Reprinted from Green Bay Press-Gazette
http:www.greenbaypressgazette.com/
September 29, 2002

REMARKS AND ESSAYS:
Shepard links campus, community
A question and answer session with Bruce Shepard, conducted by Mike Blecha, opinion page editor for the Green Bay Press-Gazette
Page one of five

Bruce Shepard, who arrived here a year ago from Eastern Oregon University, was inaugurated Sept. 20 as the fourth chancellor in the 33-year history of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
   Press-Gazette editors recently visited with Shepard in his eighth- floor office in the Cofrin Library. We talked about his first 11 months on the job, the status of current campus initiatives and his goals for UWGB's future.
   Following is an edited transcript of that interview.

Q. Bruce, assess your first 11 months on the job.
A. It's been, at least on a personal basis, the time of my life. It really suits my personality because it's a job about building relationships, at least half of it is that. Building relationships on campus internally and off-campus as well. So I've enjoyed it that way.

When I came here, I saw that the campus really had a couple of needs that jumped out at me right at the beginning. One was internal. I don't think the campus really knew how good it was. And I don't think it had confidence in the fact that it had control of its own fate, responsibility for where it needed to go. Where it wanted to go. There was a sense, I think, of having leadership imposed upon it, concepts imposed upon the campus and where it wanted to go.

I also felt that the campus was going in a direction that was apart from the region. This is a region that has a sense of its own identity. It's very clear. And the university seemed to be charting a path in going to establish a national reputation as a liberal arts school, maybe even being smaller rather than larger. And that includes so many things that probably the average person in public doesn't even care about - the student mix we have and the kinds of programs we fund and all that sort of thing.

 I knew that would not work well for the university. In fact, the evidence is that the Legislature didn't pay us to be better to attract students from out of state. What public entity is going to do that? It just doesn't make sense that Wisconsin would want to spend more money on things like the Learning Experience, to build a quality program, to attract students from out of state. But that was the strategy that was being followed.

I really did expect, when I got here, to have to turn around the campus because I thought that was what the campus believed was its future. And what I found, in fact, when I started with all these meetings with different groups, I'd start off, hypothetically, that there's this route in the national liberal arts, or emphasizing access, serving the region. (I'd say) let's talk about the strengths and weaknesses of these different approaches. I wanted to try to see if people could get to where I had already gotten in my own thinking about what would work with this university.

Nobody wanted the small, liberal arts national. I just dropped the question after a couple of meetings. That wasn't in anybody's thinking. In fact, people were involved in this community in ways I just had not begun to realize. I easily could create a list of 100 things people on this campus are already doing in the community, but people have not thought about why they're a part of this university. That really hasn't been given credibility, hasn't been given legitimacy - and that's the job of leadership to do that.

 I think the community is extremely responsive to, or just hungry, for connecting with the campus. The real test has yet to come, because what we have to be able to do if we're going to develop that sense of ownership that people feel about the whole university the way they do about the Weidner Center or the men's basketball team is that we've got to be responsive and in a timely way.

And higher ed isn't always known for timeliness in its responsiveness and we often come across with mannerisms that seem arrogant. We don't do that intentionally but that's often the way we strike people.

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