment for the campus. We developed our own relationships with the local municipalities. In this case, Outagamie and Winnebago counties, who provided funding for capital projects on the campus. And of course, all of that was done under the division of the chancellor and his or her leadership team for the University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin Extension. Because we had become a single institution with a single chancellor back in probably 2008.

So when, during the '15-'17 biennium when then-governor Scott Walker announced the budget reduction of 250 million dollars to the UW System, deans found out that our institutional budget reduction was going to be about five million dollars, a little over five million dollars. And we'd already been through a series of budget reductions, mostly campus-based and not involving personnel. This five million dollar budget reduction was probably an order of magnitude higher than we typically dealt with. And as a result, we needed to make some major changes in order to be able to deal with that type of budget cut. I think everyone knew that this was no longer a matter of cutting supplies and expenses. This was going to affect personnel.

And so the leadership team of UW Colleges and UW Extension under Chancellor Cathy Sandeen and with vice chancellors Lampe and Wildeck put together their vision for a regionalized UW Colleges model where there would be a leadership team that looked after a collection of campuses of the UW Colleges, but in a regional model. And thus the campus-based leadership that each of the thirteen campuses enjoyed would sort of be shrunk down to a regional leadership team. And that was part of the way in which we were going to save expenses. There were other ways as well. Doing some centralization of critical services, such as marketing and IT, human resources, all led to what was ultimately about sixty-two FTE job losses across the UW Colleges, primarily from about November 2015 through March and April of 2016. And as a result, we were able to reduce our operating budget by more than five million dollars to bring this in line with the budget that we had received from the UW System, the reduced budget from UW System.

So my work as a regional dean looked somewhat similar, at least initially, to my work as a campus dean. Except for the fact it was on three campuses. And I had a very different-looking leadership team. So instead of having campus-based people, I had a regional team. So I had experts in finance and curriculum and student affairs and in facilities, continuing education and in communications to help run what was really a three-campus mini organization in Northeast Wisconsin.

And it took quite a while for us to find our feet. Maybe about a year. But at the beginning of the second year of regionalization, so the beginning of 2017, we were really beginning to click. Not only as a team but also in how campus operations had changed. And they were significant. Things that faculty and staff used to get help from a local campus person with were no longer available. I'll give you an example. On each campus we used to have somebody that would, say, develop posters and print posters for faculty theater events and faculty music events and athletic events. All of those functions disappeared under our regional model. And faculty had to learn to complete a form and that 00:09:00project would be completed in Madison by the central marketing team.

So there's a very different workflow. We became a nimble, automated and progressive looking institution. Because we learned how to do things remotely. We did meetings remotely. We did paperwork remotely. We became electronically savvy. And it was an exciting and fast-paced time in the early part of 2017, after we'd got over the initial shock of how a three-campus model was going to work, and how we were going to develop curriculum that not just supported one campus, but perhaps best supported all three campuses. Or how we could make budget decisions that didn't just affect one campus, but perhaps enhanced the other two. All the thirteen campuses with the UW Colleges had been used to being very autonomous from each other, and in some ways competitive with each other. But working in a regional model began to change that.

There was also a huge change in the relationships that I had with my dean colleagues. We went from being 13 individual campus deans to four regional deans. And we greatly enhanced our relationships with the central office. We became much more team-focused with our chancellor and our vice chancellors. It became much less competitive and we became much better colleagues in how we could support all 13 campuses, rather than just focus on the outcomes for our one campus.

LEH: Could you expand on that? You made a comment about when the former colleges were sort of their own entities, competition between the colleges?

MR: Yeah. Yeah. I think I can. Every campus dean was immensely proud of the campus that he or she served. And we were all different sizes, different capabilities, different legacies. There were things that campus deans were able to do that were successful on their campus that they were then able to share with their colleagues to see if they would work on other campuses. So there was this genuine, oh, enthusiasm. Perhaps almost over-exuberance among some of the deans to promote successes that their campus were having. Yet beneath all of that were uncertainties about the finances of the two-year campuses, 00:12:00changing enrollments, changing enrollments, and the fact that some campuses seemed to have, quote, "it all," and some campuses seemed to survive on say meager resources. And I had the opportunity to work on campuses that had a lot. The Fox Valley campus had a lot. It had budget reserves, it had auxiliary facilities, such as a planetarium and an earth science museum and a childcare center that sort of added to the prestige of the university. Whereas their other campuses that survived on much more meager resources from the city or the county that they were associated with, both in terms of the amount of funding that they got from maintenance and also in terms of the faculty and staff resources, what the campuses were able to offer in terms of curriculum. And as a result, the types of students that they were able to bring in. So it was a friendly and competitive environment at the same time where the deans seemed to try to sort of like one-up each other. And I think at some point that the chancellor, and I don't remember which chancellor it was at the time, must have decided that he or she had had enough of that and that something else was probably needed, something to help us all pull in the same direction.

