UW reorg might work, but Cross, GOP not worthy of trust

As people digest the announcement by UW System President Ray Cross about his plans to link the 2-year UW Colleges with 8 of the 4-year UW campuses, many are looking for more details as to how all of this would actually work out.

Noel Radomski heads up the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education on the UW-Madison campus, and posted on to the WISCAPE site with his thoughts. Radomski said Cross’s potential new operating model could work well in dealing with the financial and efficiency problems caused by the loss of enrollment at the Colleges.

The proposal to integrate the UW Colleges campuses into UW four-year institutions is interesting, and it has the potential to stem the decline in enrollment at the UW Colleges (future branches campuses), the UW’s four-year regional universities, and UW-Milwaukee​; ​facilitate transfer​; and improve the number and success of transfer students. The probability of meeting the proposal’s stated goals will increase if adequate time and resources are provided for the planning, adoption, and implementation of the proposal. The proposal could fix the problems caused by the recent, hastily planned and executed regionalization of the UW Colleges. Hopefully, a stronger focus on local control and a regional focus will be the twin pillars driving the future of the branch campuses and regional universities.

The proposal to move Cooperative Extension to UW-Madison is timely and​ could pay great dividends. If enacted, it could rekindle the relationship ​between the state’s land grant institution and ​its citizens, agricultural sectors, local and start-up businesses, established businesses, targeted industry clusters, community-based organizations, governments, K-12 districts, and others. It takes us back to the past: UW Cooperative was part of UW-Madison until ​they were divorced in the mid-1960s. Though it was yanked from UW-Madison with the best of intentions​ -- the expectation that a large infusion of federal and philanthropic funding would be provided to address Wisconsin’s urban renewal and the war on poverty​ -- these never came to fruition due to federal monies being diverted to the Vietnam War. Now, with this proposal, county agents will once again serve as a direct bridge and translator between UW-Madison faculty, staff, and students and the communities they serve.

But Radomski noted that the concern Cross stated about “declining high school graduates in Wisconsin” is at best overblown, and perhaps signals that System needs to adjust to changing demographics. Radomski also questioned why some UW-Extension services were being centralized into System administration in Madison.

The premise that Wisconsin’s current and projected high school graduates is contributing and will lead to more enrollment declines is highly questionable and must be revisited. The December 2016 report, Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates, by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), shows that the number of Wisconsin high school graduates will be stable for a number of years, and then slowly decline. However, if you dive into the recent and projected number of Wisconsin high school graduates, you will find that the number of white high school graduates is declining, and the number of Latinx and (to a lesser extent) black high school graduates is increasing. Many UW System institutions have already made significant changes to their programs that better serve the increasing number of underrepresented students enrolling, persisting, learning, and succeeding in their institutions. It is those youth who will be tomorrow’s civic leaders, employees, and business owners, if they have more than a high school diploma or GED. The previous hope that international students will either halt enrollment declines or provide enough tuition revenue to cover for the loss of domestic student tuition is not proving true for most of the UW Colleges and regional comprehensive universities. UW-Madison is the exception….

The proposal to move three [other] UW Extension divisions to UW System administration is highly suspect and identification of better placements should proceed immediately. Is the role of UW System administration to run divisions and programs?

Stevens Point-based writer Bill Berry had a similarly mixed reaction to Cross’s reorganization plans. Berry says a well-done reorganization could be a win-win for both the Colleges and the 4-year UW campuses they would feed into, and deal with challenging demographics in Central Wisconsin.

…The merger could solve some of the knots in the current arrangement. It could ease the transferability of credits from two- to four-year institutions and perhaps provide savings on administrative overlap. It may also address the current plunge in student numbers, pushed at least in part by declines in high school graduates.

Most of the four-year campuses to which the two-year centers would be hitched are struggling with the same challenges posed by declining enrollment, worsened by withering cuts in state support. At UW-Stevens Point, which would inherit UW-Marathon County and UW-Wood County, officials are already struggling with these issues and public reaction to efforts to address them.

But Berry also notes that Cross, the Board of Regents, the right-wing Governor who selected those Regents, and the GOP legislators that helped land the UW System in these funding constraints cannot be trusted to do this the right way.

But it’s hard to be confident given the record of the current governor and many legislators, who have used our public universities as punching bags over the past decade despite the fact they are major drivers of local, regional and state economies. Some have acted with outright malice toward the universities. They can only be viewed as anti-higher education. This is piled on top of almost a half-century of dramatic declines in state support. The same lawmakers have then cynically complained about rising tuition costs.

Who knows, maybe this merger proposal will help shed new light on the value and importance of our universities. If nothing else, people who make decisions in Madison may get an education about how much local communities value their colleges.

Maybe, or maybe it’ll make constituents in places like Rice Lake, Wausau, Marshfield, Sheboygan, and Fond du Lac recognize that they need to get rid of the regressive ALEC trash that are defunding and deforming the UW Colleges in their communities.

And we should be wary of the motives behind this, particularly because of the isolated way Cross undertook to come up with this plan, leaving UW students and faculty in the dark until last week. At the same time, Cross is allowing input from another group of people, as the UW's Kris Olds noted from Cross's appearance on Mike Gousha's show this weekend.

Extract of interview with UW System President Ray Cross about plan to restructure University of Wisconsin System https://t.co/eAR6PFO6tf pic.twitter.com/e1Fz8qXMSs

— Kris Olds (@GlobalHigherEd) October 15, 2017

So Ray Cross is talking to business leaders about how to shape a sizable amount of the UW System’s future service delivery, but isn’t doing the same for the actual students and faculty that will be directly affected by it? You’d think he’d want to get some buy-in and shaping of the plan from those groups, since the plan won’t work well if those groups don’t get on board with it.

Radomski was also alarmed by Cross’s secrecy, and said the idea that this reorganization could start in less than 9 months (before some current Colleges students would even finish their 2-year program).

UW campus administrators, faculty, academic staff, university staff, students, civic business leaders, and the fourth estate were not informed of the proposal to restructure the UW System until they read the October 11 press release announcing it. ​Though individuals can now submit questions about ​the proposal through a web page, ​ at a minimum, President Cross and the UW System Board of Regents should also convene a series of open community hearings with Q&A sessions across the state. ​In addition, they should conduct an informational session at a UW System Board of Regents meeting before the Board votes on the proposal. The approval and implementation date, therefore, need to be extended. The idea of approving the restructuring proposal at a November 2017, UW System Board of Regents meeting is folly, as is a July 1, 2018, implementation date.

Yeah, there’s a lot that has to be figured out with this proposed reorganization, and it seems quite telling that Cross and the Regents are trying to jam this through as quickly as possible, with changes starting before the 2018 elections, where “future of the UW System” would be a major issue if this plan was hanging out there.

But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, right Ray? Just like I’m sure it slipped your mind to talk to the students and faculty about how their jobs and academic plans might be upended, eh boss? That act is why I also have serious misgivings over this plan, even if it might help the current declining situation at these Colleges and campuses.

Because the people Ray Cross are working for are not to be trusted, and refuse to come clean with the public about what they want to see as a final outcome of these changes - Well, at least an outcome that doesn’t involve destroying higher education in the state, or one that resides firmly in Fantasyland.