Rather than the customary academic structure organized by discipline and the usual colleges of arts, sciences, business, education, and such, UWGB’s first academic structure was arranged around four themes: Community Sciences, Creative and Communication Arts, Environmental Sciences, and Health and Leisure Time (later Human Biology). The academic plan for UWGB, from its inception and at its core, expressed a commitment to be freed from the bonds of tradition and to explore new, more effective ways to organize and apply higher learning. More revolutionary but, perhaps, not as dramatic, budgets — then and now — flow through interdisciplinary programs rather than through disciplinary departments.
Here in this dedication to continuing academic innovation — to radically rethinking how higher education can best serve society — is where I believe we find our most important and most essential academic and institutional heritage. We are about figuring out where higher education needs to be in the future.
Academic themes do not make good headlines; political causes do; and a somewhat different popular image emerged. Within years of its 1962 publication, Silent Spring joined such classics as The Federalist Papers and Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the short list of American polemics that had compelling political effect; thinking about environmental issues was rapidly capturing the attention of Americans; UWGB’s first entering class was on campus to celebrate, during its first year, what was the nation’s first Earth Day (April 22, 1970), and environmental concerns became a key focus for a small, new institution dedicated to practical problem solving, interdisciplinary approaches, and engagement in the issues of the day. UWGB gained some national note as “Environmental U.”
Strengths in various academic areas were a result, strengths of continuing importance today: those in the life sciences, policy sciences, ecosystem management, and other related fields, valuable centers and institutes were created, we developed rich and diverse natural areas for field research, and tested and proved the value of our overarching commitment to interdisciplinarity. Also tied to these environmental roots, most certainly, is our good fortune in having created from cornfields and then protected, a naturally beautiful campus. In that natural beauty, we are also an important resource for our region.
If you have followed my analysis, though, our origins are not as the “Environmental U” per se but as the “Innovative U.” That means to me that, applying the same compelling commitments to engagement and innovation that are our roots, we will, today and tomorrow, be grappling with a wide range of social, economic, and cultural challenges including but not limited to those that are environmental. We should be so doing. We are so doing. We will continue to do so.
I reach the same conclusion about our roots and their current implications following a somewhat different line of reasoning. Thirty years ago, farsighted predecessors established a campus committed to engaging our students — and ourselves! — in learning that was interdisciplinary, that involved solving practical problems, and that incorporated engagement in the community. Today, higher education around the country has realized the wisdom of the course charted by UWGB. Terminology has changed; for example, aspects of what we once called “communiversity” and “practical problem solving” are known elsewhere as “service learning.”
The rest of higher education is trying to be where UWGB was 30 years ago. Our higher education colleagues had a greater struggle because they have entrenched higher education orthodoxies to battle and because they have organizational structures not designed to support the approaches demanded by the issues of today. Our challenge is to figure out where higher education needs to be 30 years from now. But, unlike our UWGB predecessors, we now also have a legacy of traditional UWGB orthodoxies that we must mine for their strengths but be ready to alter when they pose impediments.
Several other aspects of our past are worth noting as we think about our preferred future in part because they have given rise to certain persistent misconceptions:
• Curricula: Early on, UWGB’s innovative approaches included baccalaureate curricula with novel titles. Logical enough. This did create a popular misconception that UWGB’s programs did not easily transfer and that such programs prepared students for limited employment possibilities. While the campus was innovative, 18-year-old students — and their parents — typically are not, particularly when betting their futures. Enrollments suffered. The campus transformed certain programs and added others while maintaining a commitment to interdisciplinary curricula. Professional programs were added and, like most campuses of our type, today business and teacher preparation are the most popular undergraduate majors. This is a fact that continues to surprise many with whom I speak in the community; the image of UWGB as “the place with all those funny degrees” is amazingly resilient.
• Student body: In its earliest days, UWGB was a “commuter campus.” People with whom I speak in the community are often surprised to learn that, today, about 70% of our students are residential in the sense that they are not living in their own home or the home of a parent while attending UWGB. About half of these residential students live on campus. Our population of “traditional aged” students has been increasing. These changes simultaneously raise several issues for us to consider. On the one hand, our facilities to serve traditional students lag behind the change in our student body: in dining, in other Union support services, in exercise and fitness facilities, and, according to our students, in the quality of student life, particularly on the weekends. On the other hand, our attention to building a traditional student body and traditional campus seems to have left us without the infrastructure or the incentives to meet the exploding demand for higher education coming from non-traditional students.
• Communiversity: UWGB, as a founding hallmark, emphasized engagement with the community. Some, on campus and off, report that that never “really” happened. Others say that it did. Still others simply say that, in more recent years, UWGB turned to focus in on itself.
• Size: UWGB, then located in one of Wisconsin’s major economic and population centers, was planned as a campus of 15,000 to 22,000. Today, still located in a major and dynamic metropolitan area, we are, at 5,500, one of the smallest of the UW campuses and have been within 10% of 5,000 for the last two decades.