LEH: Hmm. So could you expand on sort of the idea of promoting success, but there's also uncertainty in sort of like this in between period, between regionalization and restructuring?

MR: Yeah. So the regionalization model was extremely well-explained by our UW Colleges leadership. I thought they did an outstanding job of explaining how it was going to work. The people that were chosen to be part of the new leadership teams in each of the regions of the UW Colleges were, for the most part, tried and trusted people. But we're all thrust into new roles. And so as the regional executive officer and dean, I got to work with brand new people that 00:15:00I'd never had to work with before. So for instance, I was collegial with people from the Fond du Lac campus, because it happened to be forty miles down the road, but not really had a lot to do with them.

When it was announced in October of 2015 that I was going to be the regional dean for the UW Colleges Northeast Region, it was difficult. Because I had a colleague on this campus, where I am today, at the Fond du Lac campus of UW Oshkosh, who was my friend and colleague, who was the dean. Dean John Short. And he was then faced with being out of a job. He was somebody who I'd literally competed against for the regional dean's job. And there he was, facing the elimination of his job because I was going to become the regional dean. So that was one of the difficulties that we faced, sort of moving into the unknown.

One truth about the regional work is that despite the fact that it was not portrayed as running three campuses, for most of the people on my regional leadership team, they can tell you that the work for the nearly two years between when regionalization started and when UW System restructuring started, felt like doing three jobs. I traveled almost every day between the Fox, Fond du Lac and Manitowoc campuses. Not often three campuses a day, but more than often two campuses a day. I put on nearly forty thousand miles on my vehicle during the course of the year, driving between the campuses. I had dean colleagues, the dean in the North Region, Keith Montgomery, who had four campuses stretched out between Marinette, Marshfield, Wausau and Rice Lake. Hundreds of miles apart. And so the logistics of being a visible regional dean with community connections in each of the communities where we had campuses became a seventy or eighty-hour a week job.

And on my regional leadership team, that brought us very close together, the shared exhaustion and the shared velocity and quantity of the work was almost overwhelming. But it was also, looking back on it, sort of an exciting time as well. Because we were doing something different. Something with a new model. Something that was, we didn't want. We didn't want a five million 00:18:00dollar reduction. But by gosh, we were going to make the best of it. And that's really the attitude that the UW Colleges had throughout the seventeen years that I've been in this institution. Or was at that institution. I'm not anymore, of course. But was in that institution.

LEH: So it's like kind of a sense of like perseverance, almost.

MR: It was, yes. It was perseverance, it was survival. It was we know what we can do with very little because we've been good at it. And so I think we've been given a lifeline by the regionalization that if tackled correctly, we could make work. And I had great confidence and saw great results from people on my regional leadership team. All eight of them, or all eight of us, I think, worked very well together. I still have the absolute good fortune to work with six of them together as our axis campus leadership team at UW Oshkosh. I couldn't be more thrilled to still be working with the same people. It's like the band played on.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. So, do you think that that is sort of like what helped keep people with the UW Colleges in that period of time? Like what were your coworkers, what was the reaction from some of your coworkers?

MR: At the time of regionalization, or the time of restructuring?

LEH: Yeah, regionalization.

MR: Well, I would say that the announcement of regionalization in, we'll call it, the summer of 2015, has led to what is nearly now four and a half years of upside down, topsy turvy turbulence within people on the former UW Colleges campuses. Not only did we go through two years of working into regionalization, understanding how it worked and the different processes that it brought. But then in October of 2017, when UW System restructuring was announced, it was another mind-blowing change. And you'll often hear the term "change 00:21:00warrior" associated with people from the UW Colleges.

The most painful part about regionalization was the fact that it led to job losses. It led to sixty-two FTE, but probably close to a hundred of our colleagues, mostly from the non-instructional side, being let go. Positions were completely changed. Positions were rewritten. People took on new roles. Most of them very willingly, because some of them were thankful to keep their job. But for the faculty who were probably least affected by regionalization, certainly on the instructional side, there was a real sense of loss of colleagues who used to do things to support an academic mission of the UW Colleges.

I'll give you a couple of examples. The IT world completely changed. The Fox Valley campus, where I was, had the most envious IT department in all of the UW Colleges. We staffed it well. We provided great student support. I mean, student help desk support. We had resources dedicated towards IT. All of that went away during regionalization, despite our protests and as we created a centralized IT model. That is that central IT services would provide the services to the campuses and each campus would have a small assigned number of IT people to it, virtually identical to every other campus.

And so what I think people felt was lost was the individuality and the individual strengths that each campus had kind of got wiped away. The Fox campus had multiple FTE in the IT are whose positions were lost. Including the director of IT, who had been in that role probably close to thirty years. His position was simply eliminated. It was a crushing blow for a campus who prided itself on IT support for faculty, staff and students.

And the new model that was put into place having centralized services failed. It utterly failed the Fox campus. People had to submit a help desk ticket. People wouldn't hear back for four or five days. When they did, they were told that the problem had been resolved, and it hadn't been. It was an unmitigated 00:24:00disaster for many people. Not for everybody, but for many people, to have centralized IT services.

