Interview with Karen Schmitt

LEH: All right. So we're recording. This is Lena Evers-Hillstrom and I am interviewing Karen Schmitt. Can you say your first name and last name and then spell out your last name?

KS: Sure. It's Karen Schmitt, S-c-h-m-i-t-t.

LEH: Okay. That looks good. So why don't we start with like the basics of when did you get to the college, like the former UW Colleges? Why? That sort of stuff.

KS: Okay. I joined UW Colleges on August first, 2017 after being selected to take the position of provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs in a search I think that started in April and I ended up getting the offer and taking the position in June. So I relocated from my previous position in the University of Alaska system down to Madison and started on August first. So I was in the position for about two months prior to the restructuring.

LEH: Okay. And did you know that, were you hired with the knowledge that restructuring was going to happen? Sort of what was your introduction to restructuring?

KS: There was no indication when I was either interviewing or negotiating or relocating or for the first two months, really, of August and September that there was any restructuring planned, and that was not something that was part of the discussions. And I only was made aware of the plan, I think it was the Friday morning, I think it was October third. It was the Friday morning of the board of regents meeting in October at UW Stout when Chancellor Sandeen pulled me aside and said, "Well, you know, there's going to be this decision and an announcement next week about restructuring the campuses." So it was just in the first part of October prior to meeting with President Cross and prior to the public announcement. So.

LEH: Did you have any like particular feelings about that either way when you first heard about it?

KS: Well, I mean, it was kind of I guess surprising in terms of the lack of information. And again, I think it was the concern I had, I was relatively new in the institution. And for the previous two months, Chancellor Sandeen and the other deans and vice provosts, we'd been planning to undertake a major strategic planning activity for the next like say a year to I'd suppose do some more of our own academic planning. The year prior to 2017, so the '16-'17 academic year, UW Colleges had gone through what they called regionalization of 00:03:00all of their central support services for academic and student support, as well as their administrative support services in the HR and IT areas. So there had been a lot of institutional change from the prior year on a pretty rapid timeframe. So they were still sort of recovering from that administrative downsizing. So we were looking to reset and sort of reframe future planning parameters around the loss of enrollment, the growth of our online program. Kind of the same things that we're dealing with now in restructuring, but they were really the primary priority issues for planning that fall.

So we'd had convocation in, I guess the end of August. And a number of planning meetings to start the strategic planning process. So it was a bit of an abrupt change. It was again without really the chance to notify faculty or any of our direct reports that this was going to happen. So it felt a little bit difficult to know how to A, assist people who were going to hear this as even more shocking news. I mean, at least we had a few days of heads up to think through some of the issues that we'd need to deal with. So other than being new and having not quite started some major planning, at least we knew we weren't going to be trying to do a strategic plan and then have that all sort of thrown off as an option. It was that we were really, the decision was the system wasn't going to proceed with having an institution planning process; it was going to make the system decision to restructure and so sort of change the framework from one of institutional direction setting to system direction setting. After that, it was managing the communications, expectations and planning for the restructuring.

So, unusual, but not out of my experience. I've been in a lot of institutional restructurings. And a lot of them generally start with some sort of a decision that has to be confidential up until the point when they can release it. So, disappointing, perhaps. But I think it was just--I felt worse, probably, for the faculty and staff who'd been in the institution for many, many years. And I was relatively new. So I think psychologically it was easier to adjust to it, given that we were going to change things in some way. This was just a different framework for me. But I know a lot of the people who built the institution and had a long-term commitment there, it was a much more profound decision. So that was probably more concerning was what is this going to do to people who have much longer tenure at the institution than I do?

LEH: Sort of like what do you think like, how do you think your status as a newcomer was like different to how you view something like this? Like this big initiative, as opposed to someone, like faculty and staff who'd been at the former UW Colleges for long periods of time?

KS: Well, like I said, I think in terms of how the decision would affect people, it was much more profound. I think a lot of career commitments and things were in place. And people made career-long decisions to move to campuses and to teach and to do things. So I think just in terms of the difference between experience with the institution, I really didn't feel like I had that comparable, certainly long-term emotional commitment to it. But on the other hand, coming, I didn't come to restructure UW Colleges. It was really, relocated after I did about, I actually grew up and lived in Wisconsin and went to undergraduate here. And then moved out of state to do my academic career. So coming back after thirty years, thirty-five years out of the state to do this position, this central sort of academic leadership position, was for the type of mission and institution that Colleges was. So I think we all, you know, in terms of an institution, had different levels of adjustment. But I think probably trying to anticipate how to help people manage their different concerns.

And the unusual restructuring that we divided our campuses up into seven different institutions. It's not like we were merged with one or moved into a different kind of a single experience. We had faculty on campuses having seven or eight different experiences, depending on where their destination in this process was going to be. So that became another complexity to the sort of trying to work with the individual issues and needs of each campus and each department and individual faculty members.

LEH: What would you say were like the most like immediate concerns for faculty when they heard about restructuring? Or that like people brought to you?

KS: I think probably the first sort of initial concern, and it was, I was looking through some notes and I think it was actually quite an eloquently expressed concern was that the faculty governance group had gotten together and drew up a consensus statement about the support to the mission of the institution of Colleges. I think there was, probably a lot of the faculty understood that the two-year statewide mission of Colleges was as the open access and transfer institution. It was representative in that mission in the state system. And that by dividing it up into seven comprehensives, the risk of the mission becoming subordinate to other institutional components, the research, the graduate programs, all the additional mission components that comprehensives that UW Milwaukee had was anticipated immediately by the faculty. They realized they came to Colleges because they were dedicated to 00:09:00the teaching mission, to the open access, to dealing with freshman/sophomore level general education and then transferring students to be successful. And that that, when it's your primary mission, is one focus that's hard to recreate in another comprehensive. And to try to do that in seven different ways, it would be hard to achieve the sort of sum of the parts effect on the state for those students.

So there was a pretty big concern that the mission of open access and transfer would not be conducted at the level the Colleges had in terms of it being its primary mission. So that was initially their first response. And I think that was quite wise to focus on the mission and to emphasize to the system and to the regents that this was something the faculty were concerned about and that they would hope that there would be oversight and commitment to continuing that level of support for students and communities in the future.

LEH: Sort of going off of that, so talking about the Colleges being like a teaching institution as proposed to research focus, how does that translate with sort of faculty and like students, like the campus environment and sort of interactions? How does that influence like funding concerns as well for academics?

KS: Well that's a long question. (laughter) Well, I think Colleges was a teaching-focused institution, as are the comprehensives in our system. But they were focused on the first two years and on the open access piece. So that distinguished it quite a bit from the other institutions in that they were focused on students, often nontraditional students, maybe first generation or underprepared academically, or hadn't been to college after high school and there was a long break in between. So they were looking at, they had a very engaged developmental education program which is, again, the community college mission is kind of comparable in other states where developmental education, adult basic education, transitioning students into college-level work is a primary component of the academic program. And then also looking at the general education program as being the sort of primary component of the associate degree. And they had one associate degree program. So there was a very specific focus on transferable general education through a curriculum that would allow students to prepare wherever they came to higher education and admit and enroll in an open enrollment institution like Colleges. And then transfer after they'd completed an associate degree or at the appropriate time and have the academic skills. That's a pretty unique distinct mission from the other institutions in terms of the teaching focus. So the practice faculty had is focused on a particular type of student, too, more like in the traditional 00:12:00community college liberal arts transfer students. And that was the unique feature of UW Colleges, is that we had a state system which had thirteen campuses accredited as a single institution. And I'm familiar with a fair number of states, and this was a unique model. So faculty really did, I think, focus on that.

