University Committee Discusses Morale Concerns with Chancellor Ahead of March 15 Town Hall

University Committee members expressed their frustrations with UW-Milwaukee leadership, accusing the chancellor and other administrators of a lack of support, ineffective training, workload issues and vague communication in a meeting Tuesday, March 8.

Since 2000, staffing levels at UWM have risen, then fallen and then recovered, but the number of faculty in 2019 was more than 100 less than at its peak in 2010, even though UWM merged with Waukesha and Washington County campuses, according to a report from Wisconsin Policy Forum.

Members said that trainings such as Title IX training, anti-racist training and IT security are needed, but are ineffective in their delivery. Recent meetings about fiscal misconduct moved this issue to the foreground.

This committee meeting comes before a town hall to address faculty and staff morale on March 15.

“All the incentives are in the opposite direction,” said Nigel Rothfels, the chair of the University Committee. “It is stupid to care about the campus when all the incentives and all the rewards kind of move in a different direction.”

The university committee is a UWM-wide committee of seven professors that meets weeky.

“We are R1 and our faculty are competing nationally as members of an R1 community, and if you look at a lot of the private institutions or other R1s, the service we do on campus is not part of their repertoire,” said Erica Bornstein, a committee member.

Chancellor Mark Mone joined the online meeting and outlined some of what will be said at the town hall. He said he was drawing on past conversations with the University Committee, as well as other sources.

“The premise of it is we want to have a caring, supportive, compassionate culture for our students,” Mone said. “We want to really provide every resource we can for them. …But you have to take care of the employees, the workforce, first, before you can deliver that to students and conduct research and engage in the community.”

Mone said he will acknowledge the challenges facing faculty and staff, such as pandemic stress, and wants to highlight things the university is doing or will be doing to support them, such as trauma-informed care workshops that have been delivered to 610 employees.

The chancellor and other leaders also plan to discuss ​​health, well-being and safety, an overview of challenges and issues nationwide and UWM culture and climate at the virtual town hall, according to the UWM Report.

University Committee members responded, sharing some of their concerns with the chancellor, such as workload.

“It’s a minority of the people that do most of the service work,” said Mark Schwartz, a committee member.

Rothfels said that there is little support or acknowledgment for people in campus-wide leadership positions, and some have been asked by their departments to step back from campus-wide leadership to help elsewhere.

“The truth is we’re really struggling to meet the tasks that need to be met, even in this group,” said Rothfels, who is also the chair of the history department, director of undergraduate research and a professor.

This is amid decreasing number of faculty on campus but growing responsibilities.

“Our service burden has really increased post-pandemic and [with] a contraction of faculty on campus,” said Bornstein, who is also a professor in the anthropology department. “…It’s really important that it’s rewarded in some way, from the top really, and it’s integrated into a sense of what we should be doing together on this campus, a model initiative.”

The Wisconsin Policy Forum also found that UWM faculty are compensated 16.2% less than peer institutions and UWM’s research and development spending decreased by 12.1% between 2011 and 2019, but peer institutions’ spending as a whole grew by 13.8%, making attracting and retaining faculty more difficult.

Committee members said since Covid, faculty and staff have been expected to work with an extra level of care for one another and students.

Mone responded to the committee’s concerns saying that money doesn’t flow from Chapman Hall; schools and colleges have the money.

“There’s something wrong with our culture,” Rothfels said. “Yes, the money does not flow from Chapman Hall, but the leadership does.”

Mone said he agrees and that leadership is working on these issues, but it is a problem at other institutions as well that goes back decades.

The committee asked him to mitigate the disconnect between faculty service loads and the recognition and support they receive for doing it.

“We’ll speak to this [at the town hall],” Mone said. “I’ll have easy answers. It’s no problem to solve this.”

This comes after the UWM Office of Legal Affairs held meetings regarding fiscal misconduct which bothered some who attended.

“What does it look like when the campus consistently tries to always shift all liability onto employees for everything?” Rothfels said.

The University Committee asked Lane Hall, a member of the Faculty Senate, to give his thoughts on the fiscal misconduct meeting after the chancellor left.

Department Chairs were asked to attend one of two fiscal misconduct meetings: a presentation by Joely Urdan, Chief Legal Counsel at UWM. In the presentation, she went through ways that fiscal misconduct happens: stealing supplies, misusing credit cards, charging things that shouldn’t be charged, according to Hall, the department chair for the English department.

“…it bothered me that there was an overall message that it was up to us to police this behavior, and turn people in if they seem to be doing suspicious things like ‘taking printer supplies home,’” said Hall, who attended the meeting on March 1. “There are many situations where this is justified, and indeed we are using more and more of our own resources for our professional work with the integration of online teaching.”

He compared the tone of the presentation to blaming individuals who don’t recycle or don’t bike to work for climate change, rather than deep systems and institutions.

“I trust my colleagues and staff and feel that this ‘if you see something, say something’ surveillance and paranoia makes for a bad working environment,” Hall said.

Secretary of the University John Reisel said he attended the presentation on March 7 and didn’t have the same reaction but said they might have changed the tone at the presentation he attended.

“Basically, the message I got yesterday was ‘keep your eyes open for fiscal issues, if you think there’s something fill out this form and report it,’” Reisel said.

Rothfels said that was the bottom-line message, but that is not something he wants to do.

The committee connected this to other trainings that they think are not tailored to UWM or are often long, and seem to be more about limiting liability of the institution.

Schwartz said it seems the university is using a check-the-box approach, instead of a targeted approach.

The committee agreed that this training, and others, should be more relevant to UWM.

Earlier in the meeting, committee members discussed vague communication coming from the administration on topics such as searches and hiring practices.

While at the meeting, Mone also shared UWM’s capital budget priorities, which he discussed with UW System officials after the University Committee meeting.

The priorities are (1) continued funding for remodeling the northwest quadrant, (2) funding for a new engineering/neurosciences building and (3) resources to pay off the remaining balance due for the Zilber School of Public Health site.