So people lamented the loss of colleagues who used to do things, the colleagues that used to be of help. The colleagues that used to be of support in helping a campus run. The campus felt thinner. The campus felt less staffed, if that makes sense.

LEH: Mm hmm. Yeah. Definitely. Do you think, this is something, some of these issues were things that students noticed in certain areas?

MR: Yes. I do think that. But I also think it was a little overstated. One of the advantages of working at a two-year campus is that you tend to have a very short, half-life of student time on campus. While it takes most students two years to get an associate's degree, we also see a significant percent of the students who leave after one year. So there is always a graduating class with a new student body coming in who never experience what last year's class did.

So when I say that academics was preserved under regionalization, I do believe that Chancellor Sandeen and her team did a good job of preserving academics. The classes, the way that the classes were taught, the way that the classes were, the way that the curriculum was developed, looked very similar after regionalization as it did before. It was managed differently behind the scenes, for sure. But it looked basically the same.

In fact, during the time of regionalization, we were able to expand the types of offerings that we were able to send from one campus to another. Also, Point to Point classes, and our UW Colleges online program, which became one of the envy programs of the Midwest as far as online general education and online associate degrees went.

So yes, students may have noticed in the services that were available to them. I'll give you an example of that. Under our former campus model, a student would walk into the Student Services office and get help, say, with financial aid or with veterans' benefits. Under our regional model, much of that became centralized as well, what we call consolidated. So we had front line people who staff the office who were generalists who could answer some questions about financial aid. But if there was a more detailed question, we would 00:27:00have to refer them to somebody in our Madison office. So we lost levels of expertise as a result of regionalization.

So you could argue that perhaps students weren't served on the campus as well. The UW Colleges leadership, and I would argue as well, that students could get that same level of service if it just came in a different way. They would have to contact somebody in Madison. Pick up the phone and call somebody, or email somebody in Madison. And I suppose for some students, that area could have been one that perhaps prevented them from continuing their education, or they thought of as one more straw that broke the camel's back as far as them getting information that they might have thought would have been readily available from a student services office.

I don't tend to buy that. The student services staff were utterly professional. They all took on their new roles. Their roles changed considerably as a result of regionalization. And they, being a professional academic staff, picked up the baton and made the best of it for students. But I think behind the scenes, faculty felt as though students were not getting the same amount of service.

LEH: Yeah.

MR: Perhaps I'll also add, and of course during that time we were beginning to see the first, well, perhaps not beginning to see. We were already seeing the first stages of declining enrollments across our campuses. Some of it, which of course was driven by regionalization, was this need to stabilize the finances on the campuses. You can only make so many small cuts before you have to make a major decision about how you're going to restructure and continue into the future. And so our regionalization was in some ways a preview of what UW System restructuring was going to do. It was there to help provide stability to an institution of access where thousands upon thousands of students enrolled in college for the first time. Many of them, first generation students. Many of them returning adult students where their local University of Wisconsin campus was the lifeline to them eventually getting a bachelor's degree.

LEH: Yeah. Could you sort of expand on that? Sort of like the stabilization?

MR: Yeah. You mean from an enrollment perspective? Or how our campuses, how we were trying to stabilize our campuses?

LEH: Either one. It's up to you.

MR: So I was somewhat fortunate being the dean of the Fox Valley campus. Because enrollments were always relatively high compared to the other campuses. We were the second largest of the two-year campuses, behind the Waukesha campus. And also, I worked with an associate dean of academic affairs who was an absolute master at balancing what we needed to offer in terms of curriculum versus how much it cost based on how much tuition we were bringing in. So we had what felt like a very, a fairly stable campus.

During the process of regionalization, and I became the regional dean at Fond du Lac and Manitowoc, Fond du Lac was also extremely well-managed. However, the Manitowoc campus, while it was well-managed, had suffered quite a bit because of declining high school enrollment numbers. The Manitowoc campus had a very unique relationship with Lincoln High School. Lincoln High School is virtually next door to the former UW Manitowoc campus. And the UW Manitowoc campus relied greatly on recruiting students from Lincoln High School.

As the middle part of this decade unfolded and we began to see declines, continued declines in high school graduating class sizes across the state, it became fairly clear that schools that had formerly provided our local campuses with good numbers of incoming freshman, such as was the case of Lincoln High School in Manitowoc, was no longer providing as many students as they were. You combine that with a strong economy, great work done by the chambers of commerce across our state encouraging students to move straight from high school to work through job shadow programs, apprenticeships and things like that, and we were beginning to see the perfect storm for declining enrollments on our two-year campuses.