And the flip side of that is then, and I think this is fairly similar to our comprehensives. We became a very tuition-driven institution, since the funding from the state and a subsidy from the counties through the branch campuses was sort of consistent with tuition freeze happening I think for Colleges back around 2010 or '11, something to that effect. The pressure on growing enrollments in order to meet the fixed-cost increases of the campuses was really high. And so for the last four or five years with the declining enrollments for all kinds of reasons, demographics, the economic sort of unemployment rates being record lows. I mean, things like that, there was a real challenge to the budgets because of the tuition loss. And so the tuition-driven nature of the budget put the institution in a situation of having to either use its reserves to cover, until enrollments would recover or state funds would change or tuition rates would change. Till something changed. And so I think that was the challenge is trying to maintain all the campuses open and have a robust program allowing student services and support for faculty to be there sufficient to kind of carry out their mission. So the two things together were really what I think highlighted for the system, and given the change in the future of some of those parameters, either the enrollment numbers or demographics or our economy or our state and county support weren't likely to change dramatically. The decision to change the system structure with the restructuring sort of precipitated from that.

LEH: So do you think that, can you sort of expand on like how that dependency with tuition, how does restructuring influence some of that?

KS: Well, in one sense it's basically kind of handed the problem off to seven of our other institutions in the system. Nothing's really fundamentally changed in terms of the outlook. The current tuition rates are set and under a freeze from the state. The branch campuses now, the receiving institutions, as we call them, are struggling to kind of rebuild the enrollments up to just prior levels of last year before restructuring. And that's partially, we think, caused by some of the disruptions of the restructuring may have affected enrollments. Part of the work, and maybe I was trying to analyze that, what is the sort of current retention and recruitment outcomes from the last year or two of 00:15:00restructuring affecting the enrollments on the branch campuses, which is deepening the tuition gaps that these campuses had prior to restructuring.

So the receiving institutions have now inherited what would be considered structural deficits because prior, they hadn't been achieving enough tuition to meet their budget. So the gap was basically a structural gap. Those are continuing and may for the short term, at least, be worsened by the enrollment drops that we're seeing for this first year. But should, if we can rebuild programming and increase different opportunities on those campuses, offset some of that.

So the problem with tuition shortfall didn't go away. It got, I think, intensified because of restructuring. And we're trying to mitigate those effects now through some efforts working with the receiving institutions. But it's still going to be something that those campuses, or that the receiving institutions are now having to work through their multiyear planning forward, how are they going to deal with that in the long term? Given certain outlooks for enrollments, certain outlooks for tuition rates, certain assumptions about the state support. So it's a challenge. It was, I think, transferred to them now.

LEH: That's really interesting. Could you sort of like expand on like why restructuring might have affected enrollment for this year? Like what about it? Yeah.

KS: There's probably, I mean, two basic components to the numbers that show up at the branch campuses now. But UW Colleges would be--and I think probably the primary one may be retention. I mean, students were recruited for the fall of 2017 and had started classes essentially before the announcement. So there would have been no effect on enrollments based on restructuring in 2017. So that's kind of our baseline year. And that was a year that was down about 10 percent from the prior year, and we'd had some double digit drops for a couple of years before that. So enrollment was challenged in colleges, regardless of restructuring.

Twenty seventeen, the news came out in the fall semester, about the time when recruiting efforts would have been in high school and things. So the message about colleges is changing. And where the campus is going to be next year, and what campus are they going to be part of. That complicated recruiting that fall, but it didn't stop it. The resources put forward quickly to make sure recruiting continued. But it became very complicated, the messaging and the kind of coordination with high schools, counselors and students was made more difficult, but transferred as quickly as it could to the receiving institution so that they could start to reach out and say, an example, Wausau campus became part of Stevens Point. So that that identity and that direction was there for who's in charge of recruiting students. But also trying to maintain that you can start here and go anywhere. Just like we used to with branch campuses and colleges.

So the recruiting for the fall of 2018 was impacted, probably, the most by restructuring. The question we don't know was how much was retention impacted. And I think retention may be a larger factor, particularly for this fall. Because we're now seeing the students who were recruited, were they retained? And if both of those numbers are affected in a negative direction, what we see is we've had a dramatic drop. But not inconsistent with a couple of years prior to restructuring. So I'm working now to try to work with the OPAR, the Office of Policy Analysis and Research to get the right data to sort that out. Was the drop more dependent on students not being retained, i.e. they decided oh, I don't want to stay, things are too confusing? Or my program isn't here, I want to transfer. And so like which students did we not retain? Are there issues there? Can those be recovered if we sort of rebuild the pipeline of recruiting? And if it was a recruiting challenge it was confusing, we couldn't get high school students to kind of get in the door and enroll in time, maybe there will be a delay in their enrollment, but there still may be opportunities to recruit students and communities back to colleges in the future.

So we need a little more data analysis. And it's been hard to get that data since we're still sorting out the restricting of the student information systems. And now the data's being reported in a whole new structure which didn't exist last year.

That's a long answer. Sorry. (laughs)

LEH: No, that was great. It's really interesting. I think some of the messaging stuff with this kind of thing is really interesting. So in terms of like messaging for high schoolers and people on former college campuses, I guess this is also, it's a pretty long question, too. (laughter) So like what went into the decision making of deciding where, in terms of like from an academic standpoint, which former colleges would be tied to which four-year universities? And how do you think that impacted sort of like messaging that was put out to like people on campus or in the community?

KS: Yeah, that's a good question. And I think the first factor, at least as far as I'm aware, and I do think correlates with all the information we knew at colleges, was looking at where are the sort of natural transfer pathways for students on a branch campus? What are their primary destination schools? And those would be the natural kind of affiliated institutions. So that was sort of the first order.

Then there was I think just geography. Where are students located closest to campuses? For example, with Barron County up in Rice Lake north of 00:21:00Eau Claire, the decision to attach that campus to Eau Claire was driven by the largest number of transfer students went to Eau Claire, in general, from Barron County. But it was only slightly more than those who went to Stout or River Falls, which are the two other neighboring campuses.

So there was initially some questions like well why couldn't they be connected to Stout because there were some historical affiliations and programs that made sense to think about that. So the primary decision criteria was like number of transfer students in general going to a receiver. And maintained that decision, but we had to also then reinforce the communication, both to the, like say Stout and River Falls campuses, there will be every opportunity to recruit those students now from Eau Claire up at Barron County. So we had to kind of change a decision, through a decision on the present policy that said typically campuses can't recruit at each other. Like say River Falls can't recruit at Eau Claire. Well once you have a branch campus, then that sort of had to change. And say that yes, River Falls recruiters or Stout recruiters can go to Barron County and recruit students. Because historically, they're a fairly heavy transfer in destination for those kind of students in the two-year campus there.

So we worked out kind of that understanding that while it may be that the number was highest to Eau Claire, it was certainly not exclusive to Eau Claire. And so that that exclusivity was not part of the deal. I mean, that Eau Claire had to recognize that they were now a transfer-out institution, as well as a transfer-in institution.

So in general, that's what you see. All of the campus numbers, for the most part, correlated exactly to that. I think there were a few variations. And again, they led to discussions about that with the present and the regional institutions. I think Sheboygan was one where they were joined with Green Bay. But often many of their students go to Milwaukee, and then that wasn't joined with Milwaukee. Perhaps that should have been something that was readjusted.

After looking at it regionally, and kind of the student populations and the transportation and roads and time to travel, the decision to keep those three campuses--Marionette, Manitowoc and Sheboygan together with Green Bay--stood based on the sort of more geographic and, I imagine, somewhat political. Counties were often consulted in these discussions prior to the assignment of destination receiving institutions.

