With UW campuses in West Bend and Fond du Lac closing, students and staff are stunned and scrambling

WEST BEND − During a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Washington County orientation at the start of the semester, an administrator fielded questions from panicked parents who had read headlines about the small campus' uncertain future and a potential merger with the local technical college.

"He said it wasn't something that we had to worry about," recalled first-year student Savanna Petri.

Turns out Petri and 141 other first-year students do have reason to worry. The Washington County campus, as well as another in Fond du Lac, are effectively closing at the end of the school year.

Petri, 19, feels frustrated and misled about the situation. Had she known closure was a possibility, she said she never would have enrolled.

"At first, I don't think it really hit me," Petri said about when the news broke last week as she studied in the library. "Then later in the day is when the panic set in because now I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do next year."

Other students and staff at the Washington County and Fond du Lac campuses echoed her uncertainty.

Instructors and staff without the protection of tenure are wondering where they will work next year. The counties are figuring out what to do with the campus buildings they constructed and maintained for decades. Students are navigating new paths to their college degrees, and calculating how much more money it will cost them.

For Petri, it might mean commuting to a campus farther from her Richfield home. Or maybe she'll take classes online instead.

"This feels like the wrong decision," she said of the closure. "There's students like me who want to stay here and stay local."

The problem, according to UW officials, is there aren't enough of them to support the campus. Each campus reports fewer than 300 students enrolled this fall.

“As we build new pathways for students, we must let go of others that are no longer sustainable," UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone said in a statement.

As branch campuses face precarious future, a former employee calls for more transparency, public input

Steve Wildeck is watching as the the campuses he spent most of his career supporting collapse.

Before retiring in 2020, Wildeck spent more than 25 years as a high-level business administrator for UW Colleges, the former network of two-year branch campuses across the state restructured by the UW system in 2018 and placed under the oversight of four-year universities.

Six years post-merger, three of the 13 will be essentially shuttered. The first of them, UW-Platteville Richland, was designated for closure last year.

It's not the closures, themselves, that upset Wildeck.

"It’s more about where in the hell are we going with this?" he asked. "There’s no long-range plan. If this was part of some long-term plan that was public and transparent, that explained the time has come for these select locations to close, maybe the public could understand."

The one specific mention of the branch campuses in UW system President Jay Rothman's new strategic plan, approved late last year, calls for working with universities to develop plans for their branch campuses to remain financially viable.

When the UW-Medford campus dropped to 90 students in 1980, the UW Board of Regents discussed and voted to close the northern Wisconsin campus. But there's been little, if any, public discussion by the board ahead of the three more recent closure announcements, which have been made by Rothman without the board voting on them.

"What I find so deeply offensive in what I see is the UW system leadership is viewing these campuses merely as educational outposts that come under their management and that they have the unilateral authority to flip the switch on or off as their needs require," Wildeck said. “They have an obligation to the communities that built and maintain these campuses.”

Without the public informed and able to debate decisions before they are made, Wildeck said all opportunity is lost to lobby lawmakers and local officials. He's not presuming campuses would — or even should — remain open. But he believes the public deserves to be more involved in future decisions.

UW system spokesperson Mark Pitsch said Rothman and the Regents "have been clear and transparent about the enrollment and operational challenges" facing the branch campuses.

Rothman directed universities to assess the viability of their branch campuses last spring. More recently, he ordered leaders at the 10 remaining branches to start considering how to re-purpose their campuses, perhaps to offer four-year degrees or dual-enrollment courses for high school students looking to earn college credits early.

UW branch campuses played important role in serving low-income, nontraditional students

Transferring to a large four-year university a year earlier than expected feels daunting to Hlee Chang. She likes the small classes at UW-Oshkosh Fond du Lac — her largest has about 20 students — and the tutoring center staff helped her develop confidence in math, her weakest subject.

"It's been a lot for me to take in," Chang said about the closure. "This is a good campus, but I feel like it's being put to waste."

The daughter of immigrant parents, Chang, 23, tried Moraine Park Technical College right out of high school but it wasn't a good fit. She deemed Marian University, a private school in the area, too expensive. She relies on her part-time job, the branch campus' lower tuition rate and a Pell grant to afford her tuition bills. She lives at home because she is a caregiver to her parents.

Chang embodies the nontraditional students UW branch campuses served well for decades.

"We were the division of UW System that was best at serving those students and we're being thrown away," said Professor Mark Peterson, who has taught philosophy at the Washington County campus since 1989.

Peterson's post-mortem: Branch campuses were always asked to do more with less. Budget cuts by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2015 stripped them of individual campus recruiters and marketing positions. The 2018 merger didn't help, he said, with UWM failing to adequately support the campus or listen to ideas offered by the Washington County campus.

"It’s a tragedy," he said. "But it’s deliberate. This is not an accident. This is not a mistake. This is what the Republicans have wanted for years."

Republican lawmakers weigh in on campus closures

Two state lawmakers whose districts include the campuses pushed back on any idea that the Legislature's funding decisions played a role in the closures.

Rep. Jerry O’Connor, R-Fond du Lac, said closing the campus was the right decision from an economic perspective.

"Having a campus has been a dream for many, many years," he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "You try to hang onto your dream as long as you possibly can. But I think we’ve had some tunnel vision in the university system. We want to provide a first-class education, but at what cost to the taxpayer?"

Rep. Rick Gundrum, R-Slinger, said closing the West Bend campus where he graduated from was unavoidable and the right decision.

"It’s unfortunate, but the numbers were just not there to keep the campus open," he said. "There’s nothing the Legislature could have done to reverse the changing demographics."

Two other lawmakers whose districts include the campuses slated for closure — Sen. Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville, and Sen. Dan Feyen, R-Fond du Lac — said they weren't available for interviews. Stroebel released a statement saying the closures were unsurprising given enrollment trends. Feyen hasn't yet said anything publicly.

UW students, employees look ahead to an uncertain future

Jaden Londo feels for the first-year students scrambling to figure out what's next. The second-year Washington County student saw her professors schedule back-to-back advising sessions with students to hammer out their new four-year plan.

"But the professors and employees don't get that," Londo said. "Where's their four-year plan?"

UWM said it's working "as quickly as possible" to evaluate needs and notify employees about staffing decisions.

Adding insult to injury for professors was how UWM broke the news. Students received an email about the closure around 11 a.m. Tuesday. Washington County faculty, however, didn't get theirs until about 45 minutes later.

A few professors described awkward situations in which students informed them of the closure during class.

Emails to employees and students were set to send at the same time, but an employee inadvertently removed Washington County faculty from the list, UWM spokesperson Angelica Duria said. The university is revisiting its processes to ensure a mistake doesn't happen again.

Allison Munn, 20, got the email while working at one of her two part-time jobs. She transferred to the Washington County campus this fall after trying a year at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Maybe Munn plans to transfer to Moraine Park Technical College or UW-Milwaukee at Waukesha. Both will be much less convenient for her. She lives 10 minutes away from the Washington County campus, loves the school's small classes and found her favorite spot in the campus courtyard.

"I was just starting to like this place," she said.

Contact Kelly Meyerhofer at kmeyerhofer@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KellyMeyerhofer.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Fond du Lac, Washington County react to campus closures