In many ways, the two-year campuses are canary in the coalmine for Wisconsin higher education. We were the first campuses to rebound after the recession. But we also were the first to feel the real effects of the strong economy and the general turn away from higher education. Both as a result of strong school to work programs, and low unemployment and declining high school graduating class sizes. And so the Manitowoc campus, when I quote "inherited" it in 00:33:00fall of 2015 at the time of regionalization was in some financial difficulties. And not to a point where there were any concerns about it closing or anything like that. The difficulties are in the curriculum size. When you have less students, you should offer less curriculum. If you offer less curriculum, you have less to attract students. If you are unable to attract students, you need to offer less curriculum. And you get into a sort of downward spiral of where you have to decide where the bottom is. And deciding where the bottom is meant putting additional resources into the Manitowoc campus.

And we worked really, really hard on building a new seven million-dollar science and art facility on the Manitowoc campus with the help of Manitowoc County. That was the first building project it had done in probably thirty years on the then UW Manitowoc campus. Part of the hope for that was to upgrade the science facilities so we could attract more students out of school. And it just so happened that no sooner had we finished that building, and UW System restructuring came along and the campus went to Green Bay. So it was kind of like a surreal time. It felt like we were finishing up the building project not for ourselves but for a future entity that hadn't yet been defined.

LEH: Yeah, that's--hmm. Yeah. Right. Because Manitowoc went to Green Bay. But Fox Valley and Fond du Lac moved to, or with, UW Oshkosh, right?

MR: With. That's right. And you know, when restructuring was announced, I had fondness for, work with, engagement in, all three communities. And suddenly it felt like somebody had taken an axe and was splitting those off. And in fact, in the case of some of my staff members, they were literally besieged by requests to go with competing institutions. I had staff members who were asked to join UW Green Bay. I had staff members who were asked to join UW Oshkosh. And so ultimately, we decided that we would move together as a regional leadership staff to Oshkosh. We were wanted by them more. We seemed to be valued 00:36:00by them more. Green Bay wanted to come in and do things their own way at the Manitowoc campus. And that rubbed many of my regional leadership people the wrong way. Green Bay made it very clear that they were going to come in and change the structure of the campuses. And some of those things helped my regional leadership team decide that when restructuring came around, they wanted to look towards Oshkosh for their future employment.

LEH: Hmm. Could you talk more about that? What was it that Green Day--Green Day, oh boy. (laughs) Sorry--Green Bay wanted to do with Manitowoc that rubbed people the wrong way?

MR: I don't want to mischaracterize. I'm not sure if it's what they wanted to do with Green Bay. I think it was the way in which they approached their three campuses that they were sort of taking over and were making them satellite campuses of UW Green Bay. And this conversation is not open record right now, is it?

LEH: No. so, you can choose to have it not embargoed until a certain date, or--

MR: Yeah. One of the things that happened early on is that each of the two-year campuses had their own foundation. And the job of the foundation was to do fundraising for the local campus. And in the case of the UW Manitowoc Foundation, they had successfully raised about half a million dollars of private money to help build and renovate the science and art building, a seven million dollar project that was going on the Manitowoc campus.

Right after restructuring was announced, Green Bay came in and indicated that they were going to close in all of the two-year campus foundations at Marinette, Sheboygan and Manitowoc. And while it wasn't quite put in those terms, it was very clear that there wasn't a future for the foundation and the people who had put in the work to raise half a million dollars over the two years of planning for that project. It felt like a real kick in the teeth from Green Bay. It felt like they'd come in, hadn't wanted to understand the culture of the two-year campuses, hadn't taken the time to understand the work that was being 00:39:00done. They just wanted everything done the Green Bay way. And while I'm sure things are successful on the Manitowoc campus now, at the time two years ago not only were things fragile because UW System restructuring had been announced in a pretty bizarre way. A sort of leak from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, what seemed to be a hush-hush project. But we had only just begun second full academic year in our regional model. And so people were still learning what was the best way of doing things there when suddenly it was time for a whole new change.

And the feeling on the Manitowoc campus was that Green Bay was going to come in and have a regime change. They had people visiting the campus all the time from the Green Bay campus. They had sort of already come up with a structure of how the campus was going to look that didn't involve regional leadership team people. They were going to have their own people do that. And so it became fairly clear to some of us that there was not going to be a role for us within UW Green Bay's vision for their campuses. And that's not to say that things aren't successful there at the moment. Because it's two years later. Things have had a lot of time to settle down. But at the time, it really felt like there was a cleaver put in between the Manitowoc and the Fox and the Fond du Lac campuses. Manitowoc was clearly going one direction. Fox and Fond du Lac were clearly going in a different direction. And that's just the results of where the battle lines were drawn as to which campus was going with which four-year.

LEH: Hmm. Yeah. I think it's interesting, too, because obviously like with the foundations and with the former UW Colleges, they have such a tie with the community and with the county or city that they are affiliated with. So yeah, do you think, in terms of restructuring, what was sort of the reaction from these different communities? So you talked a little bit about Manitowoc. But, yeah.