So there was some multiple factors. But I would say in general the primary one was trying to keep the student pathways as sort of seamless as possible. So being the least disruptive to where students generally transferred to was kind of the philosophy applied.

LEH: It makes a fair amount of sense, yeah. So you made a comment about programming legacies between some of these schools. Could you talk more about that?

KS: I can talk about it fairly generally. I just don't have as long a tenure in 00:24:00the institution to be specific. And I think that's where there's probably lots of examples. I just don't know as many of them as I probably would if I'd been around longer. I think with like Stout in particular, there's a number of their degree programs that are either online or they've worked with branch campuses to kind of transfer students in as like program articulations. That's how we generally would mark somebody's campus being connected to a bachelor's degree program, so they can articulate specific courses into the bachelor's degree program. So that's in general, Colleges had, I don't know, several hundred articulation with not just Stout and River Falls type UW campuses, but with institutions in other states and other private institutions, so the students could say for sure that these courses that they're going to take at colleges will transfer in and apply to this degree program. And so it smoothed the transfer pathways where particular programs were of interest to Colleges students. So often students wanted, since Stout is close, if they wanted to take, I'm trying to think of what might be one of those programs, some sort of an engineering technology type of a program, and they started in the two-year associate's degree, they could then apply pretty much all of their sixty credits if they took the right electives when they were at Barron County to go right into a program as a junior at Stout.

So those kinds of programs were everywhere. We had also some special, and I would call that the articulated programs. And then there's also the special sort of partnership programs that were primarily in engineering with UW Platteville. Platteville's engineering had for quite a while been designated the statewide outreach program for engineering. And so they had partner campus relationships with Fox Valley, I think, and Sheboygan, where they actually had built facilities to house cohort groups of students that complete their bachelor's degree in engineering with coursework delivered from faculty from UW Platteville to those locations. And then they sort of did their first two years at colleges and then finished in that same location, or most of the coursework, at least I think could be delivered to those communities in engineering. So it ranged from everything from course articulations to actual program partnerships embedded in the community.

LEH: Yeah. Was that just because people in those communities had like a large interest in engineering? What was the sort of thought process behind establishing or continuing those partnerships?

KS: I think the establishment, again, this is another part of the history that I know generally and that there's probably better experts on it. But in general, like you said, the community had high need, the workplaces in those communities had high demand for engineering. Either engineers, engineering techs, one or two-year type techs. The sort of whole workforce around that field. So I 00:27:00think probably in like Oshkosh's case, some of the local campuses, like the four-year campus, had maybe proposed to do engineering. I think this happened up in the northwest as well. And it was the system looked at like not wanting to duplicate a lot of programs. So when the need was looked at it, it was decided that would be better to build an extension of Platteville's program in the Fox Valley area, or over in Sheboygan on the north side of Milwaukee. It would be better to do that than to try to extend Green Bray down into an area to build a new program. So often it deferred a new type of engineering program being built in a four-year institution, because there was already one in say Platteville that could extend its reach through an outreach site and build it in the community. That proved to be, I think, variable in how well it worked. And what we're seeing now is I think some of those programs have been shut down in favor of more regional offerings at Green Bay and at Oshkosh that meet those needs.

So it may in some people's opinion lead to some more duplication of engineering programs. I think the institutions there at Oshkosh and Green Bay in particular would say the needs are great, and duplication, like we do with teacher education and many other programs where there's a lot of place-based needs that need to be met by those campuses is the right thing to do. And those decisions have been made and I think we've seen that supported by the legislature with buildings and some program increments of new funding have been put in place for capacity building do to that.

So Colleges often played a role in some of those extension of baccalaureate program by providing a first two-year program. And then those partner programs on top of the three and four hundred level coursework could be delivered either online or on the campus.

LEH: Yeah, yeah. I think the like general education degree that the former UW Colleges, now UW like--(laughter) again, it's a really interesting degree. Where was I going with that? (laughs) Is there anything like specifically with like curriculum in the like restructuring process that you think like were important aspects that you focused on?

KS: Interestingly, the way that the restructuring decisions went in the early stages, because we had the sort of the must do, the can't fail imperative, I guess, was we had to maintain the accreditation of those branch campuses throughout the restructuring. And that meant that as soon as the 00:30:00campus was transferred to its receiving institution under the sort of HLC accreditation umbrella of that institution, that institution, what do you want to call it, was responsible for all of the academic decision making around the programs. And so what we found early on is that when we were transferring it to seven different institutions, and this is why it was kind of an unusual restructuring, often when you're merging or closing an institution, it would be one institution being merged with another. So it was easier to kind of track where things were going. Here we were taking and dividing resources of one institution into seven. So the decision making around what would happen to the associate's degree program, once it was restructured, colleges no longer had the authority to make decisions, and that it would be up to those seven campuses to decide, or seven receivers, to decide how that associate degree would evolve on their branch campuses.

And so we, from my side, having served as provost for that sort of restructuring planning year, we had to realize that we don't get to decide how the associate degree necessarily is going to be conducted after the institution receives it. So we spent a fair amount of time in the first few months after the decision, there was actually quite a debate. I'd say there was a call of the question twice. One was the colleges' associate of arts and sciences, AAS, was a single degree that in the fall of 2017 was just on the verge of being replaced, which would have been the fall of 2018, with two new degree programs, an associate of arts and an associate of science. There was also a plan to retain the AAS for a while. But it would have been my recommendation over time that we would downsize that AAS, which is more of a general, to the two associate of art and associate of science tracks that allow us to build pathways into the bachelor of science and bachelor of art degrees in a more structured fashion which is kind of a best practice theory of design for curriculum now.

So the faculty had passed all of the curriculum changes, and the entire process had been completed through HLC approval in September of 2017 to offer the associate of arts and associate of science, the two new degree programs.

In October when we restructured, one of the early decisions was well, what degree will we offer? What will be the catalog of the fall of 2018 once it's no longer UW Colleges? Since we were on track to replace that degree.

The faculty, who had built this new design and felt like it was a really valuable asset for the branch campuses to have this better degree, they'd done a lot of work on reimagining the associate's degree, it was called. It was about a two-year effort led by the faculty and the provost at Colleges at the time, Greg Lampe. And they'd really done, I think, a major, a lot of work in improving the idea about general education aligning with the degree structure that 00:33:00would make transfer better for a number of years in the future.

So the decision that we advocated from Colleges was that new degree be implanted because it would allow the receiver some more sort of advantage in trying to address the needs of the student and build the program in the future.

At that point, I'd say around January or so, and I could get more specific on dates, but the faculty split into two groups, I would say, and came to me and the chancellor and said, we think this is a bad idea to implement a new curriculum while we're doing restructuring. Because the curriculum was built by a faculty of 250 faculty, and to be delivered on an array of thirteen campuses with an online provision, which was a key part of all the courses being available everywhere.

With that going away, they felt it was better to be conservative and not change the curriculum. And so we had a pretty active internal debate about the people who built the new degree and wanted to take that forward into their new institutions and really work with that, and a group that were like, you know, this is really not the time to do this. It's like, have those discussions before you meet your new colleagues at the new institution and then there might be other things you want to do, or we can do differently once you're, you may have seven different ways of wanting to take this new degree forward.

And so in the end, our faculty governance drafted a resolution/recommendation to President Cross and made the request that the decision to implement the new degree be rescinded and replaced with a decision to keep the AAS, and that basically the 2017 academic catalog would be the last catalog of Colleges of record. And that that transfer in whole to the receivers July 1, 2018. And so the degree offered fall of 2018 would be the AAS, as it had been in the fall of 2017. And that it would be up to the receiving institutions to convene the faculty to decide how that changes.

