“It can scare some people,” he says with a laugh, of the phrase “moving in.”
Muir was describing his new job. Come January, he’ll be focusing on urban Milwaukee, trying to start new internships and build academic programs that will benefit the University of Wisconsin Colleges.
The Colleges are 13 tiny specks on the higher-education map in Wisconsin, beloved by the people who work there and the roughly 14,000 students who go there, but little-known or understood beyond their campuses, which mostly reside in small- and medium-sized cities, in addition to one online campus.
They serve primarily freshmen and sophomores, and are the ultimate access institutions, where students either unprepared for the academic rigors of a four-year campus or turned off by the big U experience can get their first two years of school at a fraction of the cost before transferring. Virtually every applicant is accepted. Adults – “nontraditional students” in higher-ed jargon – make up nearly a third of students.
And data show they graduate at higher rates from the four-year universities than students who transfer in from technical colleges or other four-year campuses.
In an early-October interview, Muir can be forgiven for not being on top of his mental game. It’s his first Monday at work knowing he will no longer have his current job as dean and CEO of the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, the largest of those two-year colleges.
The roomy-yet-modest office he sits in will no longer be his. The campus under his charge since 2011 will now be overseen by Jackie Joseph-Silverstein, the current dean at UW-Sheboygan, who will now divide her time as a new regional dean/CEO for three campuses: Waukesha, Sheboygan and Washington County in West Bend.
Muir had thrown his hat in the ring for the new regional job. If he’s bitter about not getting it, he’s doing a great job of masking it.
“She’s super, and I know that’s what I’m supposed to say,” he says of Joseph-Silverstein, “but she’s super. I’m going to really enjoy working with her.”
Muir has won praise for his efforts building bridges from campus to community and business groups at Waukesha, as well as at a previous job with a community college in Arizona. He calls the opportunity to dedicate his time to that cause in Milwaukee, which is mostly unserved by the UW two-year colleges, exciting.
Muir and Joseph-Silverstein are two of the first dominoes to fall in what will be a massive restructuring of the colleges. No campuses will close, and students may not notice much of a difference in the classroom. But in other areas, changes will be substantial.
Most administrative jobs will be regionalized. Many other jobs – in financial aid, IT, human resources, libraries, veterans’ services and admissions – will go away, be consolidated regionally or move from the campuses to the central office in Madison.
All told, 83 jobs will disappear, representing about 10 percent of the entire workforce at the statewide two-year colleges. Nearly a third of its administrative jobs will disappear.
The upheaval comes in response to a consultant’s report about how to manage the network of schools. It was commissioned by Ray Cross, formerly the chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension. In 2014, Cross got a promotion to his current job as president of the entire UW System.
The timing of implementing the consultant’s recommendations got turbo-charged by Gov. Scott Walker’s historic $250 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System that was approved by the Legislature for the 2015-2017 budget cycle. It came with a further two-year freeze on tuition for in-state undergraduates, cutting off a possible revenue bump for the Colleges, which draw almost exclusively from Wisconsin.
Whereas most of UW’s four-year campuses were able to cushion the cuts by raising tuition on out-of-state students, freezing open jobs, offering buyouts to longtime staffers and dipping into reserve funds, the Colleges had few options beyond severe cuts to plug a gaping $5.6 million budget hole. And they decided to cut from the top.
“It makes more sense to cut administrators,” Muir says. “They have the largest salaries.”
Muir admits he’s one of the lucky ones. He won’t be on the street but in a newly created job advising Colleges Chancellor Cathy Sandeen on the urban centers of Milwaukee, Kenosha and Racine.
“The time is now to ‘turn up the dial’ on these efforts, to direct renewed attention to a vital part of our state,” Sandeen wrote in an internal email announcing Muir’s new job.
The big question is how the somewhat-amorphous job duties will play out in reality. How can the Colleges wiggle their way into an already-crowded higher education landscape?
The Milwaukee area has more than 20 postsecondary schools, including two massive publics: UW-Milwaukee and Milwaukee Area Technical College. MATC is one of 16 tech colleges in the state which overlap somewhat with the Colleges, offering two-year degrees and, at five tech colleges, a liberal-arts transfer curriculum similar to that of the Colleges.
Some Republican lawmakers have suggested the two systems just merge to save costs. Sandeen rejects the idea, noting that the state is particularly well-served by two different institutions with distinct missions: tech colleges to prepare students directly for careers, and the UW Colleges to prepare them for continued studies. In a state lagging others in college graduates, the push should be to create more opportunities, not fewer, she says.
