UC Chair N. Rothfels reported that: 1) He has been attending the VC for University Development candidate interviews; 2) The Chancellor’s Extended Cabinet had a discussion about staff resignation issues and possible mitigation strategies; 3) Dean S. Gronert will attend the UC meeting on Jan. 11th to discuss GER planning; 4) K. Nelson will attend the UC meeting on Dec. 14th to give an overview of campus sustainability actions and planning; 5) newly-appointed DEI VC C. Vang will meet with the UC in January (date TBD); and 6) the UC will not plan to meet on December 21st, 28th, or January 4th.
Provost J. Britz joined the meeting and outlined the following: 1) UW-System has provided funds to help support Campus high school outreach efforts; 2) The Regents Special Committee is expected to announce the finalists for UW-System President later this month; 3) Proposed expansions of new engineering programs on other campuses across the UW-System is concerning—UWM will look for support to resist approvals of these plans; and 4) UWM’s GPR increase discussions with the BOR are seemingly progressing well, giving reasons to be cautiously optimistic they may actually be successful in providing more Campus funding in the next biennium.
The UC invited CGS Faculty Senators T. Wessel-Blaski and R. Gulotta to join the meeting today for an open-ended discussion of the broad range of issues facing faculty in their college.
Member E. Bornstein informed us that Provost J. Britz, VC C. Vang, and Assoc. VC D. Venugopalan will meet with the AAFEC next week to discuss DEI hiring strategies. Member D. Misra reported that APBC met last week, noting that the new colleges now have names, and that the average cut to unit budgets next year will be 1.3%. Member M. D. Schwartz attended the Governance Reps meeting on the UW-Madison campus last Friday, and reported the following: 1) There appears to be interest on the BOR to support UW-System providing release time/stipend funds for all campus’ governance committees; 2) A designated area for governance reps (who attend in-person) is again being provided at BOR meetings; and 3) JOCER approval of the anticipated pay plan may be delayed until early January, but will is still expected to occur.