And so they provided that to the president. And after some consideration, he agreed. So he changed the decision from implement the new, so schedule courses that look like the one that you're going to be offering, that you had planned up until October to do, turned into just plan to have the same program you offered this fall next fall.

So I'd say it's a conservative decision, which, you know, I think there were plusses and minuses on both sides. Not exactly sure the criteria the president used to make the decision. I think the fact the governance brought it forward is probably a pretty strong statement that there was enough momentum or enough support for it. But there was a pretty active internal debate amongst Colleges faculty that this like process, which was I think driven by the senate, and they had used a survey, which was not a secure survey. I mean, there was a lot of methodology questions about how they arose at this consensus that most of the faculty don't want to do this. But the controversy I think was rather short-lived. I think it disappointed a lot of the faculty leaders who 00:36:00had built the new degree. I think, and I'm hoping that we can like check in on this and see comparatively, some of those leaders have now in their new institutions been working on a similar sort of reimagining of the degree and doing it in their own new institutional context with new departments, new colleges and however they were structured.

And so that's where we find the divergence of the degree program began immediately in the spring of 2017 even. Faculty started working with their receiving institutions to plan how to offer the AAS. So everybody's offering the AAS 2018-2019, but they've started to change it. And some courses got changed. Some degree requirements were tweaked to look more like the receiver. Sometimes the receiver tweaked their degrees to look more like the colleges. It's been very interesting to watch how seven different integrations of that catalog has happened.

LEH: Yeah. (laughter) Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. You said something about the methodology of like they surveyed faculty members?

KS: I think, I don't know if you've talked with Holly Hassel, but she was the chair or the president, I don't know, whatever they call, chair of the senate, I guess. And so she had had a number of faculty appeal that they didn't think this change in trying to move the new degree forward was a good idea. There were a number of faculty who probably working, who had done the reimagining project, felt that this was a good thing, a very positive thing to be moving forward and kind of keeping the restructuring in the positive direction from their perspective of curriculum. So I think the senate had discussed it. And then they put out a survey to ask all faculty, should we do the new curriculum in the fall of 2018 as a planning target, and adopt the new catalog, basically, that we have already approved? They'd approved it all in policy. And it meant taking all that work, that was probably two years of a lot of faculty's work, and setting it aside. And it would be not used. And I think that was the question is should we set this aside and continue with this catalog as the target of planning for the 2018 year, or do we adopt the new and have one more catalog, basically, a 2018 catalog, which will be this one?

So they put out a survey and it was a short-form survey, I think a Qualtrics kind of thing. So it was a quick way to survey faculty so they could get an opinion. The senators, I think, in the end did take a vote and voted to recommend that it not be implemented. But it was informed by this survey, which some of the faculty didn't feel like was a very valid way to assess truly like everybody's opinion about it and often the silent majority doesn't show up to vote. If it was only the people who voted, and it was a lot of time and it wasn't really, we had to do things so quickly, it was often you had 00:39:00to set aside some of the better process you might have used if you wanted a real deliberative discussion about it.

But I think in the end, the faculty governance did take a vote. I sat in on some of their meetings and we participated in that discussion. And so they did have a, if not unanimous, it was a majority vote in support of not implementing the new catalog. And leaving that work, making it available to the next institution, but to not try to plan for that in the spring of 2017.

LEH: So like in terms of, could you expand on your thoughts about like the general, the one general degree, and like the benefits or drawbacks of the more conservative approach versus the two degrees? And like how the difference between those might affect like the relationship between these little, like the seven, you know, partner relationships?

KS: Yeah. I think the general, I'd say theory of the reimagining of the associate degree, which led to the new degree program, the associates of arts and associates of science, was driven by a couple of things. One was that the system did change its policy 117 on associate degree requirements. And so they set up a, it's based on the LEAP, learning, oh, I forget what the L, the LEAP outcomes are. I mean, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has had a longstanding commitment to general education. And the LEAP initiative defined certain types of learning outcomes from general education programs. So to align the general education requirements of LEAP with associate degrees that had been written into system standards.

So Colleges took that very seriously and decide to align its associate degree coursework with that policy. That was sort of the first, maybe not quite the driver, but it was the spark that got the discussion going. Because things needed to be reviewed in light of that system change.

Then the faculty, which were also, I think, really engaged with the LEAP type of an approach with general education, wanted to build in sort of the best practice of a design that started students on the right pathway based on where they were going for their four-year degree. And there's a fairly large difference probably between like a STEM student and a liberal arts, say, education student, somebody who wants to start on a pathway there, in terms of some of the first-year courses, some of the first-year experiences you might have students do.

So they used sort of best practices to look at designing a degree that would incorporate high-impact practices and then pathways to kind of careers and degree programs. So it incorporated a lot of sort of thinking into 00:42:00the design. And that would have paid off, I think, really well for the branch campuses to be able to improve student retention rates for like the whole cohort of incoming students. They had a lot of students who would transfer out and not complete their degree because it didn't quite meet their needs. I mean, there was a lot of things they were trying to address all at once.

But I think that really conforms to like my experience in other institutions is that the less structured your associate degree program is, the less successful your students tend to be in completing it or in completing, having the most credits possible applied to their next sort of destination degree program when they transfer out. Because sort of where students get caught is that the more general the advising to complete a general degree, the less sort of specifically they get guided to the right courses or the right time to transfer.

So I was trying to balance a lot of things. And I think that the work they had completed, incorporated and kind of balanced and optimized a lot of really good best practice, good system direction on policy and some good practical structure that they needed to help improve student success on our campuses the way we were looking at our data. And so all of that work was ready to be kind of rolled into our strategic planning and looking at building high-demand pathways, and sort of working into the sort of workforce story of the system and things. And that all sort of got set aside.

And so I think the receiving institutions could have benefited. I think it would have been hard to do, partly because, and this gets into the way, then, each of the receivers has sort of been forced to, not forced, but it's been required to view the number and the type of faculty they got. And this is a, with this work of curriculum done by a statewide body of faculty, and that's how our faculty were organized in Colleges. They had fifteen academic departments and programs, but they were spread over all campuses. So it wasn't like you had one English department on every campus. You had one English department. You had one history department. One geology department statewide. And so when they all planned it together and they all planned to offer enough courses statewide, that was very holistic thinking. When you took that and divided it into seven slices, there was no, I just call it an idiosyncratic distribution of faculty.

So Barron County had a philosopher, a chemist and an engineer. I mean, and then a history and an English. And only like twelve fulltime faculty in Barron County. But there's certainly not enough departments to offer a full degree there. So they relied on courses from the online campus to come there.

And Milwaukee and Waukesha, they have a certain array of faculty. But not any one department was all located in Waukesha. They had many faculty from many departments, but not one whole department of anything.

So when you try to mount a degree program, the specific tracks and a lot of, I'd call it beautiful design work, once you've cut that campus off from the rest of its faculty, it's impossible, basically. So you couldn't really, I think, reap the full benefit if you were a receiving institution, from a lot of that design. Unless you were one of the bigger campuses. Which is where we saw the support to try to do at Waukesha, was very supportive of trying to keep the new degree going. And they've implemented a lot of that now on their own with Milwaukee faculty.

So the fact that we had, I call them statewide, but all thirteen campuses, plus the online, had faculty forming fifteen-layered degree programs. And then we were trying to take a general degree and make it a little more structured, that was possible. Once we cut the faculty up into seven different groups, just no one group had enough of anything to really take the full program forward. It probably made sense that leaving it as flexible as it could, so that once the new campus could look at how many faculty they got on their receiving institution side, and how they integrated the faculty, then we come to the next thing.

