Struggling to maintain personal touch

By Scott Hildebrand

GREEN BAY—For years, even decades, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay treated the message like a badge of distinction: Come to school here and you will find the personal touch that only a small campus can provide.

After another round of budget cuts—the deepest in UW-Green Bay’s 36-year history—the university may have to fine-tune its message.

Just ask David Littig, a veteran political scientist at UW-Green Bay who is adjusting to what he saw on the first day of the 2004 spring semester.

“It’s the first day of classes, and my classes are huge,” he said. “The class sizes have really increased, and the workload is going up.”

Or ask Jon Virant, a junior from Sheboygan and president of the UW-Green Bay Student Government Association.

“I was in a class today with 35-plus students, and it’s supposed to be a discussion-type thing,” Virant said. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s just not as personal as it used to be.”

Real cuts, real impacts

	Students wait in line for financial services at UW-Green Bay.

Larger class sizes and fewer course offerings are part of the new reality at UW-Green Bay in the aftermath of major budget cuts in the 2003-05 biennium. The university took cuts of about $950,000 in each year of the budget period, and a one-time reduction of $472,850 in 2003-04.

Through a bottom-up budget process, UWGB did its best to protect the quality of instruction and student access to a higher education. But some impacts could not be avoided. They include:

• Larger class sizes and less flexibility in scheduling.
  
• Fewer student employment opportunities, making it more difficult for some students to support their education while also strapping offices for help.
  
• A reduction in hours, a loss of positions and budget cuts for purchasing books, journals and online resources in the university’s library—all at a time when demand for services is on the rise.
  
• The loss of funding—to the tune of more than $400,000—for an initiative aimed at keeping students in school through improvements in the first-year experience, advising and other services.
  
• An “opportunity cost” resulting from a delay in strengthening UW-Green Bay’s ability to help lead Northeastern Wisconsin’s transition to a knowledge-based economy. Budget cuts limit the university’s capacity for growth and meeting the community’s needs at a time of record regional demand.

Littig, who has been at UW-Green Bay since 1974, is all too familiar with the budgetary impacts on class size. His Introduction to American Government class has nearly doubled from its low of about 45 students. This increase in class size changes the way he approaches teaching.

“You have to use much more media and have less interaction with students,” he said. “You lose control and feel obligated to march right through the syllabus. You have more multiple-choice exams and fewer essays.”

Carol Blackshire-Belay, UW-Green Bay dean of liberal arts and sciences, said class size is a major issue across the campus. She is especially concerned about the size of general education classes for incoming students.

“A class of 40 transformed into a class of 90 just is not the same class,” Blackshire-Belay said. “They’re not getting the classroom experience.”

She also said the increased instructional workload cuts into the time faculty have for public service and for the research and scholarly work needed to stay on the cutting-edge of their fields.

Fritz Erickson, UW-Green Bay dean of professional and graduate studies, said budget limitations narrow the opportunities for students to shape their education and for the university to offer curriculum choices it should provide.

“We’re just plain not able to offer the kinds of courses we feel are needed in professional programs, and yet the demand from the communities we serve remains high,” he said.

For example, Erickson noted that UW-Green Bay accepts only one in three teacher-education prospects “simply because we don’t have the capacity to educate them.”

UW-Green Bay also has faced difficult decisions affecting support for students and faculty outside the classroom. In one action that caught the attention of the local news media, the university’s library reduced its hours only two years after expanding them at the request of students.

Kathy Pletcher, associate provost for information services, said the two-hour reduction in the library’s night-time service has had the greatest impact on returning adult students who can only get there at night.

“I see that as problematic, especially at a time when the Chancellor wants to meet the community’s needs,” she said.

Pletcher said the library also must cut its acquisitions of books and scholarly journals, hampering the library’s—and the faculty’s—ability to get the latest ideas in front of students.

University officials feel a sense of pride as they look around the campus and see how the faculty, staff and students are handling the budget cuts. But they are concerned about how the cuts will affect the university’s long-term future.

“It’s one of those things where the changes are incremental,” Pletcher said. “By the time people recognize this, sometimes it’s too late to fix it. We can’t recapture everything we lost.”

Added Erickson: “It is remarkable what the faculty and staff of UWGB have been able to do with the harsh fiscal realities we face. We have dedicated, hard-working faculty that continue to go above and beyond almost any reasonable expectation. My worry is how much more can we expect.”

Scott Hildebrand is director of marketing and university communication at UW-Green Bay.