MR: Yeah, so I'll tell you about the day after the announcement was made. I had my whole regional, Northeast Region leadership team at the Fox campus 00:42:00with me that day. We cleared out the office next to my office and used it as a quote "war room" that day. It was media chaos. It was confusion chaos. It was lack of information chaos. So the Milwaukee General Sentinel the night before had leaked a story, or had received a leaked story, maybe, about UW System restructuring.

I got my team together at eight o'clock that next morning. They cancelled all their appointments for the day so that we could sit and talk about it. My understanding was that Chancellor Sandeen of UW Colleges and UW Extension had had little to no warning about this, and she was without information as much as anybody else. We all know in these situations that people fill in their own beliefs and their own stories about what happened. And so we had to try to work on facts.

And so I made it my job that day to visit Manitowoc, Fond du Lac and Fox to hold listening and information sessions with faculty, staff and students on every campus. It was one of the few times I went to all three campuses. It was absolutely the best thing I could have done in that situation. It calmed people down, even though there wasn't much to share. It gave people a chance to ask questions, even though there weren't many answers and the answers came slowly. But it made people realize that this was going to be another major change for the UW Colleges, and that my leadership team and I were ready to listen and to make this work.

And so professionally, it was a very emotionally exhausting day to think that the UW Colleges as we knew it, the institution that we'd all been with, was going to be forever changed. Yet it was also satisfying because of the way that the eight of us huddled together for about two hours to plan how we were going to make sure that all of our constituents got the information.

So, you asked about county and community leaders. As you know, the two-year campuses are supported by the local municipalities. And one of the opening concerns that we had is what was going to happen to these campuses if they were quote unquote "taken over" by a four-year campus. President Cross set out to reassure those county leaders. And he did so through a teleconference 00:45:00with the county executives probably a week or two later to try and ease their minds about what would and wouldn't change. I would say 95 percent of that work had to be done locally, though. And we are the ones who built relationships with the counties and the cities. We are the ones that maintain those relationships. And it didn't really matter what anyone in Madison said about it. It was me going to the county executive looking him or her in the eye and telling them, this is who we are. You have supported us for forty, fifty, sixty years, however long it was. You have built the buildings on these campuses. You've put in forty million dollars over fifty years to build these. You've educated twenty-five thousand students that have gone through these facilities. It is not our plan to change anything about that relationship.

That's been generally well-received. But still confusing to the counties. My counties for the Fox Valley, now the Fox Cities Campus, Outagamie and Winnebago County, still struggle with that. They still believe that UW Oshkosh now owns these campuses. And as a result, state dollars should provide buildings on those campuses. I'm trying to tell them that nothing has changed. They believe everything has changed. And the truth lies somewhere in between. Yet the truth is that they still provide funding support for our campuses.

There was also a lot of confusion among the media. There were rumors going around that the UW Fox Valley campus was going to close. The restructuring meant that the campus was going to close. So could you imagine having to try to battle rumors that in fact the restructuring was going to close the campus? Or that Oshkosh was going to do away with the campus. So not only do we have to deal with a lack of information, especially given how the news broke, but we have to deal with the fact that not only were we in an academic year, we'd already started an academic year, but we now have hundreds of students on each campus wondering what their degree was going to be about, was it worth it? Should they get out early? Should they come back for the spring? All those types of things. So we spent a lot of time in the first few months, because there was 00:48:00not much information telling people probably our favorite expression was, "We don't know that yet, but we're trying to find out."

And I was fortunate enough to join the UW System Restructuring Steering Committee in November of 2017. I was chosen by UW Oshkosh, believe it or not, UW Oshkosh, to be a representative for UW Oshkosh on that system steering committee. Our first meeting was held in Regent Street in November 2017. It was chaotic. It was exciting. It was, we didn't know what was going on. UW System really didn't know what was going on, or at least it didn't seem like it at the time. The restructuring announcement was about a month old. There were a million questions, none of which had answers. People would talk about the maps. Which campus was going with which university? What did that mean? Allegiances were being built. It was like nothing I ever experienced. (laughter)

LEH: Yeah. I wonder, too, about like the timing of all that. It's just so, like the middle of an academic year. So you have all of the functions that are still going on, too.

MR: Yes. And a point where budgets were about to be built for the next year, but by who? Decisions were about to be made for the next academic year, but by who? Was it by the UW Colleges? How long would the UW Colleges actually exist? How long would the functions of the UW Colleges exist? How long would decision making at the UW Colleges exist? These were all great questions that were so big picture that it was impossible to answer even as a leader of the institution, or as a leader of, in this case, the region. And we obviously had a leadership in our UW Colleges and UW Extension. But when restructuring was announced, it was also affecting UW Extension. UW Extension was also going through their own version of regionalization. At the same time, they still had not fully dealt with the change in their structure. They regionalized their UW Extension county offices in the same way that the colleges regionalized their campuses. And so on top of that incredibly complex HR function that they were going 00:51:00through, they were now being split up. Part of it, Part of Extension going with Madison, part of it going to UW System. Just an incredible time for them.