And I don't know if you know, there were like two campuses decided to keep independent colleges for their faculty that received, Rock County and Milwaukee created two full, created colleges recognized by their campus as a separate body of faculty who could create their own faculty for the associate degree program. So they govern it through the Rock County campus faculty. Milwaukee took Sheboygan, not Sheboygan, Washington County and Waukesha, joined them together in what they call a College of General Studies. And that is a single faculty between two campuses to be responsible for the associate degree. So they get to decide how they want to do it. Rock County has a similar autonomy. And then they have to work through their faculty governance at the campus level to make changes through their curriculum process. So they have a lot of ownership and a lot of like autonomy to like address the needs of their campus through that sort of college organizational status.

Other campuses, I'd say, for the most part, Platteville, say, being a good example, integrated their faculty into their academic departments directly. So there was no separate Colleges faculty on Richland or Baraboo. But those English faculty are now members of the English faculty of UW Platteville, and so they participate in institutional departments and then they teach their courses on the campus. So the campus, the three campuses together really own, through their, I guess College of Arts and Sciences, or their equivalent liberal studies program, governs the content and design of their curriculum for the associate degree.

And so that makes an entirely different trajectory of how they'll plan and how they'll provision the coursework for that. They're also creating new degrees, say, like in the example of Platteville, they added two new associate 00:48:00degree programs, one in pre-agriculture and one in pre-business, pre-tourism, like sort of a tourism track for their business degree program. Because those are the needs of the communities. And so those are driven more by the business school and more by the agricultural program than by the liberal arts studies general transfer needs. So they're starting to differentiate with their colleges what their associate degrees look like. So it's very different depending on where the campus is.

And the third sort of end of that sort of blended model, I'd call it, is Stevens Point [unclear] created a university college, which is something they already had on their main campus. And so that's now like the first and second-year college for their entire region. And their faculty are affiliated with their departments, but they have their own college that's a nonacademic college. But that's more detail than you want, I know. (laughter)

LEH: Actually, sorry, what is, could you expand a little bit about what exactly like that, how that differs from like the other structures?

KS: In general, a university college approach, so it's kind of a national model that a lot of four-year institutions have adopted for dealing with students who come in and may not have a major already. So they don't know what they want. They're like undecided or undeclared majors are pretty common. So often those students, or students who may not be as prepared as others, and they need some development studies or more advising or more career services kind of advising to like, what do I want to do with my life? And so often we'll create a first year program or things. But the university college model is a common name for it. And so it has its own dean, but that college incorporates a lot of student services as well as academic programming around developmental studies, math and English, generally. It will often run the tutoring program and other academic support services, so that students can get additional support, particularly in their first and second year until they declare a major. A lot of intensive advising and work where the first-year programs are often in this kind of a college. So it's more of a service unit college with a variable blend between academics and student affairs. So I think the one in Stevens Point is fairly focused on advising, development studies and somewhat even I think actually on recruiting. So that's often not uncommon in a university college. So they're very interested in looking at the open access mission of the colleges' branch campuses. Because they believe in, now they've received that open access mission, they're going to be the receiver of those students and helping them get placed into developmental studies, or get into their first year courses on a branch. And then transfer from a branch to a program at Stevens Point or they also now have to be responsible for supporting students to transfer to Madison or transfer to Milwaukee or wherever they want to go. So that's a little different 00:51:00than saying it's the department of English that the faculty, say the faculty at Richland don't feel like they belong to such a university college where their mission is protected a little bit or advanced. It's more they're working with their English department, they're working with their history department faculty. And so they feel more affiliated with the College of Arts & Sciences, say, than they do with a university college.

Although I haven't heard lately how strongly, how the faculty on the Stevens Point campuses feel about their affiliation with this. But they have an active dean who's very out in the campuses and very working on those. So I think it's a slightly different model that you have a dean advocating the needs of the branches and the needs of those types of like community college student in general in an institution, which is I'd say not present like say at Platteville or Green Bay.

Oshkosh is, and actually Oshkosh and Green Bay, if you want the long story, they've created a very institutional identity of equality not using the university college as much. But they've both started branding their campuses as, so for Oshkosh especially, they have a heavy branding right now going on saying they're three campuses, one university. So they're not even trying to differentiate like the two-year to the four-year as much. It's three campuses, one Oshkosh.

And Green Bay's done the same. They've done what they call project, I forget what it is, something, it's kind of a clever name, anyway. But the same idea that they want to plan as a regional university with four campuses. Not like three little ones and one big one. So I think that is a strong sort of strategic approach by some of the chancellors to really get out in the region and try to embrace those campuses. Regardless of what type of programming or the mission, they're going to see this as a regional responsibility. So I think that's another variation on that. We haven't seen that kind of branding in Milwaukee, say, or I don't think really at Whitewater, either, with the Rock Campus. But they're all trying that to various degrees. But I think Oshkosh probably has the strongest statements out there in the public right now.

LEH: Hmm. It's interesting how different the approaches at the different campuses are. (laughs)

KS: Yeah.

LEH: So you talked briefly about support services. Could you talk more about that? The process of like decision making and restructuring.

KS: Support services and decision making. That's a tricky one because I guess starting out for context, the support services, whether they were academic or administrative, all had gone through a regionalization just the 00:54:00year before restructuring. So they were very, I'd say, unsettled in a lot of ways. Many of them have been reorganized. There'd been a specific direction under regionalization to cut budgets, save money. So there were positions eliminated. So often in the case of like our deans, there were thirteen campus deans but we went to four regions. So those campus deans had to compete for four jobs. So we had just gone through a fairly rapid downsizing of administration to support the campuses at the central and regional levels. Many of the specific services, whether they were administrative or student had been reengineered with a lot of heavy assistance from Huron Consulting. We had to basically business process reengineer many things to be able to do them on a regional basis. So there was a lot of disruption.

LEH: I'm sorry, could you just say what business processing is?

KS: Reengineering? (laughter)

LEH: Yeah.

KS: So I'd say prior to 2017, and maybe '15, '16 is a better year, because that was before regionalization, the decision had been made to downsize from like every campus has an HR, every campus has a student, what do they call, solution center and a student affairs officer and an academic affairs officer. So every campus kind of had its own little administrative pod that took care of the campus and then connected to central. The regionalization took and created this sort of regional approach and broke everything into these four regions. And in those regions, they went from say if they had three campuses or four campuses, they had to consolidate to one of everything. So they went to a regional and associate deans, regional student affairs officers, regional administrative officers. And so in order to do the same amount of processing for HR and for student registration records and registration that they did at the campus with a third or a quarter, three-quarters less people, they had to say well how are we going to do that?

So you had to go through and say all of your processing for hiring has to no longer be done at the campus, because those people are no longer there. (laughs) The people who help you are over here, and they will help three campuses. And so they went about saying it's like, in some cases they consolidated at one campus and the campus provided for four, the service for four others. So it's a shared service model. Some of it was completely centralized in Madison. So the shared services was very statewide. And that just meant you needed to know who were the resources to support if you're buying things, if you're hiring somebody, if you're adding a course or putting a grade in or any of those things. Every service that had been provided at a campus level now needed to be evaluated for how do we do it with the new regional structure?

So that took a lot of work. And it was a lot of work to new people, often who'd 00:57:00done the job for one campus, now had to do it for three. And they maybe had less other things to do, but they were now responsible for a lot more people. So taking the work off the campus, putting it somewhere remotely, whether it was at a different campus or at Madison. It was incredibly stressful, incredibly time-consuming work to get it right. Because you still needed to operate the campus. It wasn't like they stopped and figured it out. It's like they had to keep doing this while they were often competing for their jobs. And again, we went through massive downsizing, which meant some people didn't get the new jobs. They had to leave. So there was a lot of unhappiness about people that had been places for a while losing their job, essentially. And that was where they could save the money to kind of restructure colleges to fit the new budget model, which was the lower enrollment-driven direction that the campus was going to have to learn how to sustain itself. So it needed to cut costs.