One answer to the question of what lies ahead for the Colleges in Muir’s new role can be found in a classroom at UW-Waukesha. A blue laptop is at each student’s workspace, but those stay closed, the students instead puzzling through algebra the old-fashioned way.
Professor Shubhangi Stalder calls up group after group, distributing equal opportunities at the wall-sized white board to the 23 students, the average class size at Waukesha. With each new group, the white space quickly fills with numbers and letters, square roots and fractions, a language long forgotten to most of us.
For example: the cube root of y to the negative-sixth power.
At a dizzying pace, the students, most of them in sweatshirts and jeans, color up the board with blue and black and orange and brown markers. It comes to resemble how Jackson Pollock might solve differential equations.
They’re all there because they didn’t test into college algebra and need extra help. At all levels of higher education, students like these are growing more numerous. They show up on campus not college-ready in some subjects. Math is the most common remedial need. Across the UW System, a quarter of freshmen aren’t college-ready in math. In the UW Colleges, more than a third aren’t. It means slogging through remedial courses, which cost money but earn no transferable credit – and the courses are often failed. Many a would-be graduate dead-ends early in remedial math.
Stalder, whose long-sleeved black shirt and black pants match her hair, paces the room, stopping at students doing equations at the board and their desks. She’s part nurturing mom and part cross-examiner, demanding to know not just the answers but how students arrived at them. “Jack, tell us why that’s the case,” she tells a student. “Why should I believe you?”
Met with silence, she grows animated.
“If I’ve taught you nothing else, I want you to remember this: Always question everything and investigate why it works!”
Stalder, along with colleague Paul Martin of UW-Marathon County (another two-year college in Wausau), developed this course specifically for math phobes, combining what were two remedial courses into one to save students money and streamline their succession into
college-level math.
All lectures are available on YouTube for students to watch at their own pace, with the ability to stop and rewind. Class time consists of problem-solving. Quizzes come at the end, with an opportunity to retest if proficiency isn’t met. She also injects mindfulness training into math class, encouraging students to stop, breathe and focus on different body parts, especially if they’re up against a mental wall.
“You can’t not make mistakes when you’re learning,” she says. “Math has creativity and art built into it, but that gets lost if it’s recipe-based.”
Stalder, who earned one of three Board of Regents teaching awards in the 26-campus UW System for 2014-15, tried her course out two years ago at UW-Milwaukee, where more than a third of freshmen enter not ready for college math. She then trained others at UWM who teach remedial math.
Results were the same as when she teaches at UW-Waukesha: double or triple the success rates of passing into college math and, once there, passing out of it.
Professors at the Colleges have doctorates, just like at the big schools, but tend to have a teaching focus. Stalder, who grew up in Africa and India, then studied ring theory on her way to a doctorate at UWM, is able to translate her high-level knowledge to students at the two-year school.
Muir says it’s one example where the Colleges’ close attention to teaching hard-to-reach students can meet a specific need unfulfilled by other institutions.
“We’ve already been there [at UWM], so to speak, and shown that what we do here works really well with those students,” he says. “What I intend to do is build on that. I don’t know where that’s going to lead, other than I know that UWM is open to discussing more ways that we can do that. Is it a college within a college system or a physical site? I think the tension points would be if we were looking at setting up shop across the street [from UWM or MATC]. That’s not a goal of ours. Anything we do in Milwaukee will be working with all the educational entities, particularly those that are public, while making sure that we don’t step on any toes.”
It’s an approach that could yield gains, says Noel Radomski, who runs the Wisconsin Center of the Advancement of Postsecondary Education. He says Wisconsin is somewhat behind the curve nationally in employing its many different higher-educational institutions in a collaborative way to meet the new and changing needs of students.
Beyond faculty teaching skills, the Colleges have another distinct advantage in discussions about sharing their programs and loaning faculty members to other institutions.
“As it relates to cost, it’s the UW Colleges that will be the best deal,” Radomski says. The per-student cost is at least $2,000 cheaper than other UW four-year campuses and at state technical colleges. It comes in part because UW Colleges faculty are by far the lowest paid in the UW System, which Sandeen, the chancellor of UW Colleges and UW-Extension, is seeking to remedy somewhat, with one faculty pay bump already happening and another possible in coming years.
Sandeen says discussions in Milwaukee are far too preliminary and specifics aren’t ready to roll out. In general, she hopes that Muir’s new job will lead to new partnerships between the Colleges and other schools, including UW-Extension offices, to create “pathways and pipelines” for more students to attend college and, once there, graduate.