And we've got an institutional leadership in Chancellor Sandeen and Steve Wildeck and Greg Lampe who are trying to navigate all of that for both Colleges and Extension. And, of course, trying to provide reassurance to ten thousand students and countless hundred faculty and staff who worked for the UW Colleges on thirteen different campuses. All of whom were concerned about what their restructuring comprehensive university was going to do for them or with them or bypass them.

So you immediately saw each of the seven different receiving institutions begin to take their own unique way of handling the two-year campus partners. And that continues today.

The only time when I felt that there was a central prick on the scattergram of activity was our first UW System restructuring meeting in November 2017. Because after that, there was enough time before UW System really got their restructuring act together that the seven receiving institutions began to go a different way. So by the time we met in February of 2018 with decisions to make, there was already enough ambiguity about the different ways that each of the comprehensive universities were going that it dawned on me that the UW System was probably only just about going to be able to manage the restructuring in the early going. I give Stefan Fletcher and his team all the credit in the world because they've really brought the institutions together. But the first few months were pretty crazy, because everyone had their own idea about how they were going to deal with their two-year campuses. Including Oshkosh.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. What was Oshkosh, what were their ideas?

MR: So I would like to think that because I was the person who was chosen to lead the UW of Oshkosh's restructuring effort within UW System, I had 00:54:00some influence. And Oshkosh took a much more pragmatic and laidback approach. They didn't get too excited about anything. They weren't coming onto our campuses to assert their authority. They certainly weren't going to come and talk about how they were going to change this and that and the other. So that was both good and bad. It was good because people were not necessarily afraid of what the crashing change of restructuring might bring to them.

The bad part was that faculty and staff at Fox and Fond du Lac talked with faculty and staff as they always had done across the other eleven UW Colleges campuses and heard a myriad of different things going on. Eau Claire was doing this with Barron County. Steven's Point was doing this and this with Marshfield and Marathon County. Why isn't Oshkosh doing that with us? Why are they just sitting back? How come they're not doing this? So there was praise and complaint at the same time about the way in which Oshkosh approached restructuring. And to his credit, Chancellor Leavitt from Oshkosh had been through one of these restructurings before at his previous institution, the University of North Georgia. And so his experience quickly led us to understand that this is a marathon, not a sprint.

And you know, the Oshkosh campus at UW Oshkosh has its own issues to deal with. The fact that two campuses totally 1700 students are joining with a university of twelve thousand students is not the only thing that he has to deal with in his day to day running of the university. And so I had to come to appreciate that as well, that he runs a very complex organization. And this joining was one part of it. It was a very important part, but just one part of it. And they had to keep recruiting nationwide. They had to keep their accreditation for their program. They were of course dealing with a big huge mess associated with their own foundation scandal. There was a litigation betting with national, award-winning programs, going to the championship game of Division 3 00:57:00football. So there's lots of things that go on on a four-year campus.

When I eventually got to have an office there, oh, eighteen months ago when I was first invited to sort of become part of the chancellor's cabinet to help with this transition, it was very, very eye-opening for me to see the level of activity that takes place on a four-year university. I've not worked at a four-year university since being a junior faculty member in a small department in Louisiana in 2001. And so it was very eye-opening.

You have to understand that our two-year campuses, even when I was the campus dean of the Fox Valley campus, I had a small leadership team where we could make decisions. But we were isolated and remote from our institutional leadership in Madison. And the deans used to meet with the chancellor every month. And we'd have a full-day meeting with a detailed agenda of things that were going on, things that we were doing to improve our institution, all those types of things. Yet somehow I felt very sheltered from the troubles that any institution goes through.

When I started working in the chancellor's office at UW Oshkosh, or on the Oshkosh campus, it quickly became aware to me that the hub of activity that the chancellor's office is, the things that the chancellor's office deals with, the events that take place, the interactions of having a campus with thirteen hundred faculty and staff and employees, whereas at the Fox campus there were 110, very different dynamic. So that's been a, that's just been a really great part of this restructuring for me to get involved with this being back in the swing of a four-year university.

LEH: What do you think are like the big differences, just like sort of just the amount of activity? Or?

MR: So I think there's been a lot of surprises for the Oshkosh people as they come to the Fox and Fond du Lac campus as well. But one of the biggest differences is, of course, for the most part, our two-year campuses are commuter campuses. Kids come and go. They work during the day. They go home and do jobs. They go home and take care of parents or grandparents. So there's a different student body on the Oshkosh campus than there are at the Fox and Fond du Lac campus. We knew that. I'm not sure our Oshkosh colleagues necessarily 01:00:00grasp that. And I think unless they come to one of our campuses, they don't realize it.

And one of the things I would love to see as part of this restructuring is for more people from the Oshkosh campus to actually come and appreciate what goes on at the Fox and Fond du Lac campus. Because faculty and staff, certainly early on there was a sense that some, by some faculty members that they were being treated as second-class citizens. So there's been a lot of learning that's taken place over the course of the last two years about what it means to have a career on a two-year university campus as opposed to a four-year university campus. And I hope in some cases an appreciation for the differences in work. Classes may be smaller, but students seem to need a little more, or maybe a lot more attention, on the two-year campuses. There has to be an appreciation for the backgrounds that students come from, and especially the fact that many of them, well, they don't live on campus.

