UW Fox Budget Cuts

In July of 2015, The State of Wisconsin reduced the funds allotted to the UW system for the
purposes of balancing the state budget.
The 250 million dollar cut was declared on the first of July, 2015, to be put into place on January first,
2016. As a result, the UW-System had only six months to decide how to best utilize their reduced
budget.
According to Scott Richter, an adjunct professor at UW-Fox Valley and day-life accountaint, this
budget reduction is the consequence of reduced and altered demographics of college students. He says
that in the years he's volunteered at middle schools in the Fox Valley, he's noticed a problematic trend.
A reduced pool of K-12 students moving on to higher education. In addition, the growing field of
students with children and jobs, and thus a requirement for a less standard schedule, has created the
lack of funds.
To accommodate for this, the UW-Colleges reduced their administrative funding by 5.6 million dollars
by implementing a regionalization model which required each of the 13 schools to transition from
having a campus dean, an associate dean, a part time administrator, an assistant dean of student affairs,
an assistant dean of administration and finance, a director of marketing and communications, a director
of former university relations, a building and grounds superintendent and a director of continuing
education, to a system in which each campus is placed in one of four regions. Each region now has a
representative for each region, instead of each school.
The decision to change to this regionalization model was made by committees comprised of UWColleges staff, educators (both adjunct and tenured) and student representatives. As an explanation for
why the cuts were made where they were, Martin Rudd, Regional Executive Officer and Dean of the
North-East region of the UW-Colleges, offered
No budget reductions were made to instructional programs. We made a decision early on that we
would not touch the number of professors that we have teaching, because we are primarly a teaching
insitutation and teaching is our excellence.
Dean Rudd was not alone in attesting to the focus on preserving teaching positions. Provost Greg
Lampe, one of the two executive co-sponsors to lead the current budget reduction ,
said
A budget reduction of this magnitude required us to determine where cuts were possible, and which
budget reductions would make the most sense and move us significantly towards the $5.6 million that
was required of us to balance our budget. We decided to do the least harm possible to our academic
program because we wanted to preserve the students educational experience to the fullest extent
possible. Chancellor Sandeen decided to focus on administrative positions and functions to achieve the
necessary budget reductions. I believe we chose the areas and departments that we believed could be
consolidated or regionalized that would preserve the UW Colleges mission of providing access to
higher education to students across Wisconsin and position our students for success for whatever is
next for them (i.e., transfer to a four-year institution, a job in the community in which they live, and the
like). I believe we chose the areas where we saw opportunities for reductions without sacrificing our
values of providing access, transfer opportunities, educational quality, and affordability values. There
were not any departments I believed were more in need of this reduction than the ones which were

impacted. We were careful, thoughtful, and deliberative in our approach to the budget reductions, and
we had our experts from across the institution inform and guide the planning and implementation
processes throughout our budget reduction work.
Despite this intent, reforming our student affairs offices and student support services
was considered by many of our colleagues as controversial. said Lampe,
Perhaps more than any other area of the budget reduction work, the downsizing
and consolidation of student affairs and student support services created the most
concern among our colleagues and students.
The downsizing has certainly had an immediate impact on student life. Where it
was once possible to pay tuition on campus, there are now shuttered windows and
a sign informing students that their bills must be paid online. If a student has a
question about their financial aid or the path to their degree, they are now
required to submit a request to the Solution Center an off-site hub where, as
Dean Rudd put it, students can get the complete or beginings of answers that
they need to many of their common questions about financial aid and advising,
and access to the types of services that they typically saw somebody on the
campus for all the time.
The system itself, put into place at the start of this semester, has been described
as clunky by Dean Rudd. However, both he and Richter attest to the wisdom of
allowing the system to be implemented and put through it's paces before making
any judgments. In closing, Richter said; I'd be cautious of rushing to judgment.
Any major organizational change from a business standpoint is traumatic.