So we went through a pretty extensive process to be able to maintain all of the same services with fewer people. And that just meant everything had to be rerouted through a new process. So that reengineering is sort of, I think it's kind of an industry term for how you have to go through the workflow of every process you do, and decide how you do it with less people. Some of it's technology, some of it's automation. Some is just doing less with the same. And colleges really had to balance a lot of doing less with less people. And so that was sort of, when I came in, doing less with less was sort of a mantra. So we were trying to learn what we could do with less, and do it well.

And some of the analysis show that, and particularly in student services, where high-touch, high-community kind of outreach at the campus level was something the colleges prided itself in. having to regionalize your campus services for students was really probably the most difficult sort of intellectually and emotionally. And I think it was probably what hit the students the worst, too. There was a lot of unhappiness of like, what do you mean I can't go here to get my advising if I'm a veteran? I have to call this person on another campus. I never had to do that before. I mean, so we centralized some things that students had to do, too. And that was just routing their behavior in new ways. And that doesn't go over well when you're used to seeing a person or you're used to getting some direct contact from somebody that you really liked. Your advisor's now in a different situation.

So we were just at the point with our strategic planning of saying probably we've cut too far on student services, because we're seeing the effect and the students are not happy. And there was some evidence that there was some retention loss and different things that was pretty clear. So we were just also going to prioritize reinvesting or reallocating any new funds, or any funds we couldn't reorganize during our strategic planning to rebuild some of 01:00:00those student services. Because it was really, it was clear areas where we had just not maintained the quality or the sufficiency of services. And things like developmental studies, sort of we were able to do certain things, like online virtual learning centers. And that's sort of using the online technology. So those had some promise. And we were also looking to improve on some of the, I'd call them like technology solutions we were using for students. Tutoring, online tutoring and that type of thing.

So services were, I'd say, high disrupted prior to restructuring. And then just before we restructured, we were planning to try to improve them. I think those improvements became secondary after the decision to restructure.

So to get through the year of restructuring, the '17, rather the '18-'19 year with the what we call phase one, we had to have an operating memorandum of understanding in order to have Colleges administer services on behalf of the receiving institutions. You're probably familiar with this. The strategy that allowed us to go through the restructuring as quickly as we did, and maintain the financial aid eligibility as well as the accreditation, meant that the records, student records which were housed at Colleges' central student information system, had to be the system of record for a year.

And so in order to do that and not have Department of Education or HLC concerned about it, we had to demonstrate we had an agreement in place that for the period of July 1 2018 to July 1 2019, UW Colleges acting on behalf of the receiving institutions as a service unit non-accredited could provide a lot of the student services. And there was like a fifteen or sixteen-part MOU that outlines all the services Colleges would do as a contractor, essentially, to the receivers. So the services Colleges provided were those depleted student services for that year of restructuring. And as the branch campus, receivers came in and looked at what's happening on the branches and they saw how sort of depleted and disrupted it was, partially due to restructuring, partially due to regionalization, they got quite concerned. And so they're now, and have elevated that concern and are trying to rebuild what in the new model how they'd like to provide those services.

So at least the priority for student services has been maintained as a priority. HLC pointed out to us in December of 2018 when they did their onsite evaluation after six months of restructuring approval, they said that was an area they could see is clearly still needs to be addressed and that they had concerns and that that would be something they would track in each of the receiving institution's HLC evaluations in the future.

So I think that's where you get into how there's seven different ways you can help provide services on campus is really, again, starting to show a year worth of work. And each one is doing it differently. But the resources, I 01:03:00think, that's where we hear the campuses now in System saying they still need more money or some type of way to bring in what they want. The shortage of resources that came with the campus hasn't been mitigated by moving it. And so again, they're looking at ways that we can do that. So the system has, I think, given them some opportunity for resources to, if it's focused on student support.

The area of administrative support systems put the money into student services. And that's kind of not specifically a decision of restructuring, but it's been the system initiative that has somewhat mitigated some of the restructuring, I don't know what you'd call it, costs. But with student services coming online kind of out of the resources that were freed up from restructuring, then they're now replacing, they're doing the shared service approach to all institutions to allow the savings to be reallocated back into campus operations at the sites.

Some of that may through like the HR IT part I think actually benefit the branch campuses the most. Because they've sort of had a continuity of services in terms of the same people are providing it as well as, I'd say, the cost savings to the receivers will help to offset some of the shortfalls that had existed prior to restructuring. So I'd say shared services is another on the administrative side of the house rather than the academic side. Something that will, in the long run, benefit the branches and all of the institutions. But it's going to take a while till that sort of stands itself up fully, I think. So another couple of years.

LEH: So in terms of like online services, you talked about shared services, online tutoring, things like that. Where did UW online and like online classes play into the process of restructuring? Beyond like faculty movement.

KS: Well I'd say there's kind of two parts to that question, or the answer to that question. I mean, there's the operational side. As I mentioned, the online campus as we'd, Colleges had actually developed a policy basis to create a campus called the online campus. So it was a virtual campus where there were faculty and students attached to it for that program. I think those courses that the online campus offered were critical to the operations of all of our campuses. Because we had students on campuses that wanted to transfer to a whole lot of different programs. And if they couldn't get the courses they needed, it would make it difficult to do that. And one of the benefits to taking prereqs first and second year at the colleges was they're cheaper courses. So being able to do that and get as many of those courses before you transferred was to the students' benefit. So the colleges online allowed those courses of a 01:06:00large number of faculty sort of sharing them across the online platform to be offered statewide. And so the students at all of our campuses could get many more courses because of the college's online existence. And were allowed to complete and transfer in a much more timely fashion because of that. And so because the colleges had a single catalog, one curriculum, and a single student information system, and the way that we could implement the online platform, those courses were seamlessly available to any student on any campus. The academic planning for faculty load was really facilitated because when there was a high-demand course, faculty load could move into that on the online campus. So it became a very seamless, integrated whole, where the online became a really critical part to operating all these campuses.

And as enrollment dropped, especially we were able to tap into new sources of online students who wanted these courses, general ed courses were pretty useful for students on a lot of other campuses, too. So colleges online was able to grow when our other campuses couldn't. So they were actually producing enough revenue to give money back. So if you participated in the colleges online courses exchanging, and they were able to get high school dual enrollment students, they could get other campus special students taking their courses. And they could still offer courses at a cheaper price than the four-years, and a little bit more expensive than the branches. But they were able to grow.

In general, their operations became totally financially self-supporting. And so there was no state funding that had to go to that. We could run it entirely off its own revenues. They were running around a nine million dollar budget about the time of restructuring. And they were returning about three million dollars back into campus operations after expenses.

So that was a significant revenue stream to the campuses, too, so that had a benefit. It benefited students, it benefited faculty and then it benefited the sustainability of our sort of integrated thirteen-campus system. Didn't offset the entire problem of declining enrollments, but it was definitely a financial asset to be able to operate in that kind of a holistic fashion.

So that's the operational benefit of it. And that went away with restructuring. Because colleges online was a program. It's not a campus. And so it could, needed to be run by an accredited institution. Really the courses were transferred with the branches to the receiving institutions. Colleges Online essentially discontinued as an entity. And what we did was take the functionality of exchanging courses between receiving institutions. And recreated that. For this year we call it the course exchange. And the extended campus and system is operating it, allowing campuses to kind of put courses in and let students at the campuses and the receivers and others take them.