And there's a very different sense of community. Clubs and activities that do really well on the Oshkosh campus simply wouldn't thrive on the two-year campus. The level of interest and involvement of students in extracurricular activities is quite different on our Fox and Fond du Lac campus. Partly because we're commuter campuses, and partly because the student body is typically there to get their classes done. They have a means to an end. And that means to an end is to get their sixty credits or their associate's degree and transfer so they can get their bachelor's degree. They're typically there because the campus is close by, it has a lower tuition, it has lower fees, it might have been the only school that accepted them. It might have been their first choice school. But they have particular reasons for coming to the Fox and Fond du Lac campus that could be very different from why they did or didn't want to go to the Oshkosh campus.

LEH: Hmm. Yeah, I think that's really interesting sort of in the scope of like some of the marketing stuff and how that differs, too. Of just like four-year universities and students being very tied to the school in a lot of different aspects of their life as first-year students. Yeah, could you expand on some of that? Some of the marketing stuff? Yeah.

MR: Yeah. So historically, the UW Colleges would market in some very specific ways. Locally, being one. So for instance, the Fox campus used to 01:03:00recruit from maybe De Pere down towards Neenah. And then west out towards Winneconne and perhaps east toward Chilton. So we're talking about, take a pair of compasses and draw a forty-mile circle around the campus, and that's typically where our, at our peak, 1700 students came from.

We didn't attract out of state students, because we didn't market there. We didn't attract students from generally other parts of the state, because there was another local UW closer to them. So our marketing efforts in that way could look different. We spent a lot of time in high schools building relationships with high school counselors. Even during our regional days, we did that. We had a regional recruiter who would spend time talking with high school students in classes, not just about our Fox campus or our Fond du Lac campus, but about the value of going to college in general, and answering financial aid questions and admissions questions and things like that. Especially to students whose parents may not have gone to college and so they weren't getting that information at home.

We would do billboards. We'd do advertisements on the back of buses. We'd appear on local radio shows. And the types of things that in a community like Fond du Lac, get your name out. A billboard that's seen from Highway 41, from Interstate 41. A monthly radio slot on KFIZ talk radio where we can go and promote upcoming campus preview days. Or a day when we had an art show opening or what the next big theater production is. And sort of make it come alive for the community. Communities are very proud of having a UW school in their midst.

For instance, for the Fond du Lac campus, there was blood, sweat and tears to get a campus built here in 1968. And the campus, the community's very proud of the fact that the campus was given legislative approval to be built here.

And so the marketing, the marketing definitely looks different. Because we were attracting only local students. We could talk about the fact that we had the lowest tuition in the UW system. We could talk about the fact that we had small classes and personalized attention. In fact, we often used to talk about ourselves as a private college atmosphere at a public college price. 01:06:00Which was not too far from the truth. Because if you go twenty-five miles down the road from the UWO Fond du Lac campus, you come to Ripon College, which also has a small private college atmosphere. But also, unfortunately, has a very large college price. And so you know, you could make those distinctions as well.

You could talk about the fact that students could get involved in undergraduate research as freshmen and sophomores. You could talk about the fact that the sports, we had a robust sports conference playing against all of the other twelve UW Colleges campuses in basketball and soccer and golf and volleyball. So if you weren't destined to be a Division 3 player, you could still continue that high school passion with some collegiate sports. So those were all good marketing things that we were able to do, and that our new partners in the four-year campuses have been slow to pick up on. The fact that the market for a campus such as UWO Fond du Lac or Fox Cities looks very different than a market for the Oshkosh campus, where there were recruiting students out of Illinois using national Titan scholars, where they're recruiting nationally for Division 3 sports. While they can't offer scholarships, they can offer championship-winning teams. So where they have nationally known academic programs, rather than general education preparation programs like we had, albeit with award-winning professors.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. It's very different from sort of like the like very local kind of nature of the former UW Colleges. So sort of in restructuring, I was wondering if you could expand on like what have been sort of the easiest and most difficult areas to shift over at the access campuses?

MR: Hmm. Interesting question. Wow. I would say virtually nothing has been easy. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that a campus such, a university such as UW Oshkosh has done things a certain way for a long period of time. And so the acceptance that there may be a different way of 01:09:00doing something, or that the UW Colleges did things a different way and were also successful, has been, I think was and is and probably will be a point of friction. There were a lot of business practices that the UW Colleges did as a result of being thirteen remote locations with each other that UW Oshkosh never had to deal with, being a comprehensive university in a single location. The fact that we are now in three locations, I think, does not make, has not yet dawned on Oshkosh enough that we don't feel like we've taken a lot of backward steps. There are some very antiquated business practices that involve filling out forms that get routed to six different people for signatures in order to change a minor thing that we have had to adopt. And so I think there's a sense of frustration that there's inefficiencies on the four-year campus.

