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September
forecast: With heat subsided, it's growing season again in Green Bay Greetings from Green Bay’s University of Wisconsin! Welcome to another season of Chancellor’s FYI. Enough of you tell me you appreciate these monthly updates during the academic year that I’ve decided to give it another go. This is the fifth autumn here for the Shepards. We love the change of seasons, the beauty of the campus, the excitement of Move-In Day (see photo at right, from Sept. 1) and the remarkable energy that accompanies the first week of classes. September is also time for enrollment statistics. At UW-Green Bay, we began Fall Semester 2005 on Tuesday with a census of 5,541 students. For most of you, that’s about all you want to know. Stay with me, though. I’ll use enrollment as a starting point to fill you in on state politics, prospects for the University’s growth and regional service agenda, and how one of the most discouraging summers of my life actually left me, well, relatively optimistic. UW-Green Bay enrollment is strong, as always. I don’t know if we’ll surpass any previous highs by the time registration closes next Friday, but almost every fall, it seems, we track a handful more FTEs than the previous year. We don’t much celebrate these broken records, though, because while UWGB is quite often bigger than ever, it is never appreciably bigger than it was before. And that’s the problem. Since Wisconsin began tightly regulating enrollment in the late 1980s, any increases in Green Bay have accrued to a relatively small base at a glacial pace. Red-hot demand? Rapid growth for one of the state’s most dynamic regions? No matter. Resource and capacity limits have kept our fall census frozen in time. We find creative ways to expand services as best we can and make occasional, modest gains in the face of ever-tightening resources. We reach our admissions targets almost as soon as we begin accepting applications, and we are highly regarded as an academic institution. We take pride in what we do, but it’s hard to be satisfied when we know we could do much more. |
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Cyndie and I pitched in recently for Freshman Move-In Day. Nearly 150 University volunteers helped arriving students unpack nearly 1,000 cars in just three hours. After a long, hot summer — politically as well as meteorologically — it's refreshing to be looking forward again. In my recent remarks to a campus and community audience at Convocation (see the Web at (www.uwgb.edu/chancellor), I commented on a growing sense of urgency for achieving enrollment growth and diversity gains. In an exceptionally encouraging indicator, the Green Bay Press-Gazette took up the dialog on its editorial pages last Wednesday. Critics who complain that reporters sometimes misquote their sources need to acknowledge there are probably just as many instances when the media frames the issues even more succinctly than the sources themselves. I readily admit this is one of those instances. You can find their summary of my remarks in the editorial “Strong UWGB is key to regional economy” at http://www.uwgb.edu/univcomm/news/page/thenews.htm#key. The editorial embraces the case we have found to be most effective: Successful regions have strong public universities at their core. It’s not our agenda, it’s our region’s agenda. It’s about young people having the opportunity to discover and serve the world, yes, but also having the opportunity to live their lives and to prosper right here in Wisconsin. The newspaper recognition was gratifying, and lifted spirits at a time many of us needed them lifted. TO NEXT PAGE |
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