And then this is where it's sort of the second part of the answer is sort of the strategic value of the Colleges Online program and the decisions around it are still playing out, I'd say. And so the answers, the answer of how do 01:09:00the Colleges Online and restructuring affect decisions, there's quite a long history of decision changes related to Colleges Online as a program. And initially in the first restructuring announcement, the online program was identified as kind of like it was an entity. It could be attached to the system administration as part of the continuing education online e-learning unit, the CEOEL unit of UW Extension, which had been decided to be relocated to system [and then?].

So with that direction of the Colleges Online associate program being attached to CEOEL, that was the initial discussion. And it was to be assigned as an entity that could maintain a separate accreditation. That was the first decision in November, or first resolution in December. It was the first resolution in November. By December, it had been identified that it was not possible for Colleges Online to maintain separate accreditations as part of system administration. So it would need to go to an accredited institution.

So the board revised its decision and direction and gave the president the authority to make a decision on which institution to give the online associate's degree program to. And authorized any campus that wanted it to offer it. So that resolution went through. And the executive committee needed to sign off on the president's decision. And he made and convened a meeting with the steering committee in December to ask any of the institutions, and the steering committee was constituted by all institutions in the system, any institution in the system could put in a proposal to him in December. And two weeks later he would make a decision. Because we needed to know by the January HLC application deadline what the plan was. But they could make an application to take over and run the online associate's program as the single state institution with that responsibility after restructuring.

So there were about seven applications from different institutions to do that. And many of them receivers, but some of the non-receivers as well. Those proposals were reviewed. We reviewed them at Colleges. I think System reviewed them. I'm not sure who else reviewed them. The steering committee met again, I think, on December, around the fifteenth or sixteenth. And they discussed the proposals and kind of talked about what the favored solution was. Because picking one of those campuses would give them a big advantage for growth. Because the only thing that was growing in terms of Colleges Online was Colleges Online.

So the president took all that into consideration. And at the steering committee meeting there was a push to consider a collaborative solution, which has become a model that the UW System has used and operated through CEOEL, which was kind of the idea that that was part of why it should go to their oversight under system admin. But it's where CEOEL is not an accredited institution, but it convenes the partners, voluntary partners within the system who want 01:12:00to offer a degree collaboratively online. So that was another option.

So the president decided after thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I think made the decision early January, I'm not exactly sure, but I've been trying to track down the decision date because I've been writing this up. But they would go with a collaborative solution. So the direction was changed from having one of the accredited institutions offering the online associate's program to voluntarily recruiting as many institutions in the system that wanted to to offer the online associate's degree collaboratively through CEOEL.

So that sort of flipped a whole new kind of dimension into the future of the associate degree. And I'd say that was based on the strategic decision that the president made that that was a better way to provide for the opportunity of an associate degree online statewide in the future. And share in the growth and opportunity by collaboration of willing partners.

And so I think that strategic decision now has been playing out at this point. Because then it meant we had to figure out a way when we had transferred students to the receiving institutions as of July 1, and they would then register under their sort of accredited authority, and we could exchange courses on the online course exchange for one year, which is what we're in right now. And then next year, and we're right in the process of this, is developing a collaborative online associate's degree. And that process of curriculum development takes easily sixteen to twenty-four months. And it's just barely going to have time to be in place from the fall of 2020 to admit students. And many of the constraints of the collaborative model, with CEOEL is running, are starting to, I'd say, like chafe against the past history of how Colleges Online operated. Not because there's anything wrong with what they're doing. It's just that Colleges Online achieved an efficiency through a singularity of an institution and curriculum and SIS, a business model, a marketing plan, all kinds of things they had been doing for years to optimize. And they're trying to recreate that very quickly in something that's not necessarily designed for that kind of a program.

So we're sort of getting some of the pinch points of well, the course exchange isn't working as good as it should, or what we think it should. Well, it's not ever going to go back to what it was. It's in a sort of intermediate year. And then it's going to be replaced by what we know to be a model that works for existing collaboratives. But those are all bachelor/master program in like high-demand, market-driven fields.

An associate degree, I would say, is more of the mission-driven component of the curriculum. It's like looking to accommodate open enrollment and transfer. Those are very mission-driven elements. And they're, I think, past experience says that's a good market. And we just need to figure out how to adjust the model of our classic CEOEL collaboratives to kind of work in the future. And that's the strategic kind of problem we're trying to solve right now is how does 01:15:00that work, and can we achieve the levels of access that we had prior to restructuring. So, we're working on that still.

LEH: (laughs) Oh, man. Yeah, you said like the models that like, for collaborative environments like this, are in like high-demand areas?

KS: Mm hmm.

LEH: Could you like sort of elaborate on that? Like with like this new model, like how sort of like demand, how like generating demand in like a collaborative model, that sort of stuff?

KS: Let's see. I mean, the collaborative model itself, I'd say, we call it market-driven. So what CEOEL does is it pays attention to kind of current trends in higher education, or requests from campuses, or places where employers are coming and saying we need. And I think an example, and I'm not the best historian of this, there was a sustainable management degree program that came out of, I think, Stevens Point and some of the environmental science programs. They wanted to have an online maybe master's degree program, but really didn't know what the market was. And then CEOEL and their institution worked together and they found out well, there'd be a pretty good demand for this program if you put it out there. They didn't have enough faculty or expertise to offer it. So they did a, what they call their call for participants. And this is where I don't know the details. They get multiple institutions interested. They built a sort of collaborative curriculum that they could offer online together. And then that program's been running for several years, and sort of met the demand of professional education in that field. Because there were a lot of people going into environmental fields where they were trying to learn sustainable management principles and apply them to businesses and things, I guess.

So trying to look at areas, I think the ones coming out now are like in biotechnology. There's probably a lot of information science-related things. So they're kind of those cool new fields. And so to get out there with a degree program early, the institutions working together can build programs faster than trying to build a full faculty or a full funded program online at one institution. So it's been a way that they've been able to sort of address emerging workforce needs.

The associate degree isn't necessarily like that. I mean, it's coming out of restructuring. It was an associate degree program that could be available anywhere online in the state. And that, in volume there are a lot of students who need access to online higher education. And you need to start with your first sixty credits. So it's a good way to access higher ed online.

Colleges Online had built up their market by advertising to those 01:18:00kind of people. And I think that's just a different thing than saying you know, your niche market of trying to find the people who need a biotechnology master's degree. And you can do a lot of market research focused on that. And what kind of employers might send their employees. There's certain strategies you use to populate, you know, target marketing to those kind of students.

Marketing to students who are looking to start college, have never been to college, might be like some college, no degree, those kind of famous students who need to complete a degree, who need to like get on track and need a few courses to finish a degree. That sort of thing. So there's a volume market out there. So it's more of a volume commodities market. General education courses that transfer everywhere are really good value because you can use them to complete degrees at various other places, too.

So there's just a whole different market and a different strategy to market to them. I'd say the reason you do it is as much mission-driven as it is market-driven. And that is not the typical collaborative program. And so we're starting to, I'd say, stretch the extended campuses experience because they just haven't worked with that type of program, whereas that was what Colleges did, both on campus and online. So we had an integrated business model. They're trying to recreate that with a classic business model for collaboration, but not necessarily experienced with those type of students.

LEH: Can you maybe elaborate on like the extended campuses and that part of how their sort of role in restructuring?

KS: The UW extended campus?

LEH: Yeah.

KS: Yeah. Well, they are again started back before restructuring, the continuing ed online e-learning, CEOEL, as everybody loved it at that time, they were impacted by restructuring and initially directed to become part of system administration. It took a while, I think it was until about April before we had a decision from the president's office on which, how they would be integrated into system administration. Jim Henderson as vice president had started some planning groups. And wasn't real clear, I think, to system administration, I think it was more clear to CEOEL. They wanted to just be attached to the system. They didn't want to be integrated in the system (laughs) necessarily broken up or restructured within system administration.