And it may be that UW Colleges was forced into operating in a very different way because of our thirteen-campus structure. So for instance, doing meetings by Skype or videoconferencing is an instinct for people at our access campuses. It's no problem to schedule a Skype meeting with somebody for half an hour, bring in a couple of others, and you get your meeting accomplished. With Oshkosh, there's been an expectation that people will drive to the Oshkosh campus to have a meeting for half an hour or forty-five minutes and then go back to their work. And no real sense that that takes an hour from door to door with travel and parking. And a sense of, what would be the word, , trepidation in some ways about going to the four-year campus, and having to park and find your way to a building. There's forty buildings on the Oshkosh campus. At Fox and Fond du Lac, there's one each. I mean, it feels, it feels different. So that's been difficult.

But you know what? The chancellor spotted that early on. He said that as a result of the restructuring that he was involved in within Georgia, the most important thing and the one thing to get right is culture and identity. Without recognizing each other's culture, cultures and identity as we bring 01:12:00our three campuses into one university, none of this will work. And so that's one reason why you don't forge ahead at a million miles an hour, because you can't change culture and identity in a heartbeat. It takes time.

So I would say that part continues to be difficult. Because there are always some frictions. Frictions that I don't always get to hear about. But when our faculty meet, there are difficulties with recognition of their academic credentials. There's a difficulty in recognition of the research they might have done while at the UW Colleges. There's a realization that salaries are different. So lots of reasons to be, to feel like there could be tension at any given meeting.

When it comes to easy things, I would say acceptance that we're all going to make this work. There may be grumblings along the way. But we're all in this for the right reason. This isn't what we asked for. And regionalization wasn't what we asked for. But we got it. Restructuring wasn't what we asked for, but we got it. And the change warrior mentality of the people in the UW Colleges is a joyous part of this. Because with that attitude, we're going to make this work.

So when it comes to practical things that are easy, I'll give you a couple of examples. The UW Oshkosh Police Department have been nothing but fantastic to work with. And I'll tell you one example I can give. They are willing to provide security help. Help with our local Menasha and Fond du Lac police departments when there are emergencies. And help with enforcing parking. Help with emergency communications. So a good example would be, UW Colleges had their own method for determining if there's going to be a winter weather closure. And UW Oshkosh Police has helped us navigate what is a pretty complicated communications network so that we can quickly and easily identify who needs to be communicated with and how when we need to make a weather closing for any of our three campuses.

So there are real pockets where there has just been a great affinity to get down and solve the problems. And the problems come with integrating two completely different processes into a new method. Realizing that somewhere along the way, each one was good. And there may be a better way of doing it for everyone concerned.

LEH: Yeah. Yeah. I like that phase "change warrior." It's a nice phrase.

MR: Yeah. Certainly not my term, and certainly not a new one. But one that I think most people in the UW Colleges would identify with.

LEH: Yeah, yeah. So before I let you go, do you feel like you have anything else you want to add? Anything that really sticks out to you as an important aspect or a feature?

MR: Yeah. I don't think I would have been as successful in my advocacy role for the Fox and Fond du Lac campuses within UW Oshkosh had I not been invited by Chancellor Leavitt to serve as the representative for UW Oshkosh on the System Steering Committee for Restructuring. That was a really important and generous decision by him to have somebody from our access campuses, happened to be me, that's because I was the regional dean and Chancellor Leavitt knew me for several years before this came about. But that has enabled me to help bring over my regional leadership team into their new roles within UW Oshkosh, to help the chancellor and just having it understand that things have worked well in the UW Colleges. That this restructuring was not a result of Fox or Fond du Lac falling apart or being badly run universities. This is a result of circumstance in order for the UW System to be able to save its campuses that serve an access mission. So I think that opportunity has enabled me to help advocate in a more meaningful and deeper way for our two campuses as we strive to become this sort of one university with three campuses.

And Chancellor Leavitt, to his credit, has intentionally set out to not have Fox and Fond du Lac be branch campuses or satellite campuses. We have defined ourselves as one university with three campuses. We don't talk about a main campus; we talk about the Fox Cities, Fond du Lac and Oshkosh campuses of UW Oshkosh. That takes time. There are plenty of people who still 01:18:00think of UW Oshkosh as a single place in Oshkosh. But that is not who we are anymore. So that piece of the culture and identity is something that I've learned from him as part of this restructuring.

So I really enjoy the work that I do at UW Oshkosh. It's very much centered on the Fox and Fond du Lac campuses, on the work of the Fox and Fond du Lac campuses. There's still a long way to go. This is still three to five more years of working out where we go and how we strengthen ourselves as a regional university. And UW Oshkosh itself, it has enough problems of its own. It's got some financial challenges, it's got some enrollment challenges of its own. And we realize that we're just sort of one piece in the cog that now helps this university run.

LEH: Yeah. All right. Thank you so much.