The Students for Peace and Justice club knows how to win friends. It’s Thursday in the UW-Waukesha commons, and they’re making popcorn in a movie theater-style machine, with all of its pleasing aromas. Fellow students are asked to donate for Syrian refugees as they pick up a freshly popped bag.
Anyon Rettinger is showing me around the three-building campus, a job that comes naturally to him as a communications major trained in giving campus tours. Now a sophomore, he came out of Waukesha South High School with a 3.6 grade point average and was in the National Honor Society. He had plenty of options for college but his decision was simple.
“I decided to start saving money,” he says. Toward that end, he could go to UW-Waukesha and pay about $8,000 less in tuition and fees than he would for those same two years at UWM, compounding his savings by living at home, and still learn from professors with doctorates. He not only isn’t taking out loans, he also bought a car with his own money and pays his health insurance.
Half of Waukesha students get financial aid, averaging a little more than $6,000 a year.
Rettinger’s older sister started here, and in the process, got the ballroom dance club up and twirling. His older brother went here, too, serving as student government president. Rettinger now has that job himself.
He’s about as active as you could be on campus, down to fashioning a new counter for the Coffee Corner out of an old bookshelf. He’s thrived academically, presenting with other students about Mozart’s flute quartet at a national music conference at UW-Madison in spring 2015. The woman who wrote his music textbook happened to be there.
“As a freshman, I presented at a conference,” he says. “When does that happen ever?”
The school is just 20 miles from Downtown Milwaukee but draws few students from the city.
Three-quarters of the students, like Rettinger, are from Waukesha County.
A big issue is transportation. A bus ride from the city takes up to three hours each way. Students set up a rideshare board this year in one of the hallways, with a members-only Facebook page, too. Muir says he’s also committed to closing the gap, by bringing more Colleges programs to Milwaukee and brainstorming better transportation options to campus.
You won’t find a more enthusiastic booster of the school than Rettinger, but he acknowledges the budget cuts are hard to avoid.
“There’s this mass hysteria hanging over everyone’s head,” he says. “To some extent, I feel that’s even more damaging than the changes. It creates this whole negativity.”
Muir says UW-Waukesha – which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in the coming year – lost five top staffers in administration and student services in three months recently. They all took other jobs before the budget ax fell. Student enrollment is down 4 percent from fall 2014, both in the overall Colleges and at Waukesha. And a Legislature workgroup is studying whether the UW Colleges should even exist.
Rettinger came head-on with his sentiments at a national meeting of student government leaders in Colorado during the summer of 2015. Among the problem-solving tasks assigned to groups was one labeled “dealing with budget cuts.” Wisconsin was an example.
The recent state funding cuts to UW got headlines nationally because most states went the other direction, restoring some lost recession-era funding to public colleges.
The classroom experience at Waukesha shouldn’t change much. No faculty lost jobs in the purge, and Sandeen says the Colleges added 13 new faculty this year to fill open jobs statewide.
The focus on preserving small classes and close contact with professors is appreciated, Rettinger says. But cuts to other areas are harder to take.
In a follow-up email, he notes that campus offices such as business services, financial aid, academic advising and tutoring will be restructured, with a reduction in staff. “By reduction of services, we risk making it harder for students to get the help they need,” he says.
Outgoing dean Muir, who described the cuts as “devastating” in a May op-ed, says that some tasks students are used to handling with a staffer, face to face, will have to be done over the phone or online.
“This is not going to be easy,” he says. “But it can be done. You just have to have the right people.”
Muir looks forward to a new career direction that will place him in an as-yet-unidentified office in Milwaukee next spring. He’ll start out working from home and not on a campus for the first time in more than 30 years.
He thinks back to his interview for the Waukesha job, which he started in 2011. He was eligible to retire in Arizona and stay in the sun year-round. This job was a pay cut but an opportunity he’d always wanted – to be top dog at a campus.
At the Waukesha interview, he met with a handful of students, and found himself between the leader of campus Republicans and the leader of campus Democrats. “What’s the best part of going to school here?” he asked the group. The answer was immediate and bipartisan: the faculty and the teacher-student relationships.
“When they said that,” he says, “I thought, ‘I’m coming here, I don’t care about the money.’
“The people are amazing.”
Daniel Simmons is a senior editor at Milwaukee Magazine. Write to him at daniel.simmons@milwaukeemag.com.