So it was a little ambiguous what was going to happen. I think in April, the president's decision was that CEOEL would just become a unit under Office of Academic Affairs. Then they attached the business and entrepreneurship under the Office of University Relations. They took [WHIPS?] 1:20:45 and Humanities Council and stuck those into the Office of Finance under their VP. So three of the VPs at System were designated as the receivers of the various Extension units that were coming under system administration.

UW Help was put in the Office of Student Success in April, prior to 01:21:00restructuring. So that resolved all the like where are the Extension units going. So at that point it became more clear they'd stay as sort of an autonomous unit under the Office of Academic and Student Affairs under Jim Henderson. So that decision stood.

And then Jim announced his retirement shortly after that. And that was when shortly after that they announced that I'd do the interim position after he left June first. So I sort of was involved in how are the Colleges Online going to be integrated into CEOEL prior to April? And then once April, it was clear that Colleges Online would go into CEOEL, and CEOEL would go into Office of Academic and Student Affairs. (laughs) And then I was going to be the like vice president responsible. It was, again, my role to start, continuing to work with CEOEL, and what were they going to become under Office of Academic and Student Affairs.

By July, no, end of May, early, June, Aaron Brower then, David Schejbal, who was dean of CEOEL took a position at Marquette. And he left I think July one. So in end of May and June, we announced that Aaron Brower, who was provost at Extension, would become the dean of CEOEL and move under system administration into my office as a senior associate vice president for basically the CEOEL. And he would maintain the title of executive director of CEOEL once it restructured July first.

So we did a lot of movement around the like leadership of CEOEL right before restructuring on July first. So July first, when that started, Aaron was the executive director. CEOEL was under Office of Academic and Student Affairs. And I think my sense was, and Aaron's was as well, is that we would let that unit maintain its separate sort of status. It wasn't going to be, because it directly served students, because it directly served campuses, it was kind of unlike the other offices of policy analysis, student success or academic programming, and the other AVPs of that office. So we recognized its separate entity status and over the last year have worked on creating memorandum of understandings and delegations of authority from the vice president to the unit so that it's able to operate with the autonomy it needs in order to do the programming, and chase the market-driven strategies and leadership it's got to provide to the campuses. So it has a slightly different status than some of the other administrative offices within the system, academic affairs. But a lot of that's inside your integration issues. Just to make sure they can continue to operate and fulfill their mission and their role. Because there wasn't really a direction to change that. At the same time, they also had to integrate the online campus personnel and staff. And then to develop this collaborative degree program, which has a restructuring part.

But minus restructuring, they still have about a hundred and forty employees and a thirty million-dollar budget. I mean, they were a going concern 01:24:00before restructuring and they maintained that continuity of operations throughout that time period while also sort of being integrated into system admin and integrating the online program. So there was a lot of motion going on even though they didn't necessarily change a lot of the outward appearances of their organization.

And I'd say it was then in July, Aaron took over as the executive director. They started doing some market research on what's their new name. They wanted to rebrand themselves. So I think by December they had chosen a new name. The UW extended campus came out of some of their focus groups and branding studies. They did a lot of market research on what would be the next sort of generation name to reflect their strategic role in the system, but to give them some new opportunities to kind of look and present themselves differently on some of their graphics, and how to redesign their website and things to kind of help promote that.

So they did that about midyear and presented that to the board of regents. Again, I think the internal sort of restructuring, Aaron was really designated as the leader of that and he can probably tell you more about the inside evolution of the organization. But I think by the end of the year, calendar year 2018, they had really sort of become the extended campus with a new kind of look and a message out there about what their post-restructuring role was.

LEH: So I'm kind of also curious about sort of like the steering committee and the goings on in the steering committee. Is there any insights you could give into like what you remember as like the most pressing concerns that people were talking about? Or, yeah. Things like that. (laughs)

KS: You know, the steering committee has had, I think it played a good role. I mean, it needed to have that advisory structure and play that role for the system and this massive project that became restructuring. And I think it had to fill a lot of needs. I mean, restructuring colleges would have been enough complexity for any group to try to get their hands around (laughs) but then Extension as well. Significant changes that went on there. Largely driven by Madison and system administration. But the steering committee really was charged to kind of oversee both and to have a sort of advisory role. So I think they were pretty actively engaged upfront, because it required a lot of input on decisions. And that's when we saw the most I'd say in-depth engagement of all of the members of the steering committee. I think over time it has 01:27:00evolved into more of a colleges-focused, because that's where the issues have really emerged in terms of operations. We've got the MOU year, the phase one, a lot of complexity there on like who's doing what and what's not working and feedback kind of wasn't really its role. It wasn't an evaluation committee. It was really more to just sort of raise issues and provide input and oversight.

So I'd say in the last year it's been largely colleges-focused, so the Extensions component has been really gone, has been much reduced. I'd say that non-receivers have been variably engaged. And probably less so now. Most of the issues that are residuals are really in the receiving institutions' purview. They don't impact non-receivers very much, except in a couple of cases like the associate's degree in a collaboration that includes a couple of non-receiving institutions. So I think it's really served its purpose. And the people who were on it, I think when they needed to be engaged, they were. I think then over time it's more drifted into the like people who were most impacted by those decisions have been the most engaged. And now I think the last meeting was last month. And they're not planning to reconvene it. Largely because the decisions and things have now moved into operations or system policy or someplace where they can like be now managed in the post-restructured system.

So I think it was a pretty effective group. And you could not have done it, I think, in terms of like its transparency and communication without having that steering committee as a component of the whole project.

LEH: What were like some of the academic concerns that were brought to your attention from like not just faculty but like other people in the committee process?

KS: Oh, boy, that's a good question. You know, I guess I can't really think of any sort of standout ones. I think they just evolved with the project. They tended to focus early on on issues of like consultation. I mean, the decision and the like going forward, the restructuring with as little like I'd say institutional consultation or involvement of shared governance or even much communication at all prior to the announcement to the institutions that were affected was the early concerns. How do faculty and staff and students have inputs on these decisions which are now changing their entire careers? So I think that was an early focus, communication and making sure people understood what was happening, the transparency of new decisions, that sort of thing. So those were always coming. I mean, I'd say the academic affairs concerns were, are the authorities of the faculty being respected? Is the 01:30:00academic integrity of things being maintained? Are we going to have enough support to really be successful in the future and not lose the colleges' mission in this whole sort of [unclear].

And that was when I was provost. So the first year of the steering committee, I was serving on it as UW Colleges provost. And then when I switched over to the interim role at System as vice president, issues that would come to my attention had more to do with things that affected multiple institutions and policies. And there was more concern about policy or money that System needed to be working on. As well as that our office, Carleen Vande Zande was sort of the lead on the HLC application, the HLC site visit in December. So that was under our office as well. So getting more involved with the HLC issues and the departments of education, financial aid. We would get called in if there was a concern about some financial aid delivery. Which was had a couple of times when we had to make sure that things got straightened out or done in time so that students weren't impacted. So I became much more of the oversight role in the system seat that I sat on for that period of time.

LEH: Hmm. So would you expand on like the Higher Learning Commission?

KS: I could. I might need to do a time check, though.

LEH: Oh, it's 2:30.

KS: I think I have a three o'clock, so.

LEH: Oh, okay. All right. We'll stop here then.

KS: That's okay. We had an hour, that's what I was--

LEH: Oh, we've been talking for an hour and a half.

KS: That's what I figured. On my schedule, I think I did it for an hour. So I'm happy to make another appointment. I just have to run

End First Interview Session